WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

The justifications for the BBC licence fee have gone away My Times column on the BBC:  The revelation that disc jockeys and football presenters are paid millions for topping and tailing segments of rehashed music or rebroadcast football, especially if they are male, will almost certainly lead to more pay inflation at the BBC — […]

Review of a book by Tim Harford A review of Tim Harford’s book, Fifty things that made the modern economy.   In 2006 the historian David Edgerton wrote a book called The Shock of the Old in which he argued that the 20th century was not really all about space travel and atom bombs, but […]

The state risks locking in the wrong technology too early My recent column for The Times on the arithmetic behind electric cars:   The British government is under pressure to follow France and Volvo in promising to set a date by which to ban diesel and petrol engines in cars and replace them with electric […]

Modern human beings took a third of a million years to emerge My column in the Times on recent sensational discoveries relating to human evolution in Africa: News is dominated by sudden things — bombs, fires, election results — and so gradual news sometimes get left out. The past month has seen three discoveries in […]

A book on how human beings are also increasing biodiversity My review of Chris Thomas’s fine book, Inheritors of the Earth:   If human beings were to vanish from the Earth, what would their effect on wildlife have been? A rash of extinctions, a lot of mixing up so that wallabies and parakeets live in […]

Bad green policies waste money My Times column on conservation and the British countryside:   Even Michael Gove’s enemies concede he is good at tackling vested interests. Even his friends concede he has a knack for making enemies in the process. In his new job as secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, […]

Ten meagre reasons for cheer amid the gloom Belated posting of my post-election Times column: For those of us who want a clean Brexit and who champion freedom and innovation rather than socialism, the election result was a shattering disappointment. It reduced the party that most embraces free enterprise to a minority in the House […]

Since 1987, Britain has been transformed for the better My Times column on Britain’s general election and the missing optimism about innovation: Against the background of a terrorist campaign, a Tory government under a determined woman was cruising towards an easy victory against a socialist Labour party in a June election, but stumbling badly in […]

A curious connection between the Gothic novel and Lucretius My Times column on the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein and the 600th of De Rerum Natura’s rediscovery: It was in May 1817, two centuries ago this month, that Mary Shelley completed the writing of Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, which was published anonymously the next year. […]

A hoax shows how easy it is to fool peer review My Times column on an academic hoax: The latest university prank is embarrassing to academia and hilarious for the rest of us. Philosophy professor Peter Boghossian and mathematician Dr James Lindsay made up a learned paper on the “conceptual penis” as a “gender-performative, highly […]