Matt Ridley
How come the richer we get the less we die? Ben Pile at Climate Resistance has a nice essay on the `environmentalist’s paradox’. This is the superficially puzzling — and to many greens, infuriating — fact that people keep on getting healthier and wealthier when really they should, in all decency, be suffering terribly because of […]
Irrational pessimism about population
Matt Ridley
pologists for China’s one-child policy make bizarre economic arguments My son, aged 16, is cleverer than me and knows more about economic theory, which interests him. He has his own views on the world. So I invited him to write a blog post on a topic of his choosing. Here it is: by Matthew Ridley […]
Matt Ridley
On the use of straw men in scientific arguments I found this on John Hawks’s anthropology blog. He’s writing about the sometimes heated debate over whether Homo floresiensis is a species or a deformity: What I notice is that when I write about this, I have to correct a lot of false claims about what the […]
Daniel Ben-Ami on pessimist puritans
Matt Ridley
Scepticism about economic growth is a reactionary, not a radical philosophy Daniel Ben-Ami’s new book `Ferraris For All‘, published by the Policy Press, is a great read. Ben-Ami’s point is to defend the idea of economic development against the `growth sceptics’ who have emerged in various blue, green and red guises recently. What he does […]
Matt Ridley
Green politicking can do real harm Tim Worstall has a superb rebuke to the idiotic argument that greedy speculation, rather than greenie politicking, was the real cause of the high food prices, hunger and food riots of 2008: In short, futures allow speculation upon the future: which is why we have them, for speculation upon the […]
Matt Ridley
Previous declarations of scientific consensus have often proved wrong Update: apologies for formatting problems in a previous version of this blog post. Last week a study claimed that 97-98 percent of the most published climate scientists agree with the scientific consensus that man-made climate change is happening. Well, duh. Of course they would: it’s their livelihood. […]
Matt Ridley
Did war prevent the invention of trade in other species? Nick Wade has a good piece in today’s New York Times about John Mitani’s chronicling of warfare between troops of Chimpanzees in Uganda. Dr. Mitani’s team has now put a full picture together by following chimps on their patrols, witnessing 18 fatal attacks over 10 years […]
Matt Ridley
George Monbiot’s attack on me in the Guardian is very misleading George Monbiot’s recent attack on me in the Guardian is misleading. I do not hate the state. In fact, my views are much more balanced than Monbiot’s selective quotations imply. I argue that the state’s role in sometimes impeding or destroying the process that […]
Matt Ridley
Neanderthals may have contributed a few genes to posterity after all Tantalising clues have been emerging for some time from human genomes that Neanderthals may have contributed a few genes to posterity after all. That `we’ mated with `them’ occasionally. The clues come in the form of widely differing DNA sequences that seem to converge […]
