FORGET ALL the budgetary doom and gloom, things are already good and guaranteed to get better. It is all part of a natural evolutionary process, argues author and scientist Matt Ridley.
Dr Ridley was in Dublin yesterday brimming with optimism and ready to convince those despondent over the national finances that better times are just around the corner.
“Ireland is in a horrible state and is feeling real pain, but it is much more likely that things will turn around. Ireland will be back to growth,” he said.
Our situation will improve almost in spite of anything we might do. “It is an extraordinarily evolutionary process. We can’t help this happening,” he said in advance of a talk yesterday evening at the Science Gallery at Trinity College.
Dr Ridley is in a position to make such a claim given the success of his latest book, The Rational Optimist: How prosperity evolves. In his talk entitled The Collective Brainhe revealed the secret behind our success as a species – the capacity to trade.
“When you try and understand how humans have become so prosperous it is because of collective intelligence,” he said.
One person knows one thing and you know another, if you share the ideas something new will emerge. “We network our brains through trade,” he said. He referenced an essay from the 1950s describing how it took a million people to make a pencil.
One knew how to mine the graphite, one how to grow the trees for wood, another how to sell them and so on. Yet no one person knew how to make a pencil.
Cultural anthropologists now view this collective intelligence as an evolutionary process. “They have come to the conclusion it is Darwinian,” he said. But in this case it was not the survival of the fittest person, it was the fittest idea that wins through. Trade and exchange was central to the process, he said. “If you don’t exchange this doesn’t happen. It is the invention of exchange that drove the whole process.”
He likened it to the evolution of sex in biology where two organisms join to make another. In the case of trade one idea merges with another to deliver an advance.
The general result of exchange was “a drift towards higher living standards”, he said. “The reason things are getting better is because ideas are having sex.”
Things might look bad out there but Dr Ridley encouraged people to take a 50-year view. Over that time global average income rose by 300 per cent, people live a third longer and child mortality dropped by two-thirds. People took these advances for granted and tended to focus on the short term. Yet economic projections suggest world GDP will grow nine-fold by 2100 in real terms.