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We overestimate the impact of innovation in the short term but… My Times column on Amara’s Law:   Alongside a great many foolish things that have been said about the future, only one really clever thing stands out. It was a “law” coined by a Stanford University computer scientist and long-time head of the Institute […]

Too many people favour immigration but resist development My Times column on demography, immigration and the building of houses, roads and runways:   The Office for National Statistics says it expects Britain’s population to grow slightly more slowly than it thought three years ago, partly because of lower immigration after Brexit and partly because of […]

Bounty hunting lawyers lie behind a distortion of science My Times column on the scientific and legal scandal behind the attempt to ban a weedkiller.   Bad news is always more newsworthy than good. The widely reported finding that insect abundance is down by 75 per cent in Germany over 27 years was big news, while, […]

New technology may allow regulation by effort rather than quotas My recent Times column on Britain’s opportunity for fisheries reform post Brexit:   A richly abundant sea fish population is one of the great wonders of the world that my generation has rarely seen. Last week I was lucky enough to be aboard a boat […]

Politics is increasingly about motives, not results My Times column on how intentions are taken to matter more than what works:   The curse of modern politics is an epidemic of good intentions and bad outcomes. Policy after policy is chosen and voted on according to whether it means well, not whether it works. And […]

Empirical evidence that free markets make people nicer My Times column on free markets and free trade:   The “ultimatum game” is a fiendish invention of economists to test people’s selfishness. One player is asked to share a windfall of cash with another player, but the entire windfall is cancelled if the second player rejects […]

Censorious students, online witch-hunts, religious dogma vs freedom My Times column on threats to the enlightenment itself: Mel Brooks said last week that comedy is becoming impossible in this censorious age and he never could have made his 1974 film Blazing Saddles today. A recent poll found that 38 per cent of Britons and 70 per cent […]

The harvesting of a hands-free hectare at Harper Adams is a harbinger My recent column in the Times on robots in agriculture:   If you will forgive the outburst of alliteration, the harvesting of a “hands-free hectare” at Harper Adams University has made headlines all around the world, in the technology press as well as […]

Climate policies are doing more harm than good, a moral issue This is the text of a chapter I wrote for a new book entitled Climate Change – The Facts 2017, edited by Jennifer Marohasy. The book is worth buying for Clive James’s chapter alone.   Here is a simple fact about the world today:
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Protection against cyclones is necessary whether climate changes or not My recent Times column on Hurricanes Harvey and Irma:   As Hurricane Irma batters Florida, with Anguilla, Barbuda and Cuba clearing up and Houston drying out after Harvey, it is reasonable to ask whether such tropical cyclones are getting more frequent or fiercer. The answer […]