Speakers Matt Ridley: Rational optimist
Matt Ridley argues that, through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is, "ideas having sex with each other."
Why you should listen to him:
British author Matt Ridley knows one thing: Through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is, the mating of ideas. The sophistication of the modern world, says Ridley, lies not in individual intelligence or imagination; it is a collective enterprise. In his book The Rational Optimist, Ridley (whose previous works include Genome and Nature via Nurture) sweeps the entire arc of human history to powerfully argue that "prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else."
It is our habit of trade, idea-sharing and specialization that has created the collective brain which set human living standards on a rising trend. This, he says, "holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead -- because ideas are having sex with each other as never before."
Watch his 2010 TEDTalk, "When Ideas Have Sex."
"Ridley systematically builds a case through copious data and countless studies that “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.""Scientific American
Quotes by Matt Ridley
-
“How did we become the only species that becomes more prosperous as it becomes more populous?”
-
“Trade is 10 times as old as farming.”
-
“You can have culture without exchange. You can have, as it were, asexual culture.”
-
“You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.”
-
-
Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex
- 16:26 Posted: Jul 2010
Matt Ridley on the Web
Related Speakers
Conferences
-
- TEDGlobal 2010
- TEDGlobal 2011