Book of the week: The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

(Harper, 448 pages, $26.99)

Author Matt Ridley has hit on an idea that feels like the “grand unifying theory” of human history, said John Tierney in The New York Times. This former editor for The Economist argues that it wasn’t our big brains, our development of language, or even our willingness to help one another that made our species uniquely successful. Instead, the key event came around 80,000 years ago, when a pair of our ancestors agreed to exchange one object for another. Only Homo sapiens dreamed up trade, Ridley says, and trade multiplies our individual capacity for innovation in a way that has produced a long, unstoppable climb in living conditions. He acknowledges the hazards of global warming, but is willing to bet that, by the year 2110, we’ll have found sources of energy that are safer for the environment and help compensate for the world’s dwindling oil reserves.

Ridley “makes as strong a case as I’ve seen” for such hopefulness, said Felix Salmon in BarnesandNobleReview.com. We’ve gradually been developing cleaner energy, he explains, and he’s confident that we’ll come up with something even better before the situation gets too dire. Where he gets “a little bit too caught up in his optimism” is in predicting that life exactly a century from now will certainly be better than it is today in all sorts of ways—with lower poverty rates, less violence, and a larger human population happily occupying less land than we do now. His very own thesis about history stresses that there are extended lulls and even retreats in human progress, and the next 100 years could be one of those bad times. You’d think that Ridley, of all people, would have learned the value of short-term pessimism: A few years ago, he was chairman of the U.K. bank Northern Rock, which had to be bailed out by his government.

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Put aside Ridley’s overabundance of faith in free markets, though, and he gets “the big things” right, said The Economist. In fact, “the liberating forces of globalization and Google-ization” make it all the more likely that we will be able to overcome today’s big challenges, as those forces have vastly multiplied our special capacity for collective innovation. When the first trade between humans took place, the species stumbled upon a remarkably efficient way to get the most from the separate abilities and knowledge of each participant. It’s still our greatest trick.