In The Rational Optimist Matt Ridley make a terrific case that what make human’s special is our propensity to share, specialize and trade.  As a result of this propensity we have created a virtual shared brain that has allowed us to build a world of freedom and prosperity for humans that was inconceivable even two hundred years ago.

The book is easy to read and is chock full of quotes and ideas that will cause latter day Malthusians to cringe.

Examples:

• It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet.
• The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.
• Never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.
• There was nothing special about the brains of the moderns; it was their trade networks that made the difference – their collective brains.
• The argument is not that exchange teaches people to be kind; it is that exchange teaches people to recognise their enlightened self-interest lies in seeking cooperation.
• The intelligentsia has disdained commerce throughout Western history. Homer and Isaiah despised traders. St Paul, St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther all considered usury a sin. Shakespeare could not bring himself to make the persecuted Shylock a hero.
• The lesson of the last two centuries is that liberty and welfare march hand in hand with prosperity and trade.
• Or as the Kenyan scientist Florence Wambugu puts it, ‘You people in the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of genetically modified foods, but can we eat first?’
• Indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last.
• The secret of the modern world is its gigantic interconnectedness. Ideas are having sex with other ideas from all over the planet with ever-increasing promiscuity.
• I Highly recommend this book!