The Rational Optimist
How Prosperity Evolves
Matt Ridley
Having read it
★★★★★
Found some passages I’d written down from reading this book back in October 2012, so clearly it was a good read and had made a mark!
Plus, it’s good sorting through all one’s ‘rubbish that sits unseen in boxes’ as the process is quite helpful and rather conducive to reducing the weight of stuff, literally and figuratively, that we carry!
A good passage
On dry bird islands off the South American and South African coasts, where no rain leached away the cormorant, penguin and booby droppings, immense deposits of nitrogen and phosphorus had accumulated over centuries. Guano mining became a very profitable, and very grim, business.
[...]
But soon the best deposits were exhausted. The miners turned to rich mineral saltpetre deposits in the Andes (which proved to be ancient guano islands lifted up by South America’s westward drift), but these could hardly keep pace with demand.
A second good passage
[...] as Kenyan scientist Florence Wambug puts it, ‘You people in the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of genetically modified foods, but can we eat first?’
A third good passage
Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves filter it away.