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Lower costs mean higher spending in healthcare
Matt Ridley
The Jevons paradox in medical technology My column in The Times on healthcare costs: Babies got cheaper this week. Twice. First, Belgian scientists announced that their new method has the potential to cut the costs of some in-vitro fertilisation treatments from £5,000 to below £200. Their cut-price recipe requires little more than baking soda and […]
Nobody ever calls the weather average
Matt Ridley
The extreme weather scam exposed in a new book My review of Taxing Air, by Bob Carter and John Spooner, is in The Australian newspaper: WHEN the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show […]
I may follow the crowd, but not because it’s a crowd
Matt Ridley
Evidence, not consensus, is what counts My latest (and last) Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Last week a friend chided me for not agreeing with the scientific consensus that climate change is likely to be dangerous. I responded that, according to polls, the “consensus” about climate change only extends to the […]
The dash for shale oil will shake the world
Matt Ridley
Oil prices look set to fall as America exploits a shale cornucopia My Times column: Exciting as Britain’s latest shale gas estimate is — 47 years’ supply or more — it pales beside what is happening in the United States. There shale gas is old hat; the shale oil revolution is proving a world changer, […]
The myth that choice overload is a cause of great misery
Matt Ridley
Fashionable attacks on choice are not supported by good evidence I have an article in Spiked! on the the tyranny of consumer choice: This summer at TED Global in Edinburgh, a lively networking conference, there was a talk on one of the true and terrible scourges of the modern world. This is a bit of […]
Curing cancer is harder than preventing it
Matt Ridley
Genomics helps head off cancer, but cures remain elusive My column in The Times: Preventing cancer is proving a lot easier than curing it. The announcement that the NHS will fund five-year courses of the drugs tamoxifen or raloxifene for healthy women who are genetically predisposed to get breast and ovarian cancer is overdue. The […]
Matt Ridley
Striking a balance between intellectual property and freedom to innovate The economist Arthur Laffer is reputed to have drawn his famous curve—showing that beyond a certain point higher taxes generate lower revenue—on a paper napkin at a dinner with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in the Washington Hotel in 1974. Another economist, Alex Tabarrok of George […]
Matt Ridley
Making electricity from burning wood is bad for the economy and the environment My column in the Times on 20 June 2013: In the Energy Bill going through Parliament there is allowance for generous subsidy for a huge push towards burning wood to produce electricity. It’s already happening. Drax power station in Yorkshire has […]
Matt Ridley
In the absence of predators to control lesser predators, people have a role My article in the Times on 13 June 2013 ‘We are as gods and have to get good at it,” the Californian ecologist and writer Stewart Brand said recently. Worldwide there has been a sea change in the ecological profession. These […]
Matt Ridley
Abiogenic methane made in the mantle from carbonate? My Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on abiogenic methane Coal, oil and gas are “fossil” fuels, right? They are derived from ancient life-forms and are nonrenewable, stored energy, extracted from prehistoric sunlight. In the case of coal and most oil, this is […]
