In this Top 5 video, John goes through some of Matt Ridley's biggest reasons why we should all be rational optimists. Ridley is an expert on the topic because he literally wrote the book on it. Besides The Rational Optimist, he's most recently written Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 along with co-author Alina Chan and has had a varied career in finance, journalism, and the House of Lords.
Ridley believes that commerce, technology, and innovation are constantly improving the world and are cause for a positive outlook about our future, as they inevitably increase human prosperity. He points out that the most extreme forms of poverty are in rapid decline and large-scale human suffering from famine, which once was commonplace, is almost entirely extinct. Most controversially, Ridley argues that climate change is not the apocalyptic threat it is often purported to be, but a manageable challenge like any other.
Here are the Top 5 lessons John learned from Matt Ridley about rational optimism.