A review by renatojosediaz
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

5.0

An eye-opening book. It is now 11 years since it was published, so a lot of the information is not news. But it is in the way this information is presented that certainly invokes reflection adn thought. Human prosperity as a result of our capability to share ideas in a way other species cannot which lead to a different kind of trading where both parties benefit simultaneously from the exchange; that initial idea got me hooked, and the book expands on this idea for a few chapters. Then the chapters comparing the solutions to climate change in efficiency and efficacy give the reader insight about what is being done and about which solutions one could root for if one cares about minimizing the use of land and other resources, metrics that make some of the renewable energy methods too inefficient (at least at the time of writing).