[p2p-research] on matt ridley ..

[Michel Bauwens]

don't you find it strange that your own vision is rather doomsday, i.e.
capitalism is dead, yet  you recommend a book that, (not having read it),
seems to state the obvious, we are better off since WW II (of course, a
conclusion that should be severely qualified), while severely mis-stating
why it happened (i.e. highest development rates were under socialized
economies, not deregulated ones), and you can't logically deduce from
post-WW II developments that material economic progress will be infinite,
while ignoring all problems with sustainability ...

again, without having read it, just the reviews, it seems a profoundly
unimportant book, things have gone well for us in the past, they will go on
in the future, there's nothing to worry about ... I mean, how sillier can it
get ?

for info, environmental experts picked just one of his chapters, and
basically rip it apart:

"Basically, the excerpt from the book looks like another unbalanced
contribution from an author who has a predestined opinion. I think the title
of the book should be *Cherry-picked reality: How fantasy is maintained by
false scepticism*!"
(
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/06/matt-ridley-comments.html
)

Michel

On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 11:11 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I read the book and recommend it.   The shots are cheap and childish...and,
> more importantly, have little or nothing to do with the book.  The point of
> the book...that news has been overwhelmingly good since World War II is not
> discussed at all.  That's because it is simply demonstrable truth.
>
> I am happy to see Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis discussed here.  I
> believe I have mentioned one or both before.  Paul Hartzog I think is a big
> Elinor Ostrom fan if I am not mistaken.
>
> These people did very good work (all are more or less retired now) and have
> influenced my own work on workforce development extensively.  I've actually
> explored the 1 time development budget...it isn't realistic, but it is in
> the right zone of how to get people to make good decisions about their lives
> in an economic sense.
>
> Ryan
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 1:04 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>   on matt ridley's recent book:
>> http://crookedtimber.org/2010/06/19/chutzpah-alert/
>>
>>  Chutzpah alert
>>
>> by Chris Bertram on June 19, 2010
>>
>> Sometimes an *ad hominem* attack just seems right. Such is the case with George
>> Monbiot’s latest piece on Matt Ridley<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jun/18/matt-ridley-rational-optimist-errors>,
>> the Dawkinsite pop-science author. I’ve been aware of Ridley in his
>> journalistic capacity for years, but I had no idea that he also had a
>> parallel career in banking. Monbiot on Ridley’s *The Rational Optimist* :
>>
>> In the book, Ridley attacks the “parasitic bureaucracy”, which stifles
>> free enterprise and excoriates governments for, among other sins, bailing
>> out big corporations. If only the market is left to its own devices, he
>> insists, and not stymied by regulations, the outcome will be wonderful for
>> everybody. What Ridley glosses over is that before he wrote this book he had
>> an opportunity to put his theories into practice. As chairman of Northern
>> Rock, he was responsible, according to parliament’s Treasury select
>> committee, for a “high-risk, reckless business strategy”. Northern Rock was
>> able to pursue this strategy as a result of a “substantial failure of
>> regulation” by the state. The wonderful outcome of this experiment was the
>> first run on a British bank since 1878, and a £27bn government bail-out. But
>> it’s not just Ridley who doesn’t mention the inconvenient disjunction
>> between theory and practice: hardly anyone does. His book has now been
>> reviewed dozens of times, and almost all the reviewers have either been
>> unaware of his demonstration of what happens when his philosophy is applied
>> or too polite to mention it.
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Ryan Lanham
> rlanham1963 at gmail.com
> Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
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