The diagram interlinks the 2 books by Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist and How Innovation Works as parallel clustered conversations.
The Rational Optimist // Encourages all to look at the future with optimism through supported data of continual progress and change in the human evolutionary timeline.
How Innovation Works // proposes that progress and evolution occur through innovation. Innovation as an evolutionary, ‘recombinant’ process, not revolutionary.
He highlights ‘The Collective mind’ and ‘Exchange’ as the base of all innovation and progress. Arguing that innovation being the most important and least understood conversation especially in the modern times, Matt Ridley, makes highly complex scientific arguments understandable to the average educated reader through stories of innovations around the human evolution timeline and calls the creation of life itself as an innovation; the evolving human anatomy and culture.
Matt Ridley also states that the sustainability of the life of Modern man is the result of the additive effects of Intensive Farming, Mass Production, Shared Economies and various innovations of the modern times. Innovation ‘flourishes’ only through availability, which is the result of global exchange of ideas, goods and services (specialized production, diversified consumption); creation of time as a measure of prosperity.
The continual changing conditions of times make innovation unpredictable in prospect and predictable in retrospect (the infinite improbability drive); the reason for simultaneous inventions (innovation hotspots) across geographies which are exorable, unavoidable and compulsory, which make the ‘individual’ more disposable over the long run, enforcing the idea of the ‘collective’(Amara’s HypeCycle).
