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Matt Ridley
Food that can be stored can be traded and trade leads to democracy My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on grain, fruit and the economic underpinnings of democracy. When I was young, I had a mug on a shelf in my bedroom, and on it was a poem about a […]
Giving money for lobbying for money
Matt Ridley
The circular nature of some subsidies Update: the Taxpayers’ Alliance has a major report on this issue, by Matthew Sinclair, which concluded that Over £37 million was spent on taxpayer funded lobbying and political campaigning in 2007-08. That is nearly as much as the £38.9 million all three major political parties combined spent through their central […]
Julian Simon on rational optimism
Matt Ridley
Master Resource reposts Julian Simon’s wonderful and inspiring message of 1 May 1995. For good and bad, it has aged not at all: “EARTH DAY: SPIRITUALLY UPLIFTING, INTELLECTUALLY DEBASED” – by Julian L. Simon April 22 [1995] marks the 25th anniversary of Earth Day. Now as then its message is spiritually uplifting. But all […]
Nobody mentioned the Spanish Inquisition
Matt Ridley
Lord (Chris) Patten, new chairman of the BBC Trust, has been sounding off, militantly, at the militancy of atheists. He scored a bit of an own goal, though, with this remark: “It is curious that atheists have proved to be so intolerant of those who have a faith,” he said. “Their books would be a lot […]
Matt Ridley
Why do we like springtime so much? Update: The `hungry time’ was even later in the year than I said. See below. A meditation on the English spring I wrote for yesterday’s Times: I live on the 55th degree north parallel. If I had gone round the world along that line last week, through Denmark, Lithuania, […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on the regulation of genetic testing I just took a detailed genetic test by sending some spit to a firm in California and looking up the results on the Net. It seems I’m probably descended from a peculiarly fecund fourth-century Irish king called Niall […]
Matt Ridley
Economics for scientists In my experience, scientists often have a reflexive contempt for economics. Speaking as a scientist who came to understand economics after leaving academia, I find this attitude frustrating, because I see how they miss the fundamentally bottom-up, emergent, evolving nature of human society that the field of economics strives to understand […]
Matt Ridley
A nineteenth century blast of rational optimism Peter Risdon writes to draw to my attention what Mark Twain wrote to Walt Whitman on this 70th birthday: What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the […]
Matt Ridley
Getting cause and consequence confused is a surprisingly common error in science Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Scientists like to remind us not to confuse cause and effect. But they’re not immune from making that mistake themselves. Last week, for example, a flurry of sociological headlines emanating from a conference […]
Matt Ridley
The BBC has plumbed new depths with its recent reporting on shale gas. Its reporter Richard Black wrote a story about the old Cornell University claim that shale gas production emits more greenhouse-warming gases than coal. I happen to know quite a bit about this study and I know that it is based on very extreme […]
