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Pilotless planes and driverless cars
Matt Ridley
Eventually, it will feel reassuring that there’s nobody in the cockpit My column in The Times: The Civil Aviation Authority is concerned that pilots are becoming too reliant on automation and are increasingly out of practice in what to do when the autopilot cannot cope. We now know that a fatal Air France crash in the […]
The EU versus the UN: who makes the rules?
Matt Ridley
Increasingly, trade rules are set above the level of Brussels My column in the Times: In today’s speech on the European Union, previewed in this morning’s Times, Owen Paterson, the former environment secretary, will make a surprising and telling point. It is that many of the rules handed down to British businesses and consumers […]
Political institutions evolve slower than social ones
Matt Ridley
Britain’s government would be familiar to Daniel Defoe My Times column on the little-changed political institutions of London: Two hundred and ninety years ago a novelist, spy, tradesman and bankrupt named Daniel Defoe began publishing his account of A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. A book out this week by the distinguished sociologist […]
Ants, altruism and self sacrifice
Matt Ridley
It’s the selfishness of genes that makes us unselfish My Times column is on a disagreement between Edward Wilson and Richard Dawkins about evolution: I find it magnificent that a difference of opinion about the origin of ants between two retired evolutionary biologists, one in his eighties and one in his seventies, has made […]
Greens take the moral low ground
Matt Ridley
Why environmentalists defend the wealthy against the poor My Times column: A confession: I voted for the Green Party in 1979 – one of less than 40,000 people in the whole country who did so. It was then called the Ecology Party and I knew the local candidate in Oxford, which is some excuse. But […]
Matt Ridley
The World Health Organisation attacks vaping instead of Ebola My Times column is on the World Health Organisation’s odd priorities: its early complacency about ebola, while it attacks a new technology that saves the lives of smokers by getting them off tobacco, and obsesses about climate change: Is there a connection between ebola and […]
Matt Ridley
Ignore producers: the cost of energy benefits consumers My Times column on the faling oil price: So ingrained is the bad-news bias of the intelligentsia that the plummeting price of oil has mostly been discussed in terms of its negative effect on the budgets of oil producers, both countries and companies. We are allowed […]
Ebola needs beds on the ground
Matt Ridley
Public health measures have to work soon, or a major pandemic looms My Times column on Ebola: It is not often I find myself agreeing with apocalyptic warnings, but the west African ebola epidemic deserves hyperbole right now. Anthony Banbury, head of the UN ebola emergency response mission, says: “Time is our enemy. The […]
Matt Ridley
A precautionary ban has made things worse for bees My Times column on how banning neo-nicotinoid pesticides is proving counter-productive for bees: The European Union’s addiction to the precautionary principle — which says in effect that the risks of new technologies must be measured against perfection, not against the risks of existing technologies — […]
Bitcoin and block-chain could transform the world
Matt Ridley
The origins and implications of the technology behind bitcoin My Times column on who started bitcoin and what it means: Amid the hurly-burly of war, disease and politics, you might be forgiven for not paying much attention to bitcoin, the electronic form of money favoured by radical libertarians and drug dealers. Yet it is possible […]
