The central meeting place for Rational Optimism.
Do you love innovation and entrepreneurship?
Do you appreciate how far humanity has come… but know we still have so much further to go?
Then you might be a rational optimist.
Join Matt Ridley (author of The Rational Optimist bestselling book), Stephen McBride, Dan Steinhart and others to stay up-to-date on all things rational optimism.
What’s that you say?
You’re concerned that innovation is being stifled by bureaucracy, regulation, superstition, censorship, war and debt?
Us too.
All the more reason to join us, help spread the word, and showcase and help launch ideas to help innovation flourish.
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A welcome note from Matt Ridley:
Thank you for joining us. I have spent the past 40 years writing on topics of import and intrigue, which for me include genetics, evolution, technology and innovation. I’ve explored these ideas across my columns for the Times, Telegraph and Wall Street Journal and at length in bestselling books such as The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, The Rational Optimist, and most recently in my Birds, Sex and Beauty. You can find my full bio here: https://www.mattridley.co.uk/biography/.
“What is a Rational Optimist?”
I’m fascinated by evolution with a small “e”: the way everything from biology to language to technology changes through variation and selection. I see human innovation as being on a continuum with biological evolution and the processes that drive them both – natural selection, trial and error – to be very similar. It’s mostly a myth that because we are conscious and intentional, our technology is designed rather than evolved. The way designers and inventors work is by discarding bad ideas, adopting good ones and cross-fertilising them to produce baby ideas and then testing them. Ideas having sex, I call it.
This process, if allowed to proceed, has a bias towards benefit and will continue to generate steadily better living standards for nearly all of humanity indefinitely. It already has. Extreme poverty – defined as roughly $2 a day in today’s money -- has dropped in my lifetime from afflicting more than half of humanity to less than 8%. Nobody has ever seen a transformation of living standards like that. Child mortality is down by two thirds, lifespan up by one-third. We’re wealthier, healthier, happier, kinder, cleverer, freer, more peaceful and more equal than ever before – yes, check the stats! -- and we mostly take it for granted or don’t believe it. I am passionate about telling young people what the adults never told me and what they are not hearing from their teachers today: that the future is almost certainly bright.
What is a Rational Pessimist?
These days I also call myself a rational pessimist. What I mean by that is not that things are going to get worse but that they are going to improve at a far slower rate than they could, because of foolish policies. Freedom is the secret sauce of innovation. If we really want to let innovation flourish, then in 2100 our grandchildren could be ten times as wealthy as today, everywhere. The average person on the planet would be earning and spending $120,000 a year in today’s money. That’s an almost incredible thought but it’s not fanciful. If we stifle innovation – as we increasingly try to do with bureaucracy, regulation, superstition, censorship, war and debt – then we might be only two or three times as well off in 2100. That’s a huge opportunity cost.
This Substack will be a place to discuss, showcase and help launch ideas to help innovation flourish – and to help me formulate the next book on this topic.
Thank you for joining us and for subscribing to the Rational Optimist Society.
