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Matt Ridley
How the left discovered pessimism Here is an op-ed I wrote for today’s Australian newspaper: POLLYANNA is a fool; Cassandra was wise. As a self-proclaimed “rational optimist” who argues that the world has been getting better for most people and that the future is likely to be better still, I am up against a deep prejudice […]
The case of the missing jetpacks
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on how the future turns out: Last month a crash dummy flew to 5,000 feet above ground level in a personal jet pack. The inventor, New Zealander Glenn Martin, has spent decades on the project and is ready to start selling the device for […]
Samuel Johnson prize shortlisting for Rational Optimist
Matt Ridley
One of six books The Rational Optimist has been short-listed for the Samuel Johnson prize for the best non-fiction book of 2010. I’m thrilled.
The silence of the media and activists is deafening
Matt Ridley
More people died of organic, local e coli than at Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon combined, yet the outrage is absent From Andrew Bolt: Rich Fisher: One German organic farm has killed twice as many people as the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Gulf Oil spill combined. crickets. Hello? Environmental groups? Journalists? Hello?
Matt Ridley
Were E coli deaths preventable with food irradiation? My latest Mind and Matter column at the Wall Street Journal is about the precautionary principle as exemplified by the German e coli outbreak, which has now killed 29. Less precaution about new technology might have meant fewer deaths: A technology that might have prevented contaminated produce […]
Matt Ridley
What we do changes the wiring of our genes I have an article in The Conversation, an Australian idea forum: The human genome provides penetrating and unexpected insights into human individual and collective history. Among them is the counterintuitive idea that genes are at the mercy of experience – that what we do in our […]
Matt Ridley
Rinderpest joins smallpox in oblivion I missed this news last month. For the second time in history, human beings have eradicated a disease altogether. This time it is rinderpest, which people cannot get, only cattle so it’s not such big news as smallpox or (soon?) polio. It’s still good news. Dr Peter Roeder, who […]
Matt Ridley
Owning up to a hoax does not always work My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about what happens when hoaxers own up and nobody believes them. In the interest of space, I had to leave on the cutting room floor my favourite, though fictional, example. In The Life of Brian, […]
Matt Ridley
Tim Harford’s new book understands bottom-up design I have written the following review of Tim Harford’s book Adapt, for Nature magazine: Charles Darwin’s big idea – that blind trial and error can progressively build a powerful simulacrum of purposeful design – got pigeonholed under biology. Yet it always had wider implications in economics, technology and culture. […]
Get the fertiliser out. We can feed the world
Matt Ridley
Farmers can feed the world, if they are allowed to I have the following op-ed in today’s Times: Oxfam’s chief executive, Dame Barbara Stocking, claimed this week in a BBC interview that there will “absolutely not be enough food” to feed the world’s population in a few decades’ time. Such certainty about the future is remarkable, […]
