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The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves   作者：Matt Ridley   出版日期：2011 / 04 / 29   出版社：HarperCollins   ISBN : 9780007374816   原價：NT 710元   售價：NT 568元

內容簡介

Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than 6 billion, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years: calories; vitamins; clean water; machines; privacy; the means to travel faster than we can run, and the ability to communicate over longer distances than we can shout. Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous. In this original, optimistic book, Matt Ridley puts forward his surprisingly simple answer to how humans progress, arguing that we progress when we trade and we only really trade productively when we trust each other. The Rational Optimist will do for economics what Genome did for genomics and will show that the answer to our problems, imagined or real, is to keep on doing what we've been doing for 10,000 years – to keep on changing.

一萬年以前，世界總人口不足一千萬， 而如今卻超過了六十億，其中99%的人口相比其石器時代的祖先們吃的更好了，住的更舒適了，也玩的更豐富了，醫療條件自不必說。人類生活必需品的可用性在過去的一萬年間不斷發展，尤其是最近的兩百年，出現加速的趨勢。 無論是食物、水、營養物質還是交通與通訊工具，都變得比以前要好得多。 然而，奇怪的是，不管這些東西怎麼升級換代，人們始終認為未來會充肆著無盡的災難。在本書中，馬特·裡德利描繪人類是任何進化的，同時也指出貿易是推動人類進化的動力，也只有在相互信任的前提下，貿易才能.........。