The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [169]
p. 19 ‘Yet the global effect of the growth of China and India has been to reduce the difference between rich and poor worldwide.’ This is especially clear in Hans Rosling’s animated graphs of global income distribution at www.gapminder.com. Incidentally, the individualisation of life that brought personal freedom after the 1960s also brought less loyalty towards the group, a process that surely reached crisis point in the bonus rows of 2009: see Lindsey, B. 2009. Paul Krugman’s Nostalgianomics: Economic Policy, Social Norms and Income Inequality. Cato Institute.
p. 19 ‘As Hayek put it’. Hayek, F.A. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago University Press.
p. 19 ‘Known as the Flynn effect, after James Flynn who first drew attention to it’. Flynn, J.R. 2007. What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect. Cambridge University Press.
pp. 19–20 ‘To date 234 innocent Americans have been freed’.http://www.innocenceproject.org/know.
p. 20 ‘the average family house probably costs slightly less today than it did in 1900 or even 1700’. Comparing house prices over long periods of time is fraught with difficulty, because houses vary so much, but Piet Eichholtz has tried to index house prices by comparing the same area of Amsterdam, the Herengracht, over nearly 400 years: Eichholtz, P.M.A. 2003. A long run house price index: The Herengracht Index, 1628–1973. Real Estate Economics 25:175–92.
p. 20 ‘the same amount of artificial lighting’. Pearson, P.J.G. 2003. Energy History, Energy Services, Innovation and Sustainability. Report and Proceedings of the International Conference on Science and Technology for Sustainability 2003: Energy and Sustainability Science, Science Council of Japan, Tokyo.
pp. 20–1 ‘an hour of work in 1800 earned you ten minutes of reading light’. Nordhaus, W. 1997. Do Real-Output and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not. Cowles Foundation Paper no. 957, Yale. A modern check using British figures of £479 average weekly income and £0.09 per kilowatt-hour electricity cost produces a similar result: 1/4 second of work for 18 watt-hours, plus a little more for the cost of the bulb.
p. 21 ‘using the currency that counts, your time’. Nordhaus, W. 1997. Do Real-Output and Real Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not. Cowles Foundation Paper no. 957, Yale.
p. 21 ‘The economist Don Boudreaux’. http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2006/08/were_much_wealt.html.
p. 22 ‘The average Briton today consumes roughly 40,000 times as much artificial light as he did in 1750.’ Fouquet, R., Pearson, P.J.G., Long run trends in energy services 1300–2000. Environmental and Resource Economists 3rd World Congress, via web, Kyoto.
p. 23 ‘Healthcare and education are among the few things that cost more in terms of hours worked now than they did in the 1950s.’ Cox, W.M. and Alm, R. 1999. Myths of Rich and Poor – Why We Are Better Off Than We Think. Basic Books. See also Easterbrook, G. 2003. The Progress Paradox. Random House.
p. 23 ‘observe what Harper’s Weekly had to say’. Gordon, J.S. 2004. An Empire of Wealth: the Epic History of American Power. Harper Collins.
p. 23 ‘They were enricher-barons, too’. McCloskey, D. 2006. The Bourgeois Virtues. Chicago University Press.
p. 24 ‘Henry Ford got rich by making cars cheap’. Moore, S. and Simon, J. 2000. It’s Getting Better All the Time. Cato Institute.
p. 24 ‘The price of aluminium fell from $545 a pound in the 1880s to twenty cents a pound in the 1930s’. Shermer, M. 2007. The Mind of the Market. Times Books.
p. 24 ‘When Juan Trippe sold cheap tourist class seats on his Pan Am airline in 1945’. Norberg, J. 2006. When Man Created the World. Published in Swedish as När människan skapade världen. Timbro.
p. 25 ‘Where it took sixteen weeks to earn the price of 100 square feet of housing in 1956, now