Mini-Book Review — Ridley — The Rational Optimist

Ridley, Matt, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Harper Collins, New York, 2010. 438 pp.

Matt Ridley is a well-known British science writer who, in recent years, has specialized in writing books for the general public on new research in biology … evolutionary biology, genomics, plus a biography of Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA.

For well over a decade I’ve enjoyed his books and been very impressed with the quality of his writing, so “on spec” I put a library hold on Ridley’s latest without paying much attention to what it was about. That decision turned out to be a wonderful piece of serendipity. I’ve been reading about European “trading republics” (ancient and modern) for a few years, and trying to assemble an amateur theory about how economic dynamism and technological innovation follow, or are reinforced by, republican values. Whether Athens, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Boston, or New York and Montreal, trade under republican regimes creates massive relative wealth and huge leaps in human knowledge and standards of living.

Now Matt Ridley looks at the innate human capacity for “exchange” … and how that unique capacity affected the course of prehistory, the introduction of agriculture and “civilization,” and more latterly, the shape of the industrial revolution and the modern world. Underlying the politics of republicanism, and individual freedom, we can see the human appetite for exchange creates persistent economic advantage. Trade flows from comparative advantage, in the words of David Ricardo, and comparative advantage relentlessly rewards more specialized use of the natural environment … from the labor of humans carrying sea shells inland for trade 80,000 years ago, to the labor of domesticated horse and sheep and dogs largely for human benefit, to the use of vast quantities of ancient vegetable matter (in the form of petrochemicals), to extend the efforts of humans out of all proportion. Our species is most prosperous when most specialized, when most dependent on the differentiated talents of thousands of others. We now can live lives like the Sun King, without a retinue of thousands.

In this book I have tried to build on both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin: to interpret human society as the product of a long history of what the philosopher Dan Dennett calls ‘bubble-up’ evolution through natural selection among cultural rather than genetic variations, and as an emergent order generated by an invisible hand of individual transactions, not the product of a top-down determinism. I have tried to show that, just as sex made biological evolution cumulative, so exchange made cultural evolution cumulative and intelligence collective, and that there is therefore an inexorable tide in the affairs of men and women discernible beneath the chaos of their actions. A flood tide, not an ebb tide. p. 350

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Battleships and the Past

It finally arrived!  My copy of “German Battleships 1914-18 (2)” from the fine Osprey series came and I immediately sat down and read through it.  The book is a quick read at 48 pages but it is filled with diagrams, great photos, and detailed drawings of the three major late generation German World War One battleships, the Kaiser, Konig and Bayern classes.

Prior to World War One the British and the Germans engaged in an arms race to build mightier navies, with each side attempting to out-do the other with each succeeding generation of ships.  The ships got larger, more heavily armored, and were armed with larger caliber main armament.  The Kaiser class battleships have the odd turret configurations used in that era; the Konig looks more modern, and the Beyern class has very similar lines to the iconic WW2 Bismark series ships, along with the same caliber armament (15″ guns, in 4 double turrets).

One of the most interesting elements to me is the fact that the Bayern class is so relatively unknown given how powerful and modern they were relative to their WW1 contemporaries.  This is likely due to the fact that the Bayern did not participate in the Battle of Jutland in 1916 which was the seminal act in WW1 fleet battles, for afterwards the focus of the German navy shifted to submarines and unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917.  The wikipedia page for the Bismark series discusses how the Bismark series was derided by one British analyst as just a mildly upgraded Bayern class vessel.

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A Blast From The Past

Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, a lot of successful espionage projects run by the Soviets hinged on a certain type of snobbery.

You can see it most clearly when reading about the Cambridge Five, a spy ring consisting of several British high-bred good-old-boys. Recruited while attending a snooty college, they betrayed their country with elan and enthusiasm. The reason why they managed to get access to sensitive material was because they came from good families, and could use the connections formed during their school days to get jobs in government. Jobs that dealt with intelligence and secret information.

They had sources of sensitive info other than the documents they read while at the office. Other people in the spy game would let their guard down during casual conversation, and let slip some secrets. After all, this was their buddy from their university days! If you can’t trust someone who wears the same school tie, then the world makes no sense at all!

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