The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. Matt Ridley

sum of money. In the same vein, Kelly Cobb of Drexel University set out to make a man’s suit entirely from materials produced within 100 miles of her home. It took twenty artisans a total of 500 man-hours to achieve it and even then they had to get 8 per cent of the materials from outside the 100-mile radius. If they worked for another year, they could get it all from within the limit, argued Cobb. To put it plainly, local sourcing multiplied the cost of a cheap suit roughly a hundred-fold.

      As I write this, it is nine o’clock in the morning. In the two hours since I got out of bed I have showered in water heated by North Sea gas, shaved using an American razor running on electricity made from British coal, eaten a slice of bread made from French wheat, spread with New Zealand butter and Spanish marmalade, then brewed a cup of tea using leaves grown in Sri Lanka, dressed myself in clothes of Indian cotton and Australian wool, with shoes of Chinese leather and Malaysian rubber, and read a newspaper made from Finnish wood pulp and Chinese ink. I am now sitting at a desk typing on a Thai plastic keyboard (which perhaps began life in an Arab oil well) in order to move electrons through a Korean silicon chip and some wires of Chilean copper to display text on a computer designed and manufactured by an American firm. I have consumed goods and services from dozens of countries already this morning. Actually, I am guessing at the nationalities of some of these items, because it is almost impossible to define some of them as coming from any country, so diverse are their sources.

      More to the point, I have also consumed minuscule fractions of the productive labour of many dozens of people. Somebody had to drill the gas well, install the plumbing, design the razor, grow the cotton, write the software. They were all, though they did not know it, working for me. In exchange for some fraction of my spending, each supplied me with some fraction of their work. They gave me what I wanted just when I wanted it – as if I were the Roi Soleil, Louis XIV, at Versailles in 1700.

      The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.

      But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary…You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.

      You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.

      My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species. ‘In civilized society,’ wrote Adam Smith, an individual ‘stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.’ In Leonard Read’s classic 1958 essay ‘I, Pencil’, an ordinary pencil describes how it came to be made by millions of people, from loggers in Oregon and graphite miners in Sri Lanka to coffee bean growers in Brazil (who supplied the coffee drunk by the loggers). ‘There isn’t a single person in all these millions,’ the pencil concludes, ‘including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how.’ The pencil stands amazed at ‘the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being.’

      This is what I mean by the collective brain. As Friedrich Hayek first clearly saw, knowledge ‘never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’.

      The multiplication of labour

      You are not just consuming the labour and resources of others. You are consuming others’ inventions, too. A thousand entrepreneurs and scientists devised the intricate dance of photons and electrons by which your television works. The cotton you wear was spun and woven by machines of a type whose original inventors are long-dead heroes of the industrial revolution. The bread you eat was first cross-bred by a Neolithic Mesopotamian and baked in a way that was first invented by a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer. Their knowledge is enduringly embodied in machines, recipes and programmes from which you benefit. Unlike Louis, you number among your servants John Logie Baird, Alexander Graham Bell, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Thomas Crapper, Jonas Salk and myriad assorted other inventors. For you get the benefit of their labours, too, whether they are dead or alive.

      The point of all this cooperation is to make (Adam Smith again) ‘a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work’. It is a curious fact that in return for this cornucopia of service, you produce only one thing. That is to say, having consumed the labour and embodied discoveries of thousands of people, you then produce and sell whatever it is you do at work – haircuts, ball bearings, insurance advice, nursing, dog walking. But each of those thousands of people who work ‘for’ you is equally monotonously employed. Each produces one thing. That is what the word ‘job’ means: it refers to the simplified, singular production to which you devote your working hours. Even those who have several paying jobs – say, freelance short-story writer/neuroscientist, or computer executive/photographer – have only two or three different occupations at most. But they each consume hundreds, thousands, of things. This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production. Make one thing, use lots. The self-sufficient gardener, or his self-sufficient peasant or hunter-gatherer predecessor (who is, I shall argue, partly a myth in any case), is in contrast defined by his multiple production and simple consumption. He makes not just one thing, but