In this Oxford TED talk, Matt Ridley lays out some of the ideas in his new book The Rational Optimist.
"Ideas Having Sex" is Ridley's intuitive way of expressing evolutionary progression in markets. The mating and subsequent success or failure of ideas is a close analog to the traits genes express in biological systems.
Ridley reminds us that Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage not only works over and over again, but builds and reinforces upon itself -- unleashing incredible specialization (and prosperity).
Ridley even references Leonard Reed's I, Pencil story, famously described by Milton Friedman here:
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