WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

Dodgy long term forecasts spoil the reputations of good short-term forecasters Though I am writing this from Texas, from tomorrow I will be back in the UK and I have been checking the weather forecast for my home at the Met Office’s excellent website. By excellent, I mean both clear and accurate. I find the […]

Rachel Carson, in her hugely influential book Silent Spring, wrote that she expected an epidemic of cancer caused by chemicals in the environment, especially DDT, indeed she thought it had already begun in the early 1960s: “No longer are exposures to dangerous chemicals occupational alone; they have entered the environment of everyone-even of children as yet […]

Greens who like to make unsubstantiated claims then demand the prosecution of others for the same offence I have just sent this letter to the Guardian: In response to Donald Brown’s call for climate scepticism to be classified as a crime against humanity (1st November), in which he said `We may not have a word for this […]

Plus other matters aired on the radio Here’s an hour long conversation I did on Econtalk with economist and novelist Russ Roberts about trade, prosperity and Adam Smith. It includes a discussion of why animals can manage reciprocity but not, apparently, exchange.

Political plurality allows innovations to flourish My latest Wall Street Journal column, Triumph of the Idea Smugglers, argues that from time to time in history good ideas need rescuing from bad regimes. If Thales of Miletus had not infected Greece with rationalism after travelling in Egypt, and if 1700 years later, Leonardo Fibonacci had not […]

Market innovation helped the miners; counselling was counter-productive Today I read two contrasting articles about the wonderful rescue of the Chilean miners that I strongly recommend, even though both are a few days old. The first, by Brendan O’Neill, in Spiked (hat tip: Frank Stott), reveals the degree to which the miners helped themselves to cope […]

Is modern growth a materialist or an ideological achievement? Continuing the debate about the industrial revolution with Deirdre McCloskey Here’s her reply to me …We agree at least that innovation is the key. That’s a very, very important agreement. Joel Mokyr, Jack Goldstone, and our own Greg Clark join Matt Ridley, Robert Allen, and me […]

A neat insight from Don Boudreaux From Cafe Hayek comes this: When materials are worth recycling, markets for their reuse naturally arise.  For materials with no natural markets for their reuse, the benefits of recycling are less than its costs – and, therefore, government efforts to promote such recycling waste resources. Everyday experience should teach us […]

The perished credibility of George Update: George Monbiot has made it clear that he did not ask for the deletions of comments referred to below, but that the Guardian moderators made the deletions for legal reasons and without his knowledge. But he still fails to take the opportunity to discuss the evidence that Williams and Niggurath […]

Chris Anderson’s brilliant talk at TED Global is now on the web. Among the take-home messages: – that innovation is accelerating thanks to the ability to compare and combine. Dance is a great example. – and that video is the future of the net now that bandwidth constraints are fading. The print-dominated era is looking like […]