The Rational Optimist (51 page)

p. 268 ‘chronically entrepreneurial’. Audretsch, D.B. 2007.
The Entrepreneurial Society
. Oxford University Press.

p. 268 ‘laying the foundations for their global dominance at the expense of precisely the big companies dirigistes admired’. Postrel, V. 1998.
The Future and Its Enemies
. Free Press.

p. 269 ‘A large study by the OECD’. Quoted in Kealey, T. 2007.
Sex, Science and Profits
. William Heinemann.

p. 270 ‘a recent survey of forty-six major inventions’. Agarwal, R. and Gort, M. 2001. First mover advantage and the speed of competitive entry: 1887–1986.
Journal of Law and Economics
44:161–78.

p. 270 ‘sired by the bicycle out of the horse carriage’. Rolt, L.T.C. 1967.
The Mechanicals
. Heinemann.

p. 271 ‘cross-fertilisation ... does ... happen between species of bacteria, 80 per cent of whose genes have been borrowed from other species’. Dagan, T., Artzy-Randrup, Y. and Martin, W. 2008. Modular networks and cumulative impact of lateral transfer in prokaryote genome evolution.
PNAS
105:10039–44: ‘At least 81 +- 15% of the genes in each genome studied were involved in lateral gene transfer at some point in their history.’

p. 271 ‘able to produce only sterile offspring’. The sterility of hybrids was a problem that greatly exercised Charles Darwin, chiefly because it was being claimed by some American anthropologists that black people were a separately created species, which justified slavery, and even that hybrids between blacks and whites were sterile. See Desmond, A. and Moore, J. 2009.
Darwin’s Sacred Cause
. Penguin.

p. 271 ‘Technologies emerge from the coming together of existing technologies into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.’ Arthur, B. and Polak, W. 2004.
The Evolution of Technology within a Simple Computer Model
. Santa Fe working paper 2004-12-042.

p. 271 ‘Henry Ford once candidly admitted’. Evans, H. 2004.
They Made America
. Little, Brown.

p. 272 ‘in the historian George Basalla’s words’. Basalla, G. 1988.
The Evolution of Technology
. Cambridge University Press.

p. 272 ‘an invention looking for a job’. http://laserstars.org/history/ruby.html.

p. 273 ‘Eric von Hippel, incidentally, practises what he preaches’. Von Hippel, E. 2005.
Democratizing Innovation
. MIT Press.

p. 274 ‘as Geoffrey Miller reminds us’. Miller, G. 2009.
Spent
. Heinemann.

p. 275 ‘full-scale trebuchets capable of tossing pianos more than 150 yards’.
Wall Street Journal
, 15 January 1992.

p. 276 ‘It was Paul Romer’s great achievement in the 1990s to rescue the discipline of economics from the century-long cul-de-sac into which it had driven by failing to incorporate innovation.’ Warsh, D. 2006.
Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations
. W.W. Norton.

p. 276 ‘As Paul Romer puts it’. Romer, P. 1995.
Beyond the Knowledge Worker
. Wordlink.

Chapter 9

p. 279 ‘I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair’. Speech by John Stuart Mill to the London Debating Society on ‘perfectibility’, 2 May 1828.

p. 279 US air pollutant emissions graph. US Environmental Protection Agency.

p. 280 ‘the economist Julian Simon tried it in the 1990s’. Simon, J. 1996.
The Ultimate Resource 2
. Princeton University Press.

p. 280 ‘Bjørn Lomborg tried it in the 2000s’. Lomborg, B. 2001.
The Sceptical Environmentalist
. Cambridge University Press.

p. 280 ‘said Hayek’. Hayek, F.A. 1960.
The Constitution of Liberty
. Routledge.

p. 280 ‘As Warren Meyer has put it’. http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2005/02/in_praise_of_ro.html.

p. 280 ‘The environmentalist Lester Brown, writing in 2008’. Brown, L. 2008.
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilisation
. Earth Policy Institute.

