[p2p-research] Screw the Apocaholics -- The Optimists’ Case

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Screw the Apocaholics -- The
Optimists’ Case via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on 5/18/10

The NYT has a review/summary of Matt Ridley’s latest, “The Rational
Optimist”. Worth a read in its entirely, but here are some excerpts
from the John Tierney piece:

“Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment,” Dr. Ridley
writes. “This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange,
specialization and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of
time.”

…In ancient Babylon, it took more than 50 hours to pay for [an hour of
reading] light from a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, it took more than six
hours of work to pay for it from a tallow candle. Today, thanks to the
countless specialists producing electricity and compact fluorescent
bulbs, it takes less than a second.

… “Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court;
monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a
parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a
parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a
parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of
parasitic financiers.”

Progress this century could be impeded by politics, wars, plagues or
climate change, but Dr. Ridley argues that, as usual, the “apocaholics”
are overstating the risks and underestimating innovative responses.

“The modern world is a history of ideas meeting, mixing, mating and
mutating,” Dr. Ridley writes. “And the reason that economic growth has
accelerated so in the past two centuries is down to the fact that ideas
have been mixing more than ever before.”

… But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas
spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects
bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the
century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines,
disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence
atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment
improves and wilderness expands.”

More here.



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