The Flourishing

Humanity’s most spectacular era yet is increasingly within reach. So why are we doing everything we can to hold it back?

The bestselling author of The Rational Optimist delivers a daring vision of the future – one that is potentially dazzling, but only if we stop sleepwalking into self-inflicted decline.

We’re on the brink of a truly spectacular explosion of productivity and prosperity, argues Matt Ridley, thanks to a combination of artificial intelligence, material science and genomic knowledge that is unprecedented in its scope and implications. With characteristic wit and ferocity, he confronts the irrational pessimism that dominates public discourse and examines the bureaucratic bloat, regulatory overreach, ideological superstition and crony capitalism that stand in the way.

Optimistic in conclusion but unsparing in its analysis, The Flourishing is a rousing call to achieve and innovate by refusing to settle for a merely adequate future when a magnificent one is within reach.

Reviews

Praise for Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist:

‘A triumphant blast on the vuvuzela of common sense’ Boris Johnson

‘A glorious defence of our species… a devastating rebuke to humanity's self-haters’ Sunday Times

‘No other book has argued with such brilliance against the automatic pessimism that prevails’ Ian McEwan

‘His theory is, in a way, the glorious offspring that would result if Charles Darwin’s ideas were mated with those of Adam Smith’ Economist

‘Original, clever and controversial’ Guardian

‘As a work of bold historical positivity it is to be welcomed. At every point cheerfulness keeps breaking through’ The Times

About the author

Matt Ridley's books – including The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works and most recently Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (with Alina Chan) – have sold over a million copies, been translated into thirty-one languages and won several awards. In the 1980s as an evolutionary biologist, he studied the mating behaviour of birds. He sat in the House of Lords from 2013 to 2021 and has been a columnist for The Times, Telegraph and Wall Street Journal. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Northumberland.