The Rational Optimist is nothing if not thorough. In each chapter, author Matt Ridley breaks down the driving forces that have shaped society from its very beginning through the modern day. Sometimes, however, it seems his ambitions get the best of him when, for example, his discussion of farming begins 23,000 years ago with Syrians who subsisted on acorns and grass seed. It is an approach that would be right at home in a high school history book, but as an attempt to teach lessons about prosperity, the broad scope of The Rational Optimist quickly becomes tiresome.
Though Ridley is an accomplished author with two New York Times bestsellers under his belt, his latest book is bland and uninspiring. Written in a dull, catatonic tone, The Rational Optimist makes it tough for the reader to get from one chapter to the next, let alone finish.
It seems Ridley has merely compiled a galaxy of facts and statistics dating back to what feels like the dawn of time (the back of the book includes 56 pages of resources and citations) but has not given this information an appropriate presentation. Instead, he succeeds in proving the adage that sometimes less is truly more.
There is one silver lining to the book, however, and that is in the all-too-short last chapter. Here, Ridley makes numerous forecasts about the future, including how the collapse of Detroit's big carmakers in 2009 "leaves a flock of entrepreneurial start-ups in charge of the next generation of cars and engines." He also sees the demise of large corporations, or "monolithic behemoths," and suggests that they will be driven extinct by small firms and "ephemeral aggregations of people that form and reform continuously." He even goes so far as to predict that genetic engineering will become open-source, where "people, not corporations, decide what combinations of genes they want." In this, The Rational Optimist is indeed an eye-opener. It is just a shame it does not have such an effect until the last chapter.
Emily Holbrook is associate editor of Risk Management.
