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posted: December 28, 2025
tl;dr: It’s rational to be optimistic about the progress of humanity, but there are a few potential disruptors...
I’ve long believed that engineers, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and private sector workers do far more to improve people’s lives than do politicians. I’ve also long believed that the standard of living for the vast majority of people on earth has never been better, continues to improve, and will improve for the foreseeable future, barring a civilization-threatening event such as a deadly manmade global pandemic. Author Matt Ridley believes as I do, and provides supporting evidence for these views in The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.
Oft-cited economic statistics such as GDP growth rate and the rate of unemployment and inflation are abstractions that only hint at how an economy is performing for people. What matter more are statistics that measure aspects of the quality of life: infant death rate, longevity, health, caloric intake, average square footage of dwellings, and the percentage of the population with electricity, flush toilets, broadband Internet access, smart phones, and other amenities that make modern life better for people. Ridley recites a cornucopia of these at the beginning of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves to make the case that, regardless of what the pessimists say, the long-term trend for humanity is upwards.
The more interesting question is why this is true. Ridley spends much of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves building his case that the secret ingredients are labor specialization, markets, free trade, and a light touch by government which, ideally, enforces property rights but does not devolve into a confiscatory elite. Ridley knows far more archeology, anthropology, and ancient history than I do, and presents compelling histories of how early civilizations developed, grew, and in some cases declined, laying the foundations for today’s modern world.
Ridley is a strong proponent of free-market capitalism. I can imagine his dismay as the world drifts more towards state-directed capitalism. Less clear is how he feels about free trade with nations whose competitive advantages include a willingness to despoil the environment and to steal intellectual property. Free trade today raises more questions than it did in its earliest days, when a fisherman and a net maker could each specialize on their crafts and both be better off by trading with each other.
In the second half of the book Ridley presents arguments to refute various doomsday scenarios such as overpopulation, mass famines, running out of finite resources (e.g. fossil fuels), apparently endemic poverty in Africa, and climate change. With the plunging birth rate in most of the developed world, and downward trends elsewhere, the threat of humans overwhelming the planet is already a solved problem, in my and Ridley’s opinion, although the human population won’t peak for several more decades before it inexorably starts to fall. The climate is changing, but alarmists understate how it has also changed in the past and the degree to which living beings can adapt. Loss of biodiversity is likely a bigger problem, and climate change plays a minor role in that. One solution is intensive farming on smaller amounts of land, and yet that solution is often opposed by the same environmentalists sounding the alarm.
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves was written in 2010 in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and during the Great Recession. In the book Ridley is generally dismissive of the threat of a viral pandemic. That may have been true before COVID-19 because prior naturally emergent viruses weren’t particularly well-suited to spread widely in humans. But SARS-CoV-2 did spread rapidly, and that unusual human adaptation upon first emergence was what triggered Ridley and Alina Chan that something was amiss. They document a good amount of the evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab leak in Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. More evidence continues to emerge.
Perhaps Ridley would agree with me that a manmade pandemic is now the greatest threat to human civilization. It would be very hard to develop a virus that would kill every human on the planet. But a virus that killed 10% to 20% of the human population would likely seriously disrupt our interconnected, interdependent modern society such that humanity would likely be set back several hundred years in its development. I too am a rational optimist, but we need to strictly control technologies such as nuclear weapons, manmade pathogens, and malevolent artificial intelligence in order to ensure the continued progress of our species.