I make no secret of being a huge fan of Matt Ridley’s body of work, and his lat­est addi­tion to this, The Ratio­nal Opti­mist, seems like a wel­come addition.

A won­der­ful sum­mary of the book’s main theme–that inno­va­tion and the spread­ing of the­o­ries and ideas is the key to a pros­per­ous future and we should be opti­mistic for what lies ahead because of this–has been writ­ten by John Tier­ney, with a nice look at one rea­son why inno­va­tion and its com­pan­ions are impor­tant for progress:

“For­get wars, reli­gions, famines and poems for the moment,” Dr. Rid­ley writes. “This is history’s great­est theme: the metas­ta­sis of exchange, spe­cial­iza­tion and the inven­tion it has called forth, the ‘cre­ation’ of time.”

You can appre­ci­ate the time­sav­ing ben­e­fits through a mea­sure devised by the econ­o­mist William D. Nord­haus: how long it takes the aver­age worker to pay for an hour of read­ing light. In ancient Baby­lon, it took more than 50 hours to pay for that light from a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, it took more than six hours of work to pay for it from a tal­low can­dle. Today, thanks to the count­less spe­cial­ists pro­duc­ing elec­tric­ity and com­pact flu­o­res­cent bulbs, it takes less than a second.