An idea walks into a bar. She meets another idea. They get
together, and nine months later (or maybe it’s nine minutes or
seconds? It’s not clear how it works with ideas), a new idea is
born. A baby idea with the best traits of both parents.

When this happens a lot, everyone gets smarter and the world
gets better.

Did you know that ideas have sex?

It’s a weird concept, but the more I think about it, the more
right it seems. I learned it from British journalist Matt Ridley, a
recent
guest on my Fox Business show.

Ridley, author of The Rational
Optimist, says the reason life gets better is that ideas
have sex.

“Ideas spread through trade,” he told me. “And when they meet,
they can mate, and you can produce combinations of different ideas.
I think a good example is a camera pill, which takes a picture of
your insides on the way through. It came about (during) a
conversation between a gastroenterologist and a guided missile
designer … a process very similar to sex in biology, because
through sex, genes meet and recombine, and you get new combinations
of genes. That’s what causes innovation in biology, and innovation
in culture.”

And life improves.

“Our living standards have shot up in my lifetime. The average
income of the average person, corrected for inflation, is three
times what it was when I was born (in 1958). And life span is 30
percent longer.”

This didn’t happen because of central planning. It’s the
spontaneous market generated from free individuals that sets and
keeps it in motion.

Ridley goes on to argue that even sex between the ideas of dumb
people produces better results than those of a brilliant central
planner.

“If you look at human history … lots of people in a room who
are talking to each other, however stupid they are, can achieve a
lot more than a lot of clever people in the room who never talk to
each other. So it’s not individual intelligence that counts in how
well a society works. It’s how well people communicate and exchange
ideas with each other.”

In light of this, it’s not hard to understand why Ridley calls
himself a rational optimist. He reminds me the late, great
economist Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate
Resource, who for years stood virtually alone in
explaining the benefits of population growth, free exchange, and
the mixing of ideas.

“I was fed up with the pessimists,” Ridley explained. “When I
was a student in the 1970s, the grown-ups told me that the future
of the world was bleak, that the oil was running out, that the
population explosion was unstoppable, that famine was inevitable. I
feel kind of cross that nobody said anything optimistic to me about
how these resources might not run out. They might become more
abundant because of human ingenuity. They might actually get
cheaper rather than more expensive and that it might be possible
for us to live higher living standards and actually do less damage
to the environment as we do so, that the air might get cleaner, the
rivers might get cleaner!

“All of these things have happened. We’ve got healthier,
happier, cleaner, kinder, cleverer, more peaceful and, indeed, more
equal, if you look at the picture globally over that time.”

In a debate, Bill Gates pushed back against Ridley’s optimism.
Gates argued that worrying about the worst case can help drive a
solution.