|
0fbeba4
|
Friedrich Hayek advanced the view that the common law contributed to greater economic welfare because it was less interventionist, less under the tutelage of the state, and was better able to respond to change than civil legal systems; indeed, it was for him a legal system that led, like the market, to a spontaneous order.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
b1774d0
|
For far too long we have underestimated the power of spontaneous, organic and constructive change driven from below, in our obsession with designing change from above. Embrace the general theory of evolution. Admit that everything evolves.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
57ede63
|
Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity. Here, in my own words, is what a modern version of Smithism claims. First, the spontaneous and voluntary exchange of goods and services leads to a division of labour in which people specialise in what they are good at doing. Second, this in turn leads to gains from trade for each party to a transaction, because everybody is doing what he is most productive at and..
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
c48a438
|
The conclusion that all these studies converge upon is that about half of your IQ was inherited, and less than a fifth was due to the environment you shared with your siblings - the family. The rest came from the womb, the school and outside influences such as peer groups. But even this is misleading. Not only does your IQ change with age, but so does its heritability. As you grow up and accumulate experiences, the influence of your genes i..
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
de66cb9
|
Yet to define genes by the diseases they cause is about as absurd as defining organs of the body by the diseases they get: livers are there to cause cirrhosis, hearts to cause heart attacks and brains to cause strokes. It is a measure, not of our knowledge but of our ignorance that this is the way the genome catalogues read. It is literally true that the only thing we know about some genes is that their malfunction causes a particular disea..
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
fb7a683
|
The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
5f3ae05
|
TP53 seems to encode the greater good, like a suicide pill in the mouth of a soldier that dissolves only when it detects evidence that he is about to mutiny.
|
|
cells
genome
genes
genetics
|
Matt Ridley |
|
27aafa2
|
The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation - that is to say, in crime.' Perhaps we have left all that behind, and the state is now evolving steadily towards benign and gentle virtue. Perhaps not. Tudor
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
123499c
|
South Korea and Ghana had the same income per capita in the 1950s. One received far more aid, advice and political intervention than the other. It is now by far the poorer of the two. In general, Asian economies grew their way out of poverty in the late twentieth century, while African economies failed to be aided out of poverty. Trade, not aid, proved the best way to achieve an increase in prosperity.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
9cfba6d
|
In Bletchley, in Britain, in 1943, in total secrecy, a brilliant mathematician, Alan Turing, is seeing his most incisive insight turned into physical reality. Turing has argued that numbers can compute numbers. To crack the Lorentz encoding machines of the German forces, a computer called Colossus has been built based on Turing's principles: it is a universal machine with a modifiable stored program. Nobody realises it at the time, least of..
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
cb86d9a
|
What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
52436c9
|
So if gangsters become governments, does this mean that governments began as gangsters?
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
3579a61
|
In 1976, when eight million Indians were sterilised, Robert McNamara visited the country and congratulated it: 'At long last India is moving effectively to address its population problem.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
37e1df4
|
The obsession with which those on the right resist Charles Darwin's insight - that the complexity of nature does not imply a designer - matches the obsession with which those on the left resist Adam Smith's insight - that the complexity of society does not imply a planner.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
007feaf
|
The real tragedy of nationalised education is how little innovation it has seen.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
9e358ee
|
Today we are still in thrall to Great Man history, if only because we like reading biography. American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land. Never was this messianic mood more extreme than on the day Barack Obama won the presidency.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
1f28a64
|
If you divide the world into those countries where the majority live in cities, and those where the majority live in the countryside, you find that the former are four times as wealthy, in terms of average income, as the latter.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
c999e1d
|
The mind drives the body, which drives the genome.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
19b74c1
|
The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic Frisby points out in his book Life After the State, opportunities in finance ripple outwards from the Treasury. The state spends money before it even exists; the privileged banks then get first access to newly minted money and can invest it befo..
