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Life Arts    H4'ed 7/15/17

Review of Matt Ridley's Evolution of Everything

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Don Smith
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In The Horrifying Hidden Story Behind Drug Company Profits and The Truth about the Drug Companies, a former Editor in Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine writes of the drug industry, "Instead of being an engine of innovation, it is a vast marketing machine. Instead of being a free market success story, it lives off government-funded research and monopoly rights."

Ridley argues against the Great Man view of history, according to which history is largely driven by te actions of geniuses and heroes. Instead, Ridley believes, changes emerge bottom-up. Numerous discoveries and inventions were made by multiple people at abut the same time. Newton and Leibniz invented calculus at about the same time. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace came up with the theory of evolution at about the same time.

Before google's search engine, there were numerous other search engines available: Alta Vista, Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, etc.

"Music, too, evolves. To a surprising extent, it changes under its own steam, with musicians carried along for the ride."

"Simultaneous discovery and invention mean that both patents and Nobel prizes are fundamentally unfair things." If so, then large profits are unfair too.

If Ridley is correct that many inventions are due to societal forces and shared knowledge, isn't that a reason for high taxation and for "spreading the wealth" that emerges from technology?

He says that private schools were thriving in the 1800s but were unfairly displaced by government schools.

Ridley is critical of abusive patent law. Ridley acknowledges that corporations do abuse government power to enhance their wealth.

He says that governments do more harm than good. He ignores the great success of Scandinavian countries and Denmark, as well as the success stories like Singapore, where prosperity came top-down. And he ignores the historically large role of the U.S. government in many technologies and providing services that corporations depend on. (Not to mention the bailouts!)

The final chapter, Evolution of the Internet, celebrates the decentralized and often open-source nature of the Internet: Wikipedia, citizen bloggers, and photo-sharing democratized journalism.

Ridley speculates that the technology behind bitcoin "could radically decentralize society itself, getting rid of the need for banks, governments, even companies, and politicians". Imagine in the future summoning a taxi that not only has no driver, but that belongs to a computer network, not to a human being." Decentralized institutions are immune to corruption -- unless there is insufficient government to control monopoly and crime. "The big-government model that threatens to bankrupt and bully us is not just unafforable; it is also increasingly impractical."

Ridley is a conservative intellectual, a rare species. He makes a good case for bottom-up libertarianism, but the book is imbalanced. Progressives need to fight such libertarian thinking. Government can be and often is a source of good. We need to fix government so that it serves the people, and not the rich. Medicare for All. Social Security. Public Education. Progressive taxation. Regulation. Environmentalism. All these depend on top-down designs. In fact, both good and bad ideas emerge both bottom-up and top-down.

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Democratic Precinct Committee Officer, activist, writer, and programmer. My op-ed pieces have appeared in the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and elsewhere. See http://WALiberals.org and http://ProgressiveMemes.org for my (more...)
 

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