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4505306
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Today, of Americans officially designated as 'poor', 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these.
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Matt Ridley |
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77a266e
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It is just possible that the predators and parasites will actually win altogether, or rather that ambitious ideological busybodies will succeed in shutting down the catallaxy and crashing the world back into pre-industrial poverty some time during the coming century. There is even a new reason for such pessimism: the integrated nature of the world means that it may soon be possible to capture the entire world on behalf of a foolish idea, wh..
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Matt Ridley |
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f90b57e
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Snazi-li se muz ziskat zenu, neposle ji svuj vypis z uctu, ale daruje ji perlovy nahrdelnik. Nechlubi se svou lekarskou kartou, ale mezi reci prohodi, ze kazdy tyden ubehne patnact kilometru a nikdy nebyva nachlazeny. Nechlubi se pred ni akademickymi tituly, ale snazi se ji okouzlit svym vtipem. Nezaprisaha se pred ni svou pozornosti, ale k narozeninam ji posle kytici rudych ruzi. Temito gesty ji oznamuje: jsem bohaty, jsem zdravy, jsem chy..
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Matt Ridley |
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a7e8e99
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There is no country in the world that has a higher birth rate than it had in 1960, and in the less developed world as a whole the birth rate has approximately halved.
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Matt Ridley |
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d4e42c1
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In the 1950s it took thirty minutes work to earn the price of a McDonald's cheeseburger; today it takes three minutes.
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Matt Ridley |
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27bfda7
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It is a common trick to forecast the future on the assumption of no technological change, and find it dire. This is not wrong. The future would indeed be dire if invention and discovery ceased. As Paul Romer puts it: 'Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding ne..
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Matt Ridley |
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d0c7b3b
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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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8db8a00
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This is not a book about the Human Genome Project -- about mapping and sequencing techniques - but a book about what that project has found. Some time in the year 2000, we shall probably have a rough first draft of the complete human genome. In just a few short years we will have moved from knowing almost nothing about our genes to knowing everything. I genuinely believe that we are living through the greatest intellectual moment in history..
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Matt Ridley |
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ed0801a
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This means - and religious people might find this a useful argument - that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born. Of course, that life might have been born on a different planet and seeded here by spacecraft, or there might even have been thousands of kinds of life at first, but only Luca survived in the ruthless free-for-all of the primeval soup. But until the genetic code was cracked in the 1960s, we did not kno..
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Matt Ridley |
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ed669a1
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Sometimes the obvious can stare you in the face. Until 1955, it was agreed that human beings had twenty-four pairs of chromosomes. It was just one of those facts that everybody knew was right. They knew it was right because in 1921 a Texan named Theophilus Painter had sliced thin sections off the testicles of two black men and one white man castrated for insanity and 'self-abuse', fixed the slices in chemicals and examined them under the mi..
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Matt Ridley |
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0eeca04
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A month after the Watson-Crick structure was published, Britain crowned a new queen and a British expedition conquered Mount Everest on the same day. Apart from a small piece in the News Chronicle, the double helix did not make the newspapers. Today most scientists consider it the most momentous discovery of the century, if not the millennium.
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Matt Ridley |
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e8bc6af
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The filament of D N A is information, a message written in a code of chemicals, one chemical for each letter. It is almost too good to be true, but the code turns out to be written in a way that we can understand. Just like written English, the genetic code is a linear language, written in a straight line. Just like written English, it is digital, in that every letter bears the same importance. Moreover, the language of DNA is considerably ..
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Matt Ridley |
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f50b640
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The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity
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Matt Ridley |
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1d11ef1
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On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us? THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
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Matt Ridley |
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65a7da3
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Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty.
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Matt Ridley |
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5117ed5
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So growth will resume - unless prevented by the wrong policies. Somebody, somewhere, is still tweaking a piece of software, testing a new material, or transferring a gene that will make your and my life easier in the future.
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Matt Ridley |
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a2ba582
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In civilized society,' wrote Adam Smith, an individual 'stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.
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Matt Ridley |
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bef74b4
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If culture consisted simply of learning habits from others, it would soon stagnate. For culture to turn cumulative, ideas needed to meet and mate.
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Matt Ridley |
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ebb1e23
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Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top-down description of the world, and a top-down prescription by which we should live.
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Matt Ridley |
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1984765
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there is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.
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Matt Ridley |
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81b95a9
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the universe was not created for or about human beings, that we are not special, and there was no Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty in the distant past, but only a primitive battle for survival.
