The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [170]
p. 25 ‘To remedy this, governments then have to enforce the building of more affordable housing, or subsidise mortgage lending to the poor’. Woods, T.E. 2009. Meltdown. Regnery Press.
p. 25 ‘according to Richard Layard’. Layard, R. 2005. Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. Penguin.
p. 26 ‘The hippies were right all along’. Oswald, Andrew. 2006. The hippies were right all along about happiness. Financial Times, 19 January 2006.
p. 26 ‘a study by Richard Easterlin in 1974’. Easterlin, R.A. 1974. Does economic growth improve the human lot? in Paul A. David and Melvin W. Reder (eds). Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz. Academic Press.
p. 26 ‘the Easterlin paradox does not exist’. Stevenson, B. and Wolfers, J. 2008. Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox. NBER Working Papers 14282, National Bureau of Economic Research; Ingleheart, R., Foa, R., Peterson, C. and Welzel, C. 2008. Development, freedom and rising happiness: a global perspective, 1981–2007. Perspectives on Psychological Science 3:264–86.
p. 26 ‘In the words of one of the studies’. Stevenson, B. and Justin Wolfers, J. 2008. Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox. NBER Working Papers 14282, National Bureau of Economic Research.
p. 27 ‘a tax on consumption to encourage saving for investment instead’. Frank, R.H. 1999. Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess. The Free Press.
p. 27 ‘to be well off and unhappy is surely better than to be poor and unhappy.’ The journalist Greg Easterbrook’s prayer goes: ‘thank you that I and five hundred million others are well-housed, well-supplied, overfed, free, and not content; because we might be starving, wretched, locked under tyranny and still not content.’ Easterbrook, G. 2003. The Progress Paradox. Basic Books.
p. 27 ‘psychologists find people to have fairly constant levels of happiness’. Gilbert, D. 2007. Stumbling on Happiness. Harper Press.
p. 27 ‘political scientist Ronald Ingleheart’. Ingleheart, R., Foa, R., Peterson, C. and Welzel, C. 2008. Development, freedom and rising happiness: a global perspective, 1981–2007. Perspectives on Psychological Science 3:264–86.
p. 28 ‘Ruut Veenhoven finds’. Veenhoven, R. 1999. Quality-of-life in individualistic society: A comparison of 43 nations in the early 1990’s. Social Indicators Research 48:157–86.
p. 28 ‘some pressure groups may have exacerbated real hunger in Zambia’. Paarlberg, R. 2008. Starved for Science. Harvard University Press.
p. 28 ‘The precautionary principle’. Ron Bailey points out that most renditions of the precautionary principle boil down to the injunction: ‘Never do anything for the first time.’ http://reason.com/archives/2003/07/02/making-the-future-safe.
p. 29 ‘By the same age, human hunter-gatherers have consumed about 20 per cent of their lifetime calories, but produced just 4 per cent.’ Kaplan, H.E. and Robson, A.J. 2002. The emergence of humans: the co-evolution of intelligence and longevity with intergenerational transfers. PNAS 99:10221–6; see also Kaplan, H. and Gurven, M. 2005. The natural history of human food sharing and cooperation: a review and a new multi-individual approach to the negotiation of norms. In Moral Sentiments and Material Interests (eds H. Gintis, S. Bowles, R. Boyd and E.Fehr). MIT Press.
p. 31 ‘curse of resources’. Ferguson, N. 2008. The Ascent of Money. Allen Lane.
p. 31 ‘the Great Depression of the 1930s is just a dip in the slope’. Findlay, R. and O’Rourke, K.H. 2007. Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy. Princeton University Press.
p. 31 ‘All sorts of new products and industries were born during the Depression’. Nicholas, T. 2008. Innovation lessons from the 1930s. McKinsey Quarterly, December 2008.
p. 31 ‘Arcadia Biosciences in northern California’. http://www.arcadiabio.com/pr_0032.php.