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Smoking (and European regulation) kills
Matt Ridley
E-cigarettes deserve encouragement as a lesser evil My Times column is on harm reduction, Swedish snus and e-cigarettes: Is this the end of smoking? Not if the bureaucrats can help it. Sweden’s reputation for solving policy problems, from education to banking, is all the rage. The Swedes are also ahead of the rest of Europe […]
The sceptics are right. Don’t scapegoat them.
Matt Ridley
Floods and gales in the UK are not evidence of climate change This is my column in the Times this week. I have added some updates in the text and below. In the old days we would have drowned a witch to stop the floods. These days the Green Party, Greenpeace and Ed Miliband […]
Science discovers new ignorance about the past
Matt Ridley
Genes generate new mysteries about prehistory My recent Times column on new discoveries in the history of our species: It is somehow appropriate that the 850,000-year-old footprints found on a beach in Norfolk last May, and announced last week, have since been washed away. Why? Because the ephemeral nature of that extraordinary discovery underlines the […]
Do people mind more about inequality than poverty?
Matt Ridley
Few people know that global inequality is falling and so is poverty My Times column this week was on the facts behind the inequality debate: The Swedish data impresario Hans Rosling recently asked some British people to estimate the average number of births per woman in Bangladesh and gave them four possible answers. Just 12 […]
Cherry picking and the tale of the Siberian larch trees
Matt Ridley
Stephen McIntyre responds to Keith Briffa’s allegations This is Stephen McIntyre’s response to me, commenting on the letters from Professor Keith Briffa to the Times in response to my column on the widespread problem of withheld adverse data. It makes very clear that my account was accurate, that my account was mischaracterized by Professor Briffa […]
Matt Ridley
President Hollande’s affair and the triumph of human monogamy My recent Times column was on human monogamy: The tragic death of an Indian minister’s wife and the overdose of a French president’s “wife” give a startling insight into the misery that infidelity causes in a monogamous society. In cultures like India and France, it is […]
China’s one-child policy was inspired by western greens
Matt Ridley
A missile scientist and the “Limits to Growth” As China’s one-child policy comes officially to an end, it is time to write the epitaph on this horrible experiment — part of the blame for which lies, surprisingly, in the West and with green, rather than red, philosophy. The policy has left China with a demographic […]
The real risks of cherry picking scientific data
Matt Ridley
The sin of omission of inconvenient results My Times column is on the dangers of omitting inconvenient results: Perhaps it should be called Tamiflugate. Yet the doubts reported by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee last week go well beyond the possible waste of nearly half a billion pounds on a flu drug that […]
Matt Ridley
Daniel Hannan argues that bottom-up liberty has deep roots My Times column of 30 December 2013: It was only five years ago that “Anglo-Saxon” economics was discredited and finished. Continental or Chinese capitalism, dirigiste and heavily regulated, was the future. Yet here’s the Centre for Economics and Business Research last week saying that Britain is […]
Matt Ridley
Norbert Elias explains how moral standards change My Times column, December 23, 2013: There is a common thread running through many recent stories: paedophilia at Caldicott prep school and in modern Rochdale, the murders of Lee Rigby in Woolwich and by Sergeant Alexander Blackman in Afghanistan, perhaps even segregation of student audiences and opposition […]
