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Giving money for lobbying for money
Matt Ridley
The circular nature of some subsidies Update: the Taxpayers’ Alliance has a major report on this issue, by Matthew Sinclair, which concluded that Over £37 million was spent on taxpayer funded lobbying and political campaigning in 2007-08. That is nearly as much as the £38.9 million all three major political parties combined spent through their central […]
Julian Simon on rational optimism
Matt Ridley
Master Resource reposts Julian Simon’s wonderful and inspiring message of 1 May 1995. For good and bad, it has aged not at all: “EARTH DAY: SPIRITUALLY UPLIFTING, INTELLECTUALLY DEBASED” – by Julian L. Simon April 22 [1995] marks the 25th anniversary of Earth Day. Now as then its message is spiritually uplifting. But all […]
Nobody mentioned the Spanish Inquisition
Matt Ridley
Lord (Chris) Patten, new chairman of the BBC Trust, has been sounding off, militantly, at the militancy of atheists. He scored a bit of an own goal, though, with this remark: “It is curious that atheists have proved to be so intolerant of those who have a faith,” he said. “Their books would be a lot […]
Matt Ridley
Why do we like springtime so much? Update: The `hungry time’ was even later in the year than I said. See below. A meditation on the English spring I wrote for yesterday’s Times: I live on the 55th degree north parallel. If I had gone round the world along that line last week, through Denmark, Lithuania, […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on the regulation of genetic testing I just took a detailed genetic test by sending some spit to a firm in California and looking up the results on the Net. It seems I’m probably descended from a peculiarly fecund fourth-century Irish king called Niall […]
Matt Ridley
Economics for scientists In my experience, scientists often have a reflexive contempt for economics. Speaking as a scientist who came to understand economics after leaving academia, I find this attitude frustrating, because I see how they miss the fundamentally bottom-up, emergent, evolving nature of human society that the field of economics strives to understand […]
Matt Ridley
A nineteenth century blast of rational optimism Peter Risdon writes to draw to my attention what Mark Twain wrote to Walt Whitman on this 70th birthday: What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the […]
Matt Ridley
Getting cause and consequence confused is a surprisingly common error in science Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Scientists like to remind us not to confuse cause and effect. But they’re not immune from making that mistake themselves. Last week, for example, a flurry of sociological headlines emanating from a conference […]
Matt Ridley
The BBC has plumbed new depths with its recent reporting on shale gas. Its reporter Richard Black wrote a story about the old Cornell University claim that shale gas production emits more greenhouse-warming gases than coal. I happen to know quite a bit about this study and I know that it is based on very extreme […]
Matt Ridley
Alan Carlin has a peer reviewed paper in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, which concludes that climate policy is, in my terminology, a tourniquet for a nosebleed: The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions may be about two orders of magnitude less than those estimated by most economists because the climate sensitivity […]