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Matt Ridley |
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e2fb469
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He was like modern atheists in arguing that the soul dies, there is no afterlife, all organised religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel, and angels, demons or ghosts do not exist. In his ethics he thought the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
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Matt Ridley |
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19b098b
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Lao Tzu saw this twenty-six centuries ago: 'The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.' Montesquieu's phrase for the calming effect of trade on human violence, intolerance and enmity was 'doux commerce' - sweet commerce. And he has been amply vindicated in the centuries since. The richer and more market-oriented societies have become, the nicer people have behaved. Think of the Dutch after 1600, the Swedes after 1800,..
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Matt Ridley |
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6ca5dc9
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The idea that parents shape their children's personalities is so ingrained, and still supplies so many psychoanalysts with their livelihoods, that any challenge to it is bound to meet a lot of resistance. Yet the evidence has been getting more and more clear: variations in personality are determined by a combination of genes and random influences, but not by parents. The central premise of Freudian analysis - that childhood events cause adu..
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Matt Ridley |
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7210b17
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Societies that chose 'normative monogamy', or an insistence upon sex within exclusive marriage, tended to tame their young men, improve social cohesion, balance the sex ratio, reduce the crime rate, and encourage men to work rather than fight. This made such societies more productive and less destructive, so they tended to expand at the expense of other societies.
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Matt Ridley |
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5b8816f
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Technology was made possible by division of labour: market exchange calls forth innovation.
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Matt Ridley |
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5ac7ae3
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A large, interconnected population meant faster cumulative invention - a surprising truth even to this day, as Hong Kong and Manhattan islands demonstrate.
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Matt Ridley |
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f9b1fc6
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The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology. Why pay huge fees to spend three years on one campus, earning the right to be paid not very much more in the real world than non-graduates, rather than putting together your own combination of online courses, marked and graded online, using the lectures of the best teachers in the field wherever they happen to be?
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Matt Ridley |
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5bcfbf4
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Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed. NIALL FERGUSON
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Matt Ridley |
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b381aab
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The argument is not that exchange teaches people to be kind; it is that exchange teaches people to recognise their enlightened self-interest lies in seeking cooperation.
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Matt Ridley |
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8af0344
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Karl Popper - that any theory that is incapable of falsification cannot be considered scientific.
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Matt Ridley |
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09a4b2b
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Imports are Christmas morning; exports are January's MasterCard bill. P.J. O'ROURKE
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Matt Ridley |
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29c555c
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fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.
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Matt Ridley |
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5e9e3e0
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the beauty of commerce is that when it works it rewards people for solving other people's problems. It is 'best understood as an evolutionary system, constantly creating and trying out new solutions to problems in a similar way to how evolution works in nature. Some solutions are "fitter" than others. The fittest survive and propagate. The unfit die."
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Matt Ridley |
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68db140
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George Washington said that 'Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.
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Matt Ridley |
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cc8c9f2
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firms are temporary aggregations of people to help them do their producing in such a way as to help others do their consuming.
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Matt Ridley |
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3fe0cdd
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You inherit not your IQ but your ability to develop a high IQ under certain environmental circumstances. How does one parcel that one into nature and nurture? It is frankly impossible.
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science
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Matt Ridley |
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2f37483
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and the United States made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. 'The industrialised nations whose governments invested least in science did best economically,' says Kealey, 'and they didn't do so badly in science either.
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Matt Ridley |
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72d8ad8
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In 2003, the OECD published a paper on 'sources of growth in OECD countries' between 1971 and 1998, finding to its explicit surprise that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. Yet it is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored.
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Matt Ridley |
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dc24165
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Paradoxically, depathologising people's fundamental inclinations and giving group members permission to be the way they are seemed to constitute the best insurance that their self-esteem and interpersonal effectiveness would improve.
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Matt Ridley |
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d13e070
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Brink Lindsey has pointed out. 'Despite the obvious successes of unplanned markets, despite the spectacular rise of the Internet's decentralized order, and despite the well-publicized new science of "complexity" and its study of self-organizing systems, it is still widely assumed that the only alternative to central authority is chaos."
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Matt Ridley |
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52ea3dc
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California was especially enthusiastic about eugenics. By 1933 it had forcibly sterilised more people than all other states combined. So when the Third International Congress of Eugenics gathered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1932 under the presidency of Charles Davenport, and Davenport asked, 'Can we by eugenical studies point the way to produce the superman and the superstate?', it was to California that the sup..
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Matt Ridley |
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6455784
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But until the genetic code was cracked in the 1960s, we did not know what we now know: that all life is one; seaweed is your distant cousin and anthrax one of your advanced relatives.
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Matt Ridley |
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500a287
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Nancy Wexler fears that science is now in the position of Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes.
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Matt Ridley |