WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

My article for Spectator: In search of wisdom about how an officious government reluctantly relaxes its grip after an emergency, I stumbled on a 1948 newsreel clip of Harold Wilson when he was president of the Board of Trade. It’s a glimpse of long-forgotten and brain-boggling complexity in the rationing system. ‘We have taken some […]

I went on The Knowledge Project podcast with Shane Parrish to discuss “writing books about science, the age-old battle between viruses and humans, rational optimism, the difference between innovation and invention, the role of trial and error and the effects of social media on seeing others’ points of view.” It was a wonderful conversation, and […]

My article from Warp News: At a time when the miraculous success of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 has transformed the battle against the pandemic, it is fitting to recall that the general idea behind vaccination was brought to the attention of the western world, not by brilliant and privileged professors, but by a black slave and […]

The WHO has now wasted a year failing to investigate properly the origins of Covid-19 My article for The Telegraph: It is a year ago last week since the World Health Organisation conceded, belatedly, that a pandemic was under way. The organisation’s decisions in early 2020 were undoubtedly influenced by the Chinese government. On 14 […]

Like the Ming empire before it, bureaucratic tyranny is immiserating a beautiful and cultured place My article for The Telegraph: There is something rather apt in the coincidence of an Italian ban on vaccine exports to Australia and the negotiation by Liz Truss, the trade secretary, of lower tariffs on trade with the United States. […]

China may now be the most innovative place on earth, but India may soon replace it as the world’s innovation leader My article for Discourse: Innovation is the “main event” of the modern age. It’s the reason why after millennia of comparative stagnation, the last several hundred years featured sudden, dramatic improvements in technology and […]

This is a more detailed version of the article co-written with Alina Chan on the origin of the virus causing the Covid pandemic which was published in the Telegraph on 6 February. “Viral” by Matt Ridley is coming later this year. Sign up for his newsletter and follow him on Facebook and Twitter to learn […]

The evolution of Covid is not random My article for The Spectator: In the genetic diaspora of an epidemic, there is ferocious competition between strains of virus to get to the next victim first. That leads to apparently purposeful outcomes, as if the virus had a mind. One of the things people find hardest to […]

A team of WHO researchers has arrived in China but won’t investigate the possibility that the coronavirus originated in a lab. My article for the Wall Street Journal, with Dr. Chan: In the first week of January, scientists representing the World Health Organization (WHO) were due to arrive in China to trace the origins of […]

The list of our achievements in biology is extraordinary for a country with just one per cent of the world’s population My latest article, for The Telegraph: Britain probably leads the world in self-criticism. So maybe we don’t always notice when the country leads the world in something a bit more useful. During the pandemic […]