p. 283 ‘Pessimists have always been ubiquitous and have always been feted’. Herman, A. 1997.
The Idea of Decline in Western History
. The Free Press.

p. 283 ‘wrote Adam Smith at the start of the industrial revolution’. Smith, A. 1776.
The Wealth of Nations
.

pp. 283–4 ‘cried the
Quarterly Review
’. Smiles, S. 1857.
The Life of George Stephenson, Railways Engineer
. John Murray.

p. 284 ‘Dr Arnold was more enlightened’. Quoted in Williams, A. 2008.
The Enemies of Progress
. Societas.

p. 284 ‘Robert Southey had just published a book’. Southey, R. 1829.
Sir Thomas More: Or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society
. John Murray.

p. 285 ‘the modern philosopher John Gray’. Quoted in Postrel, V. 1998.
The Future and Its Enemies
. Free Press.

p. 285 ‘Thomas Babington Macaulay’. Macaulay, T.B. 1830. Review of Southey’s Colloquies on Society.
Edinburgh Review
, January 1830.

p. 286 ‘in his
History of England
’. Macaulay, T.B. 1848.
History of England from the Accession of James the Second
.

p. 287 ‘said Macaulay in 1830’. Macaulay, T.B. 1830. Review of Southey’s Colloquies on Society.
Edinburgh Review
, January 1830.

p. 288 ‘a book called
Degeneration
, by the German Max Nordau’. Quoted in Leadbetter, C. 2002.
Up the Down Escalator: Why the Global Pessimists Are Wrong
. Viking.

p. 288 ‘said Winston Churchill in a memo to the prime minister’. Asquith papers, December 1910, quoted in Addison, P. 1992.
Churchill on the Home Front 1900–1955
. Jonathan Cape.

p. 288 ‘Theodore Roosevelt was even more explicit’.
The Works of Theodore Roosevelt
, National Edition, XII, p. 201.

p. 288 ‘as Isaiah Berlin put it’. Quoted in Byatt, I. 2008. Weighing the present against the future: the choice and use of discount rates in the analysis of climate change. In
Climate Change Policy: Challenging the Activists
. Institute of Economic Affairs.

p. 289 ‘Oswald Spengler in 1923 in his bestselling polemic
The Decline of the West
’. Spengler, O. 1923.
The Decline of the West
. George Allen & Unwin.

p. 290 ‘the opening words of Agenda 21’. Preamble to Agenda 21, 1992.

p. 290 ‘in the words of Charles Leadbetter’. Leadbetter, C. 2002.
Up the Down Escalator: Why the Global Pessimists Are Wrong
. Viking.

p. 291 ‘groaned the wealthy environmentalist Edward Goldsmith’. Quoted in Postrel, V. 1998.
The Future and Its Enemies
. Free Press.

p. 291 ‘in the words of the Prince of Wales’. HRH Prince of Wales 2000. The civilized society.
Temenos Academy Review
. See http://www.prince ofwales.gov.uk/speechesandarticles/an_article_by_hrh_the_prince_of_wales_titled_the_civilised_s_93.html000.

p. 291 ‘says a professor of psychology’. Barry Schwartz, quoted in Easterbrook, G. 2003.
The Progress Paradox
. Random House.

p. 291 ‘This notion dates from Herbert Marcuse’. Saunders, P. 2007. Why capitalism is good for the soul.
Policy Magazine
23:3–9.

p. 291 ‘the poet Hesiod was nostalgic for a lost golden age’. Hesiod,
Works and Days
II.

p. 292 ‘Plato, who deplored writing as a destroyer of memorising’. Barron, D. 2009.
A Better Pencil
. Oxford University Press.

p. 292 ‘scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Orange’. John Cornwell. Is technology ruining our children?
The Times
, 27 April 2008.

p. 292 ‘The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’. Phillips, A. and Taylor, B. 2009.
On Kindness
. Hamish Hamilton. Excerpted in
The Guardian
, 3 January 2009.

p. 293 ‘Bill McKibben’s best-selling dirge of 1989’. McKibben, W. 1989.
The End of Nature
. Random House.

