The Rational Optimist

Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes. (Location 76)

shall argue that there was a point in human prehistory when big-brained, cultural, learning people for the first time began to exchange things with each other, and that once they started doing so, culture suddenly became cumulative, and the great headlong experiment of human economic ‘progress’ began. (Location 103)

Specialisation encouraged innovation, because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool-making tool. (Location 110)

That saved time, and prosperity is simply time saved, which is proportional to the division of labour. (Location 110)

On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us? (Location 154)

Put it another way, an hour of work today earns you 300 days’ worth of reading light; an hour of work in 1800 earned you ten minutes of reading light. (Location 290)

Besides, a million years of natural selection shaped human nature to be ambitious to rear successful children, not to settle for contentment: people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate. (Location 391)

Getting richer is not the only or even the best way of getting happier. Social and political liberation is far more effective, says the political scientist Ronald Ingleheart: the big gains in happiness come from living in a society that frees you to make choices about your lifestyle – about where to live, who to marry, how to express your sexuality and so on. It is the increase in free choice since 1981 that has been responsible for the increase in happiness recorded since then in forty-five out of fifty-two countries. Ruut Veenhoven finds that ‘the more individualized the nation, the more citizens enjoy their life.’ (Location 392)

Most past bursts of human prosperity have come to naught because they allocated too little money to innovation and too much to asset price inflation or to war, corruption, luxury and theft. (Location 436)

Note: Finding welth of resources is not lwags a good thing

Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. (Location 528)

This is what I mean by the collective brain. As Friedrich Hayek first clearly saw, knowledge ‘never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’. (Location 546)

What this implies is that far from being merely materialist, human consumption is already driven by a sort of pseudo-spiritualism that seeks love, heroism and admiration. (Location 650)

Note: Materialism is too simplistic it is status swking

In other words, cooking encourages specialisation by sex. The first and deepest division of labour is the sexual one. It is an iron rule documented in virtually all foraging people that ‘men hunt, women and children gather’. The two sexes move ‘through the same habitat, making strikingly different decisions about how to obtain resources within that habitat (Location 869)

Without trade, innovation just does not happen. (Location 1017)

Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. (Location 1017)

According to the anthropologist Joe Henrich, human beings learn skills from each other by copying prestigious individuals, and they innovate by making mistakes that are very occasionally improvements – that is how culture evolves. (Location 1102)

By these measures, Norway is heaving with trust (65 per cent trust each other) and wealthy, while Peru is wallowing in mistrust (5 per cent trust each other) and poor. ‘A 15% increase in the proportion of people in a country who think others are trustworthy,’ says Paul Zak, ‘raises income per person by 1% per year for every year thereafter.’ (Location 1380)

In that sense ‘capitalism’ is dying, and fast. The size of the average American company is down from twenty-five employees to ten in just twenty-five years. (Location 1639)

That is the point of agriculture: it diverts the labour of other species to providing services for human beings. (Location 1711)

The characteristic signature of prosperity is increasing specialisation. The characteristic signature of poverty is a return to self-sufficiency. (Location 1862)

Another factor is wealth. Having more income means you can afford more babies, but it also means you can afford more luxuries to divert you from constant breeding. Children are consumer goods, but rather time-consuming and demanding ones compared with, say, cars. (Location 2953)

By 1722 Parliament had bowed to the wishes of these weavers and on Christmas day that year, when the Calico Act took effect, it became illegal to wear cotton of any kind, or even to use it in home furnishings. Not for the last time, the narrow interest of producers triumphed over the broader interest of consumers in an act of trade protectionism. (Location 3181)

even today scientists’ job is really to come along and explain the empirical findings of technological tinkerers after they have discovered something. (Location 3630)

Note: Theory always comes after practice

When I go into the local superstore, I never see people driven to misery by the impossibility of choice. I see people choosing. (Location 4088)