I am not a fan of “airport nonfiction”: the kind of book featured at airport bookstalls and purchased by intelligent young businesspeople to while away a cross-country flight. This genre has brought wealth and fame to Malcolm Gladwell (Blink), Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan), the Levitt–Dubner partnership (Freakonomics), and others. Jolly good luck to them all. I’m just happier with a novel, biography, or history book.
An airport nonfiction book is built around a single big idea. By thirty pages in I have grasped the idea and found it neither original nor interesting. Then . . . oh, the guy has three hundred more pages of examples and case studies? Uh . . .
The thing can be done well or badly, though, and Matt Ridley does it decently well. His big idea is the one in his title: that most of the change that takes place in the world is “bottom-up,” not “top-down.” We have a strong predisposition to attribute everything that happens, in both the human and the natural world, to agents: generals win battles, tycoons guide their businesses, nations are shaped by political leaders, new species are created by an Intelligent Designer, the Self—an invisible homunculus located somewhere behind the eyeballs—directs our actions.
Ridley wants to tell us that while agency might occasionally be in play—it would be hard to deny it in the case of, say, the D-Day landings—it is much more often the case
