WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

This time the warnings are not overdone My article for Reaction: In Aesop’s fable about the boy who cried “Wolf!”, the point of the tale is that eventually there was a wolf, but the boy was not believed because he had given too many false alarms. In my view, the Covid-19 coronavirus is indeed a […]

Britain has uniquely legislated to reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions in 2050 My article for GlobalVision: As Britain relaunches itself as an independent trading nation, its fate will depend on how competitive it is. We have lots going for us, but we also have a heavily regulated economy, high labour costs and low productivity, so we may […]

Culture and practice can change without putting Big Brother in charge My article for The Telegraph: In the 19th century Ignaz Semmelweis was vilified and ostracised when he tried to make doctors wash their hands after doing autopsies on women who had died from childbirth fever before going straight upstairs to deliver more babies. We […]

World-class laboratories have been freed from the dead hand of Brussels regulation Update: My House of Lords Speech on Genome Editing from 4th March   My article for The Critic: Britain is really good at biology. In physics and chemistry, or painting and music, we have often failed to match the Germans, the French or […]

Coming 14th May and 19th May and Available to Pre-Order My next book How Innovation Works will be published on 14th May in the United Kingdom and 19th May in the United States and Canada. It’s available for pre-order now. While it has been searchable on booksellers’ websites for a few months, and teased here […]

My blog post for Free Market Conservatives: When you think about it, what has happened to human society in the last 300 years is pretty weird. After trundling along with horses and sailboats, slaves and swords, for millennia, we suddenly got steam engines and search engines, and planes and cars and electricity and computers and […]

Coronavirus is far from the first disease they’ve passed on to us My article from The Spectator: I’m no Nostradamus, but 20 years ago when I was commissioned to write a short book about disease in the new millennium, I predicted that if a new pandemic did happen it would be a virus, not a […]

I visited reddit’s r/IAmA community Wednesday to answer your questions. Here are some highlights. Can you briefly summarise your position on climate change? Yes, though it’s not an issue I am focusing on much at the moment. My view is summarised in a lecture I gave in 2016 called Global Warming versus Global Greening. I’ve covered […]

“An enthusiastic history of human technical innovation” From the Kirkus review of How Innovation Works: Throughout the book, the author delivers fascinating histories of technology that we take for granted. Many hands contributed to the developments of the steam engine, automobile, and computer. Ridley makes a convincing case that obsessive trial and error works better […]

Britain needs to rediscover trial and error, serendipity, speed, and innovation My article from The Spectator: What was Brexit for? After finally taking Britain out of the European Union, the Prime Minister can now start to give us his answer — and the opportunity in front of him is pretty clear. He could speed up, […]