I tried reading “the rational optimist” by Matt Ridley. Here is a summary of the book chapters
- Stats and anecdotes showing the world got better.
- Stats and anecdotes from the next era showing the world got better.
- Stats and anecdotes from the next era showing the world got better.
- Stats and anecdotes from the next era showing the world got better.
- Stats and anecdotes from the next era showing the world got better.
- Stats and anecdotes from the next era showing the world got better.
- Stats and anecdotes from the next era showing the world got better.
- Stats and anecdotes from the next era showing the world got better.
- Stats and anecdotes from the next era showing the world got better.
- Some Pessimism: Africa is doomed, but it is gonna be alright. Climate change will kill us all if we don’t react to it, but it is also gonna be alright.
- Extrapolation of the stats and the anecdotes from chapters 1-9 to the coming 100 years.
The end
I am an optimist myself. It is the first word in my bio. But the book looks like it is written for optimists looking to support their confirmation bias. No wonder most of the people recommending it such as Bill Gates, and Naval are known to be optimists themselves.
I totally agree that the world got and is getting better. I keep telling everyone that someone like myself, born in Egypt fifty years before I was born, and have the same disease I have, would had far lower chance of living a comfortable life as the one I enjoy, let alone having a decent job and living by themself in a different country.
The book almost dismisses randomness and the role it plays in social, political, and economic boom and bust cycles. It forgets that the turkey after 1000 days of getting fed, it thinks tomorrow will be the same until thanksgiving comes.
It also dismisses the point, that individualization and capitalism, the same things that led the world becoming better, are making people unhappy feeling they lost their sense of belonging in the society, which on a longer run might have a reversal effect by people wanting this progress to stop. The book ignores that the rapid technological advancements are making tech and tech companies controlling humans more than ever, driving us towards a dystopian world where we become slaves of those technologies.
Those are just few points of pessimism – among many others – that I expected to be addressed in such a book. I expected it to have stronger arguments targeted towards real pessimists, and not a compressed dose of statistics and anecdotes that anyone could argue against, even if they are true.