Rational Optimist


Read about our pricing and services

List Price: $26.99

PriceQuantity
$21.591-24
$18.8925-99
$17.54100-499
$17.00500+

Bulk discounts are non-returnable.

Customize It



Hardcover
438 pages
ISBN 9780061452055 Published May 2010
Harper
See all formats


Rational Optimist
How Prosperity Evolves
By Matt Ridley 

Related Blog Posts
The Economist's Books of the Year
Posted Dec. 2, 2010 11:17 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

The Economist is surely one of the best, if not the best, weekly publications running. Oddly, though, considering its title, it put only three books in the economics & business category of this year's "page turners"—while there are ten in politics & current affairs and eight in history. I guess that's not too odd, considering this is coming from a magazine that calls itself a newspaper, a newspaper that almost never carries a byline on its articles and essays. But, while The Economist refuses to be boxed in by norms, they sure do know a good book when they read one. The economics & business titles chosen were:

I haven't read More Money Than God yet (incidentally, written by "a British journalist who is married to [their] economics editor," a courageous choice there from the editors), but The Big Short and High Financier were two of my favorites of 2010. Also, four of the books in their science & technology category could fit loosely into business. They are:

You can get The Economist's entire list of page turners from the original post, where you'll find brief descriptions of each book.

You can also find a list of Books by Economist writers in 2010 at the site. They do seem to put out a lot of books over there, possibly because their writers want to put their names on something. (I kid, I kid... I love you The Economist.)



The Financial Times & Goldman Sachs Business Book Award: The Longlist
Posted Aug. 9, 2010 7:23 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

The longlist for The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year was announced this morning. And just as interesting as the list itself, which includes a novel this year, is the fact that Lloyd Blankfein is recusing himself as a judge. He is doing so because "a number of books on this year’s longlist address various aspects of the financial crisis," a crisis Blankfein was intimately involved in as CEO of Goldman Sachs. Hi is, in fact, a subject in some of those books—including Too Big to Fail, which we named the 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year* in 2009.

The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs longlist for 2010 is:

*A reminder to authors and publishers out there, we are now accepting submissions for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards for 2010.



Friday Links
Posted July 16, 2010 11:27 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

➻ My favorite release of the month so far has been Diary of a Very Bad Year. It's a series of interviews (an entire book's worth) Keith Gessen of n+1 did with one "HFM," an anonymous hedge-fund mananger, from late September 2007 to the late summer of 2009. It's an insider's account of the financial meltdown from someone who saw finance not as a money-grabbing proposition out of college, but as an "intellectual vocation." n+1 posted a number of excerpts in advance of the book's release, the most intriguing of which (to me) was Bullies and Bankers.

➻ Another n+1 editor, Chad Harbach, was interviewed by Matt Robison at The Morning News with a great group of writers about the convergence of sports and literature, sports literature, and how "Leigh Montville, it turned out, was never a woman." It's reading that begets more reading, as each of the writers talks about their favorite sports pieces. Strangely, the finest piece of sports writing ever put to page, John Updike's Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, was not mentioned.

➻ Bob Sutton has thoroughly covered the topic of swearing recently, and he summed it all up very fecking nicely in the post on The subtleties of strategic swearing. It contains links to many of his previous posts and podcasts on the issue, which will leave you more thoughtful on the topic than you probably need to be, especially in this day and age when you have characters like Hugh MacLeod and Julien Smith out there swearing casually as a mother[lover]. Maybe they're just really strategic?

➻ Shelf Awareness did a great job this morning of quickly Dissecting Amazon, and references a Milwaukee Journal Sentinal article on the affect "everyone's collective love affair with Amazon" has had on local bookstores—in particular the company we grew up in, Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops.

➻ Friend of the company and University Press Book Traveler John Ecklund has written an interesting history of our that company—one seen from his perspective as an employee at Schwartz. Part 1 focuses on a our late owner David Schwartz's shocking experiment with a crassly commercial business book promotion, and it's even more shocking success. Part 2 discusses the hiring of our peerless leader, Jack Covert, to follow up and expand that success:

Enter Jack Covert. Jack and his wife Ann were proprietors of “Jack’s Record Rack,” the legendary music store on the east side of Milwaukee. [...]

I don’t think Jack or David really knew for sure that the idea of selling big quantities of books to corporations would ever really bear fruit, nor how long the experiment to find out would have to last. But there was a willingness to commit resources and tweak the program until it got traction.

It's now 25 years later, and we're still experimenting.

➻ At the conjunction of business books and the music industry (as Jack is in the history above), we have The Lefsetz Letter ("First in Music Analysis"), which reviewed Rework recently, relating the book's lessons to the music industry, and an Indie Launch Pad interview with Scott Stratten, author of the soon-to-be-released Unmarketing.

➻ Inder Sidhu, author of Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today's Profits and Drives Tomorrow's Growth, wrote about How to give up power and get more done for The Washington Post this week. He details how, "Instead of choosing between a traditional command-and-control management model, or a more egalitarian one, smart business leaders are embracing the power of the 'and.'"

➻ John Tierney had an interesting column in the Times late last month about Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind, and how—while it's no good for reading comprehension—it may be very good for the creative process (if you're able to keep track of where it's wandered).

➻ James Mathewson, editor-in-chief of ibm.com, wrote recently about How to Measure the Value of Editors, how a simple edit turned us from subjects to citizens, and how "well edited pages do 30 percent better than unedited pages."

➻ Matt Ridley, the author of the intelligent and provocative Rational Optimist, was a speaker at this month's TED Conference. His talk was about When ideas have sex and how all that really matters is how intelligent we are collectively.

➻ Susan Orlean wrote a hilarious piece in The New Yorker about the tremendous turnover in the publishing industry and how it has affected her as an author.

➻ It's a good weekend to be in, or come to, Milwaukee. Well, it always is, but this weekend is especially nice, because it's Radio Summer Camp!

➻ Fans of the suddenly ubiquitous Old Spice commercials might enjoy the College Library Parody.

➻ "I warned you. With mogwai comes much responsibility. But you didn't listen."




More on this book

Lists & Bestsellers