Crisis Antidote – The Rational Optimist

Take a break from the doom and gloom of the credit crunch with Matt Ridley’s talk on his excellent upbeat book “The Rational Optimist – How Prosperity Evolves”, time to take a step back and appreciate just how lucky those of us alive today really are.

Per the blurb for the talk –

Matt Ridley, bestselling author of The Red Queen, Nature via Nurture, and other books, tells the story of human cultural and economic evolution in his latest work, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. Combining the best of economics and biology, he explains both the “how” and “why” of the amazing (and recent) explosion in worldwide human well-being. Against the pessimism of many of today’s intellectuals and commentators, Ridley presents a compelling case for why progress will continue, but only if cultural evolution is allowed to develop in the direction of more contact, trade, and openness between people.

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