Economics · Similar reads

Books like The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley is about human progress, trade and exchange, innovation. If that's what drew you in, here are 6 books that share its DNA — each summarized on Superbook, and ready to chat with in the app.

  1. Enlightenment Now
    Enlightenment Now

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    Enlightenment Now

    Steven Pinker · Science

    Enlightenment Now is Steven Pinker's argument that the ideals of the Enlightenment — reason, science, humanism, and progress — have been responsible for a dramatic and continuing improvement in human wellbeing across virtually every measurable dimension, and that these ideals are under threat from counter-Enlightenment movements on both the left and the right.

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  2. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World
    Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World

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    Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World

    Hans Rosling · Economics

    Hans Rosling spent decades testing audiences of students, professors, journalists, and politicians on basic facts about global development — child mortality rates, literacy, extreme poverty, life expectancy — and found consistently that even well-educated, well-intentioned people performed worse than chance.

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  3. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
    Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

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    Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

    Yuval Noah Harari · History

    Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

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  4. Guns, Germs, and Steel
    Guns, Germs, and Steel

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    Guns, Germs, and Steel

    Jared Diamond · Science

    Guns, Germs, and Steel is Jared Diamond's attempt to answer a question posed to him by a Papua New Guinean politician named Yali: why did Europeans end up with so much cargo — wealth, technology, power — while other peoples had comparatively little?

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  5. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
    Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

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    Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

    Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson · Economics

    Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that the fundamental difference between rich and poor countries is not geography, culture, or bad luck.

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  6. 100 to 1 in the Stock Market
    100 to 1 in the Stock Market

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    100 to 1 in the Stock Market

    Thomas Phelps · Economics

    100 to 1 in the Stock Market, published in 1972 by Thomas Phelps, is a study of the conditions under which stocks return one hundred times an investor's original investment — and an argument that such stocks are more common and more identifiable in advance than most investors believe.

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