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This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production.
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Matt Ridley |
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They had stumbled on what Friedrich Hayek called the catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by a growing division of labour.
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Matt Ridley |
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For barter to work, two individuals do not need to offer things of equal value. Trade is often unequal, but still benefits both sides.
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Matt Ridley |
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homini lupus', said Plautus. 'Man is a wolf to man.
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Matt Ridley |
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It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo's magic trick.
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Matt Ridley |
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Fundamentally, other animals do not do barter.
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Matt Ridley |
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Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons.
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Matt Ridley |
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Economists are quick to speak of 'market failure', and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from 'government failure'.
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Matt Ridley |
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In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created.
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Matt Ridley |
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Posterity can pay for its ancestors' lives because posterity can be richer through innovation. If somebody somewhere takes out a mortgage, which he will repay in three decades' time, to invest in a business that invents a gadget that saves his customers time, then that money, brought forward from the future, will enrich both him and those customers to the point where the loan can be repaid to posterity. That is growth. If, on the other hand..
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Matt Ridley |
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This isn't about auctions,' said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, 'in fact it's not about economic warfare. It's the opposite.' It was survival of the nicest.
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Matt Ridley |
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That is the point of agriculture: it diverts the labour of other species to providing services for human beings.
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Matt Ridley |
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Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs.
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Matt Ridley |
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As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth.
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Matt Ridley |
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What is miraculous is that in modern society you can trust and be trusted by a shopkeeper you do not know.
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Matt Ridley |
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in a sorry world there is no safety to be found in standing still.
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Matt Ridley |
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Like Milton Friedman, I notice that 'business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger.
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Matt Ridley |
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Imagine if you had to be completely self-sufficient (not just pretending, like Thoreau).
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Matt Ridley |
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each person 'intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention'. Yet
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Matt Ridley |
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Modern philosophers who aspire to rise above the sordid economic reality of the world would do well to recall that this trade made possible the cross-fertilisation of ideas that led to great discoveries.
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Matt Ridley |
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Yet as soon as Greece was unified into an empire by a thug - Philip of Macedon in 338 BC - it lost its edge.
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Matt Ridley |
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All that determinists are asking you to accept is that there cannot be effect without cause.
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Matt Ridley |
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The brutal campaign of mass sterilisation, forced abortion and infanticide was exacerbated by the voluntary murder of baby girls on a genocidal scale as parents tried to ensure that their one legal child was a boy. Fertility fell, but not much faster than it would have done if a policy of economic development, public health and education had been adopted instead. What
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Matt Ridley |
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the whole point of science, the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, is the rejection of arguments from authority.
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Matt Ridley |
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What was the international reaction to this holocaust? The United Nations Secretary General awarded a prize to General Qian in 1983, and recorded his 'deep appreciation' for the way in which the Chinese government had 'marshalled the resources necessary to implement population policies on a massive scale'.
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Matt Ridley |
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A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why?
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Matt Ridley |
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On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Adam and God touch fingers. To the uneducated eye it is not clear who is creating whom. We are supposed to assume God's the one doing the creating, and much of the world thinks so. To anybody who has read the history of the ancient world, it is crystal clear by contrast that, in the words of the title of Selina O'Grady's book on the subject, Man Created God. God is plainly an invention of the human imag..
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Matt Ridley |
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all gods and all superstitions emerge from within human minds, and go through characteristic but unplanned transformations as history unfolds. Thus even the most top-down feature of human culture is actually a bottom-up, emergent phenomenon. O'Grady
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Matt Ridley |
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Religions always and everywhere insist upon the argument from authority. You should do this or that because the Pope or the Koran or the local priest says you should. For centuries most of the world convinced itself that the only reason people act morally is because of instruction, that in effect without superstition there can be no ethical behaviour.
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Matt Ridley |
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Some thought they were messages from Gaia to tell humanity to combat global warming.
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Matt Ridley |
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In short, there is no question that a country can run a stable paper currency without a gold standard, a central bank, a lender of last resort, or much regulation; and not only avoid disaster, but perform well. Bottom-up monetary systems - known as free banking - have a far better track record than top-down ones. Walter Bagehot, the great nineteenth-century theorist of central banking, admitted as much. In his influential book Lombard Stree..
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Matt Ridley |
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Further evidence for the man-made nature of gods comes from their evolutionary history. It is a little-known fact, but gods evolve.
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Matt Ridley |
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as Isaiah Berlin put it, 'disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals alive today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rulers have claimed is their duty to promote has been a common cause of misery
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Matt Ridley |
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The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity.
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Matt Ridley |
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Two economists recently concluded, after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is 'a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator'. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops.
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Matt Ridley |
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In truth, far from being unsustainable, the interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is.
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Matt Ridley |
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Economists are quick to speak of 'market failure', and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from 'government failure'. Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all..
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Matt Ridley |
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Fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact - an inconvenient truth if there ever was one - is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents.
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Matt Ridley |
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From the perspective of today, or from that of a Cobden-Mill-Smith liberal, there is not a great deal of difference between the various -isms of the twentieth century. Communism, fascism, nationalism, corporatism, protectionism, Taylorism, dirigisme - they are all centralising systems with planning at their heart.
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Matt Ridley |
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Fascism and communism were and are religions of the state.
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Matt Ridley |
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The Brazilian diplomat Josue de Castro, in his book The Geopolitics of Hunger, was even bolder in his criticism of the neo-Malthusians, saying that 'The road to survival, therefore, does not lie in the neo-Malthusian prescriptions to eliminate surplus people, nor in birth control, but in the effort to make everybody on the face of the earth productive.' In
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Matt Ridley |
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The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China's lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. Malthus's
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Matt Ridley |
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Malthus's poor laws were wrong; British attitudes to famine in India and Ireland were wrong; eugenics was wrong; the Holocaust was wrong; India's sterilisation programme was wrong; China's one-child policy was wrong. These were sins of commission, not omission. Malthusian misanthropy - the notion that you should harden your heart, approve of famine and disease, feel ashamed of pity and compassion, for the good of the race - was wrong pragma..
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Matt Ridley |
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When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.
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Matt Ridley |