The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [168]
p. 9 ‘sluiced artificially cheap money towards bad risks’. For a good account of this see Norberg, J. 2009. Financial Fiasco. Cato Institute.
p. 9 ‘The crisis has at least as much political as economic causation’. Friedman, J. 2009. A crisis of politics, not economics: complexity, ignorance and policy failure. Critical Review 23 (introduction to special issue).
Chapter 1
p. 11 ‘On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?’ Macaulay, T.B. 1830. Review of Southey’s Colloquies on Society. Edinburgh Review, January 1830.
p. 11 World GDP graph. Maddison, A. 2006. The World Economy. OECD Publishing.
p. 12 ‘But the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against disease and much more likely to live to old age than their ancestors have ever been’. Kremer, M. 1993. Population growth and technical change, one million BC to 1990. Quarterly Journal of Economics 108:681–716. See Brad De Long’s estimates at http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/1998_Draft/World_GDP/Estimating_World_GDP.html.
p. 12 ‘the number of different products that you can buy in New York or London tops ten billion’. Beinhocker, E. 2006. The Origin of Wealth. Harvard Business School Press.
p. 13 ‘As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it will be trapped and eaten by the boy’. See McCloskey, D. 2006. The Bourgeois Virtues. Chicago University Press: ‘Let us then be rich. Remember smoky crofters’ cabins. Remember being tied in Japan by law and cost to one locale. Remember American outhouses and iced-over rain barrels and cold and wet and dirt. Remember in Denmark ten people living in one room, the cows and chickens in the other room. Remember in Nebraska sod houses and isolation.’
p. 14 ‘income has risen more than nine times’. Maddison, A. 2006. The World Economy. OECD Publishing.
p. 15 ‘The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day’. Norberg, J. 2006. When Man Created the World. Published in Swedish as När människan skapade världen. Timbro.
p. 15 ‘The poor in the developing world grew their consumption twice as fast as the world as a whole between 1980 and 2000’. Lal, D. 2006. Reviving the Invisible Hand. Princeton University Press. See also Bhalla, S. 2002. Imagine There’s No Country. Institute of International Economics.
p. 15 ‘The percentage living in such absolute poverty has dropped by more than half – to less than 18 per cent’. Chen, S. and Ravallion, M. 2007. Absolute poverty measures for the developing world, 1981–2004. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS). 104: 16757–62.
p. 15 ‘The United Nations estimates that poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.’ Lomborg, B. 2001. The Sceptical Environmentalist. Cambridge University Press.
p. 16 ‘In 1958 J.K. Galbraith declared’. Galbraith, J.K. 1958. The Affluent Society. Houghton Mifflin.
p. 16 ‘This would have been unthinkable at mid-century’. Statistics from Lindsey, B. 2007. The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture. Collins.
p. 17 ‘Today, a car emits less pollution travelling at full speed than a parked car did in 1970 from leaks.’ Pollution facts from Norberg, J. 2006. When Man Created the World. Published in Swedish as När människan skapade världen. Timbro.
p. 17 ‘Within just five years both predictions were proved wrong in at least one country. ’ Oeppen, J. and Vaupel, J.W. 2002. Demography. Broken limits to life expectancy. Science 296:1029–31.
p. 18 ‘People are not only spending a longer time living, but a shorter time dying.’ Tallis, R. 2006. ‘Sense about Science’ annual lecture. http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/pdf/Lecture2007Transcript.pdf.
p. 18 ‘The same is true of cancer, heart disease and respiratory disease: they all still increase with age, but they do so later and later, by about ten years since the 1950s.’ Fogel,