p. 293 ‘Robert Kaplan told the world in 1994’. www.theatlantic.com/doc/199402/anarchy.

p. 293 ‘our stolen future’. Colburn, T., Dumanoski, D. and Myers, J.P. 1996.
Our Stolen Future
. Dutton. See Breithaupt, H. 2004.
A Cause without a Disease
. EMBO Reports 5:16–18.

p. 293 ‘Jared Diamond fell under the spell of fashionable pessimism’. Diamond, J. 1995.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
. Radius.

p. 294 ‘Martin Rees in his book’. Rees, M. 2003.
Our Final Century
. Heinemann.

p. 294 ‘what Greg Easterbrook calls’. Easterbrook, G. 2003.
The Progress Paradox
. Random House.

p. 294 ‘People ... tend to assume that they will live longer, stay married longer and travel more than they do’. Gilbert, D. 2007.
Stumbling on Happiness
. Harper Press.

p. 294 ‘Dane Stangler calls this’. Stangler, D., personal communication.

p. 294 ‘people much more viscerally dislike losing a sum of money than they like winning the same sum’. McDermott, R., Fowler, J.H. and Smirnov, O. 2008. On the evolutionary origin of prospect theory preferences.
The Journal of Politics
70:335–50.

p. 294 ‘pessimism genes might quite literally be commoner than optimism genes’. Fox, E., Ridgewell, A. and Ashwin, C. 2009. Looking on the bright side: biased attention and the human serotonin transporter gene.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
(doi:10.1098/rspb.2008.1788).

p. 295 ‘the 7-repeat version of the DRD4 gene accounts for 20 per cent of financial risk taking in men’. Dreber, A. et al. 2009. The 7R polymorphism in the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4) is associated with financial risk taking in men.
Evolution and Human Behavior
(in press).

p. 295 ‘The day I was writing a first draft of this paragraph, the BBC reported’. 1 May 2008.

p. 295 ‘how the
New York Times
reported the reassuring news in 2009 that world temperature had not risen for a decade’.
New York Times
, 23 September 2009.

p. 296 ‘a new theory suggests that cosmic rays are a bigger cause of the Antarctic ozone hole than chlorine is’. Lu, Q.-B. 2009. Correlation between cosmic rays and ozone depletion.
Physical Review Letters
102:118501–9400.

p. 297 ‘Rachel Carson, influenced by Hueper, set out in her book
Silent Spring
(1962) to terrify her readers’. Carson, R. 1962.
Silent Spring
. Houghton Mifflin.

p. 297 ‘other causes of childhood death were declining faster’. Bailey, R. 2002. Silent Spring at 40.
Reason
, June 2002. http://www.reason.com/news/show/34823.html.

p. 298 ‘wrote the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich in 1971’. Ehrlich, P. 1970.
The Population Bomb.
2nd edition. Buccaneer Press.

p. 298 ‘Later he was more specific’. Special Earthday edition of
Ramparts
magazine, 1970.

p. 298 ‘both cancer incidence and death rate from cancer fell steadily’. Ames, B.N. and Gold, L.S. 1997. Environmental pollution, pesticides and the prevention of cancer: misconceptions.
FASEB Journal
11:1041–52.

p. 298 ‘Richard Doll and Richard Peto had concluded that age-adjusted cancer rates were falling’. Doll, R. and Peto, R. 1981. The causes of cancer: quantitative estimates of avoidable risks of cancer in the United States today.
Journal of the National Cancer Institute
66:1193–1308.

p. 298 ‘As Bruce Ames famously demonstrated in the late 1990s’. Ames, B.N. and Gold, L.S. 1997. Environmental pollution, pesticides, and the prevention of cancer: misconceptions.
FASEB Journal
11:1041–52.

p. 299 ‘Ames says’. Bruce Ames, personal communication.

p. 299 ‘sparing, targeted use of DDT against malarial mosquitoes can be done without any such threat to wildlife’. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/bate200406030904.asp; http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10176.