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Britain’s employment and productivity puzzle
Matt Ridley
Unemployment rose less then fell faster than expected My column in last week’s Times was on the rise in employment, reforms to welfare and the productivity puzzle in Britain: Successful innovations are sometimes low-tech: corrugated iron, for example, or the word “OK”. In this vein, as Iain Duncan Smith will say in a speech […]
Matt Ridley
James Lovelock recants his alarmism My review for The Times of James Lovelock’s new book, A Rough Ride to the Future. This book reveals that James Lovelock, at 94, has not lost his sparkling intelligence, his lucid prose style, or his cheerful humanity. May Gaia grant that we all have such talents in our […]
Matt Ridley
Global warming looks like it will be cheaper to cope with than to prevent My Spectator article on the IPCC’s new emphasis on adaptation: Nigel Lawson was right after all. Ever since the Centre for Policy Studies lecture in 2006 that launched the former chancellor on his late career as a critic of global warming […]
Matt Ridley
Easterly’s book on aid and autocracy My review of William Easterly’s book The Tyranny of Experts for The Times: Imagine, writes the economist William Easterly, that in 2010 more than 20,000 farmers in rural Ohio had been forced from their land by soldiers, their cows slaughtered, their harvest torched and one of their sons […]
Matt Ridley
Easterly’s book on aid and autocracy My review of William Easterly’s book The Tyranny of Experts for The Times: Imagine, writes the economist William Easterly, that in 2010 more than 20,000 farmers in rural Ohio had been forced from their land by soldiers, their cows slaughtered, their harvest torched and one of their sons […]
There is no simple explanation for the missing airliner
Matt Ridley
Only implausible explanations remain My Times column is on the missing airliner and Occam’s razor. The tragic disappearance of all 239 people on board flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean has one really peculiar feature to it: none of the possible explanations is remotely plausible, yet one of them must be true. The usual […]
Muting the alarm on climate change
Matt Ridley
Even with exaggerated assumptions of sensitivity, the IPCC has to down-grade alarm The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will shortly publish the second part of its latest report, on the likely impact of climate change. Government representatives are meeting with scientists in Japan to sex up—sorry, rewrite—a summary of the scientists’ accounts of […]
Technology creates jobs as much as it destroys them
Matt Ridley
It’s a good thing we don’t all have to dig the fields by hand My Times column is on technology and jobs: Bill Gates voiced a thought in a speech last week that is increasingly troubling America’s technical elite — that technology is about to make many, many people redundant. Advances in software, he said, […]
The good news you don’t hear about diseases
Matt Ridley
Malaria, TB and Aids are in steady retreat My Times column is on malaria, TB and Aids — all in steady decline, a fact that officials and journalists seem reluctant to report: There’s a tendency among public officials and journalists, when they discuss disease, to dress good news up as bad. My favourite example […]
Smoking (and European regulation) kills
Matt Ridley
E-cigarettes deserve encouragement as a lesser evil My Times column is on harm reduction, Swedish snus and e-cigarettes: Is this the end of smoking? Not if the bureaucrats can help it. Sweden’s reputation for solving policy problems, from education to banking, is all the rage. The Swedes are also ahead of the rest of Europe […]
