The light at the end of the tunnel

Matt Ridley

I have an op-ed article in the Times today, arguing that there is light at the end of the tunnel for the world’s and the British economy: the long-term gains from living within our means are huge:   Matthew Parris hit a nerve last Saturday with his argument that we have lived beyond our means and […]

The language window

Matt Ridley

Here is my latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal There are many mysteries about Ray, the 17-year-old English-speaking “forest boy” who walked into the city hall in Berlin on Sept. 5, claiming to have lived wild in the woods for five years with his father-until his father recently died in a fall. […]

The ancient cloud

Matt Ridley

I have the following  opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, adapted from my forthcoming Hayek lecture. The crowd-sourced, wikinomic cloud is the new, new thing that all management consultants are now telling their clients to embrace. Yet the cloud is not a new thing at all. It has been the source of human invention […]

Room for all

Matt Ridley

I published this article in the Ottawa Citizen today: The world now has almost seven billion people and rising. The population may surpass nine billion by 2050. We, together with our 20 billion chickens and four billion cattle, sheep and pigs, will utterly dominate the planet. Can the planet take it? Can we take it?   […]

From not work to network

Matt Ridley

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on drug development and network analysis: Here’s a paradox. Every week seems to bring news from a research laboratory of an ingenious candidate cure about to enter clinical trials for a serious disease. Yet the productivity of drugs coming out of clinical trials has […]

Maybe we’re all conspiracy theorists

Matt Ridley

My latest Wall Street Journal Mind and Matter column discusses conspiracy theories. Michael Shermer, the founder and editor of Skeptic magazine, has never received so many angry letters as when he wrote a column for Scientific American debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. Mr. Shermer found himself vilified, often in CAPITAL LETTERS, as a patsy of the […]

Draco among the viruses

Matt Ridley

Latest Wall Street Journal  column is on how anti-virals outwit natural selection: Draco, who wrote Athens’s first constitution in about 620 B.C., decreed that just about every crime should be punishable by death, because that was what petty criminals deserved and he could think of no harsher penalty for serious criminals. “Draconian” means indiscriminate as […]

Rational Optimist by Skype

Matt Ridley

Back in June, I could not make it to Idea City in Canada,  meeting that chose “ideas having sex as its slogan”. But I recorded a talk by Skype and here it is.

Counting species out

Matt Ridley

I have a piece in today’s Times newspaper on extinction of species. Here it is, with added links: The suitably named Dr Boris Worm, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, led the team that this week estimated the number of species on the planet at 8.7 million, plus or minus 1.3 million. That sounds about right. We human beings […]

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