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
7e4b097
|
Most of the so-called robber barons got rich by cutting the price of goods, not raising them.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
a85bdf2
|
Friedrich Hayek's, with his prescient warning in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that socialism and fascism were not really opposites, but had 'fundamental similarity of methods and ideas', that economic planning and state control were at the top of an illiberal slope that led to tyranny, oppression and serfdom, and that the individualism of free markets was the true road to liberation. Ignoring
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
20002af
|
Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvements to the living standards of consumers. Most
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
7e7cd3d
|
If your teacher is in a private, for-profit school, however, and you withdraw your child, then the owner of the school will quickly feel the effect in his pocket, and the bad teacher will be fired. In a free system the parent, the consumer, is the boss. Tooley found that private-school proprietors constantly monitor their teachers and follow up parents' complaints. His team visited classrooms in various parts of India and Africa, and found ..
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
8ce4d8a
|
The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
4dd8059
|
The most important fact about extreme weather is that the number of deaths caused by floods, droughts and storms has dropped by 93 per cent since the 1920s, despite a trebling of the world population: not because the weather has grown less wild, but because the world has grown rich enough to enable us to protect ourselves better.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
d812ca6
|
The elite gets things wrong, says Douglas Carswell in The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy, 'because they endlessly seek to govern by design a world that is best organized spontaneously from below'. Public policy failures stem from planners' excessive faith in deliberate design. 'They consistently underrate the merits of spontaneous, organic arrangements, and fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
6d5a102
|
We are told that we are sinning (by emitting CO2), that we have original sin (human greed), which has banished us from Eden (the pre-industrial world), for which we must confess (by condemning irresponsible consumerism), atone (by paying carbon taxes), repent (insisting that politicians pay lip service to climate-change alarm), and seek salvation (sustainability). The wealthy can buy indulgences (carbon offsets) so as to keep flying their p..
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
c4577c5
|
In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top-down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
f8ac784
|
Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another; or different by virtue of one's similarity to a third. So it is with individuals.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
99ce746
|
I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
b78d1c2
|
Education, done properly, is an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
aefcf8f
|
Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
046ee90
|
E claro que nao ha um unico gene, mas ha algo infinitamente mais enaltecedor e magnifico: toda uma naturza humana, flexivelmente pre-ordenada em nossos cromossomos e indiossincratica de cada um de nos. Todo mundo tem uma unica e distina natureza endogena. Um self.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
71a5ab7
|
Perhaps the heritability of IQ implies something entirely different, something that once and for all proves that Galton's attempt to discriminate between nature and nurture is misconceived. Consider this apparently fatuous fact. People with high IQ s, on average, have more symmetrical ears than people with low IQ s. Their whole bodies seem to be more symmetrical: foot breadth, ankle breadth, finger length, wrist breadth and elbow breadth ea..
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
3db8771
|
Is it not striking that the cost of food and clothing has gone steadily downwards over the past fifty years, while the cost of healthcare and education has gone steadily upwards?
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
cbc2d07
|
Simultaneous discovery and invention mean that both patents and Nobel Prizes are fundamentally unfair things.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
99c6bf7
|
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term 'meme' for a unit of cultural imitation.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
1896243
|
With increasingly money-based interactions among strangers, people increasingly began to think of neighbours as potential trading partners rather than potential prey. Killing the shopkeeper makes no sense.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
ea6bd74
|
Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs. Once again, notice that this is not policy.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
fe1d7b5
|
The comedian Emo Philips once joked that he considered his brain to be the most fascinating organ in his body - until he realised who was telling him this.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
9226780
|
The influence upon our intelligence of events that happened in the womb is three times as great as anything our parents did to us after our birth.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
1a8a727
|
As I mentioned earlier, the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
117c130
|
The Dark Ages were a massive experiment in the back-to-the-land hippy lifestyle (without the trust fund):
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |
|
12e7635
|
Montagues and Capulets, French and English, Whig and Tory, Airbus and Boeing, Pepsi and Coke, Serb and Muslim, Christian and Saracen - we are irredeemably tribal creatures. The neighbouring or rival group, however defined, is automatically an enemy. Argentinians and Chileans hate each other because there is nobody else nearby to hate.
|
|
|
Matt Ridley |