#11,678 in Business & money books
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Reddit mentions of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.)
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Reddit mentions: 4
We found 4 Reddit mentions of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.). Here are the top ones.
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| Release date | June 2010 |
The world is improving by most metrics. This is best shown through global statistics for health, poverty, education, equality, etc. Try reading The Rational Optimist or It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 years. Things obviously aren't perfect, but they're improving.
Anyway, the media tend to focus on awful things. Just try to keep the doom and gloom in perspective. For example, Ebola is scary, but it's only killed about 1,000 people. Compare that to the diseases that have been eradicated by medical and technological advances over the years/decades/centuries/millennia. Sure, the middle-east and eastern Europe are death-infested war zones. Compare that to WWII or any of these. By death toll, Ukraine is more comparable to 9-11 than it is to any actual war.
"The amount of oil left, the food-growing capacity of the world’s farmland, even the regenerative capacity of the biosphere – these are not fixed numbers; they are dynamic variables produced by a constant negotiation between human ingenuity and natural constraints."
--Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist
Try to keep in mind that popular media rarely presents a proportionately balanced view of the world. Due to fundamental incentives, media tends to be biased toward particular kinds of attention-grabbing sensationalism and pessimism.
Wanting to accurately perceive the state of the overall world beyond our personal experiences is admirable, so good for you. Investing the time to increase understanding helps us react rationally and responsibly.
A useful starting place is this brief TED talk by the amazing statistician Hans Rosling. Good books include Pinker's "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress" and Ridley's "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves".
The world is objectively better than ever before. Murder rates, death from conflicts, famine and disease, sexual violence - all lower than ever and decreasing (on a global, per capita basis).
The 24-hour news cycle doesn’t care about that though, because it is fear and panic that grab viewers and sell ads.
The Rational Optimist Is an interesting read that delves how the world has been improving and why. I recommend it.