Enter your search criteria and we will find you the most relevant content.
Matt Ridley
Daniel Hannan argues that bottom-up liberty has deep roots My Times column of 30 December 2013: It was only five years ago that “Anglo-Saxon” economics was discredited and finished. Continental or Chinese capitalism, dirigiste and heavily regulated, was the future. Yet here’s the Centre for Economics and Business Research last week saying that Britain is […]
Matt Ridley
Norbert Elias explains how moral standards change My Times column, December 23, 2013: There is a common thread running through many recent stories: paedophilia at Caldicott prep school and in modern Rochdale, the murders of Lee Rigby in Woolwich and by Sergeant Alexander Blackman in Afghanistan, perhaps even segregation of student audiences and opposition […]
Medicinal regulation of vaping could kill people
Matt Ridley
E-cigarettes are mainly used to quit smoking – don’t stifle them My recent speech in the House of Lords on the dangers of too much regulatory precaution over electronic cigarettes has sparked a huge amount of interest among “vapers”. I am reprinting the speech here as a blog: I congratulate my noble friend Lord Astor, […]
Matt Ridley
Who’s on the committee to deal with it if there is? My Times column on how earthlings communicate with life in space: The Hubble telescope has revealed that Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has fountains of water vapour near one of its poles, which means its ocean might not always be hermetically sealed by miles-thick […]
Heritable IQ is a sign of social mobility
Matt Ridley
Paradoxical features of the genetics of intelligence My fellow Times writer the cricketer Ed Smith posed me a very good question the other day. How many of the people born in the world in 1756 could have become Mozart? (My answer, by the way, was four.) So here’s a similar question: how many Britons born in […]
Gas and oil prices may soon fall
Matt Ridley
If they do, renewable energy will look even worse My Times column was on the likely effect of weaker oil and gas prices on competitiveness: The Chancellor is to knock £50 off the average energy bill by replacing some green levies with general taxation and extending the timescale for rolling out others. On the face […]
Immigration versus social cohesion?
Matt Ridley
The elite benefit, so it’s becoming a leftish issue My Times column is on immigration: It looks as if David Cameron is determined not to emulate Tony Blair over European immigration. Faced with opinion polls showing that tightening immigration is top of the list of concerns that voters want the Prime Minister to negotiate with […]
Matt Ridley
Home thoughts from abroad After my recent visit to Australia I wrote the diary column in the Australian edition of the Spectator: I flew from London into Sydney, then Melbourne, to make three dinner speeches in a row. Through nerves I never finished the main course of three dinners. Pity, because in my experience Australian […]
Matt Ridley
Review of a book on the people who made the shale gas revolution My review of Gregory Zuckerman’s book The Frackers appeared in The Times on 23 November. In the long tradition of serendipitous mistakes that led to great discoveries, we can now add a key moment in 1997. Nick Steinsberger, an engineer with Mitchell […]
Matt Ridley
Reply to a misleading article in the Guardian I have the following letter in the Guardian (online). While preaching to others to be accurate, John Abraham is himself inaccurate in his critique of me ( Global warming and business reporting – can business news organizations achieve less than zero?, 18 November, theguardian.com). In correcting one […]
