Ridley on Trade, Growth, and the Rational Optimist

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2010

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about why he is optimistic about the future and how trade and specialization explain the evolution of human development over the millennia. Ridley argues that life is getting better for most of the people on earth and that the underlying cause is trade and specialization. He discusses the differences between Smith's and Ricardo's insights into trade and growth and why despite what seems to be strong evidence, people are frequently pessimistic about the future. Ridley also addresses environmental issues.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is October 14, 2010, and my guest is Matt Ridley. His latest book is The Rational Optimist,
0:46.1	How Prosperity Evolves. Matt, welcome to Econ Talk. Russ, it's great to be on the show. So your
0:53.0	book is remarkably ambitious and really an extraordinary achievement in both depth and breadth. You try to
1:02.9	do something that is just a little bit beyond modest. You try to explain all of human history
1:11.7	around a small slice of what we might want to know about, and you provocatively leverage the idea
1:21.9	that trade, the ability to exchange and the subsequent divisional labor that ensues, can explain
1:29.9	much of human development going back really thousands of years. Yes, one of my ambitions is to
1:38.0	try and take the notion of trade a lot further back into prehistory than people generally do. There's
1:43.3	been a tendency among anthropologists and archaeologists to say that, look, you can't do trade until
1:48.9	you've invented law and order and government and farming and things like that. I think the evidence
1:54.9	suggests that simply isn't true that hunter-gatherers are perfectly good at trading and that it
1:59.8	had a crucial impact on human history. But my other ambition is to say, look, this is actually the
2:06.2	grand theme of human history. Forget the wars and the poets and the culture, et cetera. Those
2:14.7	are all important, but the thing that's running through human history all the time is this tendency to
2:21.8	divide labor on a big scale and sometimes it shrinks again to a small scale, but gradually and
2:28.0	extra-ably ratchet like it grows until we include everybody in this habit of getting other people
2:34.4	to do things for us and doing things for other people and working for each other is the great theme
	...

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