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the torch of catallaxy alight, and India, and maybe Brazil, not to mention a host of smaller free cities and states. By 2050, China’s economy may well be double the size of America’s. The experiment will go on. So long as human exchange and specialisation are allowed to thrive somewhere, then culture evolves whether leaders help it or hinder it, and the result is that prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands. Said Lord Macaulay, ‘We see in almost every part of the annals of mankind how the industry of individuals, struggling up against wars, taxes, famines, conflagrations, mischievous prohibitions, and more mischievous protections, creates faster than governments can squander, and repairs whatever invaders can destroy.’

Human nature will not change. The same old dramas of aggression and addiction, of infatuation and indoctrination, of charm and harm, will play out, but in an ever more prosperous world. In Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth, the Antrobus family (representing humankind) just manages to survive the ice age, the flood and a world war, but their natures do not change. History repeats itself as a spiral not a circle, Wilder implied, with an ever-growing capacity for both good and bad, played out through unchanging individual character. So the human race will continue to expand and enrich its culture, despite setbacks and despite individual people having much the same evolved, unchanging nature. The twenty-first century will be a magnificent time to be alive.

Dare to be an optimist.

Notes and References

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

These notes will be continuously corrected and expanded on the website www.rationaloptimist.com.

Prologue

p. 1 ‘In other classes of animals, the individual advances from infancy to age or maturity’. Ferguson, A. 1767. An Essay on the History of Civil Society.

pp. 1–2 ‘On my desk as I write sit two artefacts of roughly the same size’. Photographs of the hand axe and computer mouse reproduced by permission of John Watson.

p. 3 ‘from perhaps 3 million to nearly 7 billion people’. Kremer, M. 1993. Population growth and technical change, one million B.C. to 1990. Quarterly Journal of Economics 108:681–716.

p. 4 ‘The human being is the only animal that ...’ Gilbert, D. 2007. Stumbling on Happiness. Harper Press.

p. 4 ‘with the possible exception of language’. Pagel, M. 2008. Rise of the digital machine. Nature 452:699.

p. 4 ‘compared with even chimpanzees humans are almost obsessively interested in faithful imitation’. Horner, V. and Whiten, A. 2005. Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Animal Cognition 8:164–81.

p. 5 ‘We may call it social evolution when an invention quietly spreads through imitation.’ Tarde, G. 1969/1888. On Communication and Social Influence. Chicago University Press.

p. 5 ‘selection by imitation of successful institutions and habits’. Hayek, F.A. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago University Press.

p. 5 ‘Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term “meme” for a unit of cultural imitation’. Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.

p. 5 ‘Richard Nelson in the 1980s proposed that whole economies evolve by natural selection’. Nelson, R.R. and Winter, S.G. 1982. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Harvard University Press.

p. 6 ‘a culture or a camera’. Richerson, P. and Boyd, R. 2005. Not by Genes Alone. Chicago University Press: ‘adding one innovation after another to a tradition until the results resemble organs of extreme perfection’.

p. 7 ‘“To create is to recombine” said the molecular biologist François Jacob’. Jacob, F. 1977. Evolution and tinkering. Science 196:1163.

p. 8 ‘what