The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley
Most people assume the world is going to hell in a handbasket and that they are the only ones who will do well. There is something about human nature that makes us pessimistic of others and optimistic about yourself. Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist explains how in nearly every way the world is becoming more a more prosperous. I was given a new perspective on the world, I had never looked at the world through an optimist's eyes until now. All around us is positive improvements, but we only focus on the negative. As long as you consider facts and past data before considering the state of the world, then you can have an optimistic outlook and look into the future rather than be a pessimist and look into the mistakes of the past.
It was very appropriate to read this before the Data Visualization Quest. Throughout this book, there were thousands of facts, each more interesting than the last. He would relate things to wealth that you would never think of. For example, he related how many minutes of work it took for an hour of light. Today (on the average wage in the U.K.) you would have to work ½ a second for an hour of light, in 1800, that turns into 6 hours of labor for just one hour of light.
Some argue that there was extreme …show more content…
He is not just an author, but also a businessman and a conservative journalist. Ridley has focused on science, mathematical, and non-fictional books, which shows in The Rational Optimist. Each of his books dives deeply into a subject and he writes about them extremely thoroughly. Other than his 19 books, he also has a TED talk titled “When Ideas Have Sex”. Basically, ideas reproduce like humans, they pass on components and soon you end up with a more advanced and beneficial idea. He spends one of 11 chapters in his book explain why this is important and how it actually
Most people assume the world is going to hell in a handbasket and that they are the only ones who will do well. There is something about human nature that makes us pessimistic of others and optimistic about yourself. Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist explains how in nearly every way the world is becoming more a more prosperous. I was given a new perspective on the world, I had never looked at the world through an optimist's eyes until now. All around us is positive improvements, but we only focus on the negative. As long as you consider facts and past data before considering the state of the world, then you can have an optimistic outlook and look into the future rather than be a pessimist and look into the mistakes of the past.
It was very appropriate to read this before the Data Visualization Quest. Throughout this book, there were thousands of facts, each more interesting than the last. He would relate things to wealth that you would never think of. For example, he related how many minutes of work it took for an hour of light. Today (on the average wage in the U.K.) you would have to work ½ a second for an hour of light, in 1800, that turns into 6 hours of labor for just one hour of light.
Some argue that there was extreme …show more content…
He is not just an author, but also a businessman and a conservative journalist. Ridley has focused on science, mathematical, and non-fictional books, which shows in The Rational Optimist. Each of his books dives deeply into a subject and he writes about them extremely thoroughly. Other than his 19 books, he also has a TED talk titled “When Ideas Have Sex”. Basically, ideas reproduce like humans, they pass on components and soon you end up with a more advanced and beneficial idea. He spends one of 11 chapters in his book explain why this is important and how it actually