This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 17, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

We control far less about our world than we might like to believe.

To Matt Ridley, that's often a very good thing. In his

new book The Evolution of Everything he discusses how ideas emerge in religion,

technology, government, leadership, money, even our own minds.

We spoke last week.

You mentioned that some of your friends, ideologically minded, might take offense or be bothered by certain things you say about religion and certain

other of your friends would be bothered by what they what you say about government so drill down just a little bit what are the things

that you say that you think will cause some of your friends trouble?

Well I'm arguing that the world is a much more bottom-up place, much less top down place, and that we make

the mistake of thinking that somebody's in charge, and that's God in some cases and its government

in other cases. We tend to think the government runs the

economy, that's nonsense, it doesn't, ordinary people run the economy. We tend to

think God tells us how to behave well. I think that's nonsense too. I think we tell each other how to behave well.

So people who are wedded to a particular view of the world, what I would call a slightly

creationist view of the world, believing in too much top-down

planning, may not like some of my chapters, but the interesting thing is of course that people on the left

will dislike some chapters and people on the right will dislike other chapters.

Now we can see technologically at least in the 20th century and 21st century we can watch technology

evolved.

That's been something that from year to year recently at least

...