The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [179]
p. 108 ‘now-unfashionable philosopher Herbert Spencer who insisted that freedom would increase along with commerce’. Quotes are from 1842 essay for The Nonconformist and 1853 essay for The Westminster Review. Both quoted in Nisbet, R. 1980. History of the Idea of Progress. Basic Books.
p. 108 ‘The American civil rights movement drew its strength partly from a great economic migration’. Lindsey, B. 2007. The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture. Collins.
p. 109 ‘much argument about whether democracy is necessary for growth’. Friedman, B. 2005. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. Knopf.
p. 109 ‘I am happy to cheer, with Deirdre McCloskey’. McCloskey, D. 2006. The Bourgeois Virtues. Chicago University Press.
p. 110 ‘One side denounced capitalism but gobbled up its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.’ Lindsey, B. 2007. The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture. Collins.
p. 111 ‘Like Milton Friedman’. Quoted in Norberg, J. 2008. The Klein Doctrine. Cato Institute briefing paper no. 102. 14 May 2008.
p. 111 ‘serfs under feudal brandlords’. Klein, N. 2001. No Logo. Flamingo.
p. 111 ‘Shell may have tried to dump an oil-storage device’. Greenpeace claimed that the Brent Spar had 5,500 tonnes of oil in it, then later admitted the true figure was nearer 100 tonnes.
p. 111 ‘Enron funded climate alarmism’. Ken Lay had ambitions for Enron to ‘become the world’s leading renewable energy company’ and it lobbied hard for renewable energy subsidies and mandates. See http://masterresource.org/?p=3302#more-3302.
p. 111 ‘half of today’s biggest companies did not even exist in 1980’. Micklethwait, J. and Wooldridge, A. 2003. The Company. Weidenfeld.
p. 112 ‘According to Eric Beinhocker of McKinsey’. Beinhocker, E. 2006. The Origin of Wealth. Random House.
p. 113 ‘Like corrugated iron and container shipping’. The development of containerisation in the 1950s made the loading and unloading of ships roughly twenty times as fast and thereby dramatically lowered the cost of trade, helping to start the boom in Asian exports. Today, despite the advent of the weightless information age, the world’s merchant fleet – at over 550 million gross registered tonnes – is twice the size it was in 1970 and ten times the size it was in 1920. See Edgerton, D. 2006. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. Profile Books.
p. 113 ‘A single, routine, minuscule Wal-Mart decision in the 1990s’. Fishman, C. 2006. The Wal-Mart Effect. Penguin.
p. 114 ‘As Kodak and Fuji slugged it out for dominance in the 35mm film industry’. The remarkable thing about the death of film cameras is how blind the film companies were to it. As late as 2003, they were insisting that digital would only take some of the market and film would endure.
p. 114 ‘In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year’. Kauffman Foundation estimates: cited in The Economist survey of business in America, by Robert Guest, 30 May 2009.
p. 114 ‘“This isn’t about auctions,” said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay’. ‘ebay, inc’. Harvard Business School case study 9-700-007.
p. 117 ‘In a sample of 127 countries’. Carden, A. and Hall, J. 2009. Why are some places rich while others are poor? The institutional necessity of economic freedom (29 July 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1440786.
p. 117 ‘the World Bank published a study of “intangible wealth”’. Bailey, R. 2007. The secrets of intangible wealth. Reason, 5 October 2007. http://reason.com/news/show/122854.html.
p. 118 ‘lex mercatoria’. I discuss this in more detail in The Origins of Virtue (1996).
p. 118 ‘When Michael Shermer and three friends started a bicycle race across America’. In Shermer, M. 2007. The Mind of the Market. Times Books.
Chapter 4
p. 121 ‘Whoever could make two ears of corn’. Swift, J. 1726. Gulliver’s Travels.
p. 121 Global cereal harvest graph. See FAOSTAT: http://faostat.fao.org.
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