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Matt Ridley
Why collective guesses outperform experts in certain decisions My Times column on the wisdom of crowds, published the day before election day in the US: ‘In these democratic days, any investigation into the trustworthiness and peculiarities of popular judgments is of interest.” So begins an article entitled Vox Populi, which is not about Donald Trump […]
Poverty, not wealth, is the greater threat to wildlife
Matt Ridley
Why wolves are increasing, lions decreasing and tigers holding steady? My Times column on the surprising correlation between prosperity and improving conservation outcomes: As foxes move into cities and deer, badgers and otters grow ever-more numerous, along with birds such as ospreys, buzzards and red kites, you might be thinking much of Britain’s wildlife is […]
Batteries won’t make renewables into reliables
Matt Ridley
The scale and cost of battery storage for grid power would be huge My Times column on batteries: Batteries are no longer boring. Whether catching fire in Samsung Note 7s, being hailed as the answer to future electricity grids thanks to breakthrough chemical innovation, or being manufactured on a gigantic scale in Elon Musk’s […]
Brexit should mean opening the doors to foreign scientists
Matt Ridley
Polls show the public welcomes skilled migrants such as scientists My recent Times column from 10 October on immigration and the European Union: Michael Kosterlitz, one of the four British-born but American-resident winners of Nobel prizes in science this year, is so incensed by Brexit that he is considering renouncing his British citizenship: “The idea […]
Britain’s broken land-use planning system
Matt Ridley
Protesters, lawyers and public servants make money from delay My recent Times column on the planning paralysis holding back Britain: At last, the government is about to decide on a third runway at Heathrow airport — by the end of this month, I hear. It’s only been ten years since Tony Blair’s government first proposed […]
Matt Ridley
An attack that confirms the accuracy of my lecture I have sent the following letter to the president of the Royal Society and the Chairman and director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in response to a highly misleading letter to me that was copied to them. To Sir Venki Ramakrishnan FRS, Lord Lawson […]
Global greening versus global warming
Matt Ridley
The 2016 Global Warming Policy Foundation Lecture The text of a lecture given at the Royal Society on 17 October 2016: (Note some minor corrections made subsequent to delivery. These are shown in italics.) I am a passionate champion of science. I have devoted most of my career to celebrating and chronicling scientific discovery. […]
Matt Ridley
A lecture on the grim history of Malthusian policies I gave a lecture recently at Haileybury College (the successor to the East India College where the economist Robert Malthus taught), on the topic of “The Misapplication of Malthus”. It was based on a chapter of my book The Evolution of Everything: Parson Malthus casts a […]
Britain’s chance to be the global champion of free trade
Matt Ridley
UK to trigger Brexit 200 years after Ricardo’s comparative advantage My Times column on free trade after Brexit: The prime minister wants Britain to be “the most passionate, most consistent, most convincing advocate for free trade”. Under either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and with world trade stagnating, it looks as if the job is […]
Mental illness is the greatest research challenge
Matt Ridley
Infectious and heart disease are in retreat; cancer won’t go away My Times column on the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative in basic medical science: Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, and his wife Priscilla Chan, a paediatrician, have announced their intention to spend $3 billion over ten years on medical research. Having met them last year, […]
