How long does it take to read The Rational Optimist?
How Prosperity Evolves
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley takes about 8 hours 2 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 8 hours 2 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2010. 438 pages, about 120,450 words.
17 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 23 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 8 hours 2 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 1 minute |
The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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.
Subjects: Wealth, Optimism, Practical reason, History, Nonfiction, Reason
