Ramona and I spent the best part of last week on a remote family guest ranch. It is a few hours drive from Bozeman followed by a twelve-mile wagon ride. The ranch was built as a private retreat in the early 1920s and retains original character and charm.

We were there with a few old friends, two members of families who own the ranch, and a small group of wounded warriors with Project Healing Waters. The latter guests were exploring fly-fishing as therapy. I saw new evidence that it’s magic.

Most of the staff has worked at the ranch for years, a few for decades. They more closely resembled the people I logged with forty years ago than academics. It’s easy to imagine why the ranch crew finds their situation so attractive. They are in a stunning place and are appreciated and respected. They have autonomy in completing jobs that require skills and entail physical reality checks.

These are ingredients for satisfaction. Without reality checks, life satisfaction is elusive. Is this why so many “intellectuals” complain about and apologize for America, the world’s most compassionate and successful large-scale social experiment?

The Tea Party movement demonstrates that most middle class people appreciate our progress and fear greater political control. For example, those who observe the Forest Service’s pathetic efforts to clear trails understand the dangers of 18 czars running America.

With my left leg in a cast, fishing, hiking, and riding were precluded at the ranch. This had an advantage; it left many hours to read. Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves captivated my attention. Ridley earned an Oxford Ph.D. in zoology and was the science editor for The Economist. His new work may be the most positive and influential book of this decade. Read it and feel better.

Occasionally, perhaps once every 20 years or so, some wise, public spirited individual produces a volume that transforms the policy debate. For example, in 1984 Charles Murray published Losing Ground, a critique of the welfare state. He argued that the welfare apparatus of the 1960s and 1970s created strong disincentives for people to better their own lives. Instead, it generated a burgeoning, ever suffering underclass. Murray’s book built the foundations for President Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996.

Ridley’s Rational Optimist is more ambitious. He wants to replace the ill-founded pessimistic folklore of the upper middle class with an optimism based on history, data, and logic. He wants to counter the propensity of socially conscious, educated people to exaggerate social and environmental problems and ignore solutions not imposed by political force.

Pessimism is hardly a new phenomenon. In an 1828 London Debating Society speech, John Stuart Mill observed: “[T]he man who despairs when others hope is admired by a large clan of persons as a sage....” Similarly, the great 20th century economist F. A. Hayek noted, “Implicit confidence in the beneficence of progress has come to be regarded as the sign of a shallow mind.”

Among most academics and intellectuals preening at parties, pessimism swamps our history of progress. When one looming catastrophe diminishes or disappears, another is found. The coming ice age of the 1980s is replaced by global warming hysteria. We witness a persistent demand for doom.

In sum, intellectuals and most university people, despair over the human condition and disparage the prospect of progress. Ridley has a diametrically opposed position.

To him, the human race has become a “collective problem solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways.” The data is clear and compelling. Cumulative innovation has “doubled life span, cut child mortality by three-quarters and multiplied per capita income ninefold—world-wide—in little more than a century....”

All this has been driven by ideas interacting and reproducing. The search engine, the mobile phone, and container shipping have made ideas more promiscuous and powerful. Ridley counsels that political corruption and special interests could inhibit the progress that naturally follows. Even optimists agree.