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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f596c04 | To me this is a dangerous doctrine, which justifies inflicting real pain in the here and now on disadvantaged people on the basis of forestalling a distant possibility of doom. | Matt Ridley | ||
| d0b6723 | the state has socialised the cost and privatised the reward. That | Matt Ridley | ||
| e1a7eed | What if renewable energy rolled out on a grand scale proves so environmentally damaging that it does great harm? Bio-energy, a policy intended to forestall global warming, is already killing hundreds of thousands of people each year by putting up the price of food. Various | Matt Ridley | ||
| fc2eed2 | In the United States, government spending rose from 7.5 per cent of GDP in 1913, to 27 per cent in 1960, to 30 per cent in 2000, to 41 per cent in 2011. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7160008 | When I write or speak about falling child mortality in Africa today, I can be sure I will get a response along exactly these Malthusian lines: but surely it's a bad thing if you stop poor people dying? What's the good of bringing economic growth to Africa: they will only have more babies - and more cars. Better to be cruel to be kind. Let's call it Malthusian misanthropy. And it is 180 degrees wrong. The way to get population growth to slow.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 8a0ed19 | Education is dominated by creationist thinking. The curriculum is too prescriptive and slow to change, teachers are encouraged to teach to the exam rather than to the pupils' or their own strengths, the textbooks are infused with instructions about what to think instead of how to think, teaching methods are more about instructing than learning, | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1fb96da | For me, the characteristic features of a mystical and therefore untrustworthy, theory are that it is not refutable, that it appeals to authority, that it relies heavily on anecdote, that it makes a virtue of consensus (look how many people believe like me!), and that it takes the moral high ground. You will notice that this applies to most religions. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 51b5bd0 | The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. | Matt Ridley | ||
| f0517a2 | The growth of international bureaucracies with power to determine many aspects of people's lives is a dominant feature of our age. Even the European Union is increasingly powerless, as it merely transmits to its member states rules set at higher levels. Food standards, for example, are decided by a United Nations body called the Codex Alimentarius. The rules of the banking industry are set by a committee based in Basel in Switzerland. Finan.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| d30fb87 | For more than two hundred years, on the topic of human population, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, basing itself on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale. When I began researching this book I thought of Malthusian theory, eugenics, Nazi genocide and modern population control as separate and distinct episodes in human history. I am no longer so sure. I think there is some persuasive evi.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9bfe9a2 | with the elucidation of the genetic code in 1966, Francis Crick confidently declared vitalism dead and buried. Only it still lives on in various pseudosciences. Homeopathy is based on vitalism. Its founder Samuel Hahnemann believed that diseases 'are solely spirit-like (dynamic) derangements of the spirit-like power (the vital principle) that animates the human body'. | Matt Ridley | ||
| c2b37e3 | Founded in the 1960s by an Italian industrialist and a Scottish chemist, the Club of Rome is a talking shop for the great and the good, devoted to the worship of Malthus, and meeting behind closed doors at lavish venues. Together with its affiliates it still attracts leading names, from Al Gore and Bill Clinton to the Dalai Lama and Bianca Jagger. 'The real enemy, then, is humanity itself,' the Club of Rome declaimed in a book in 1993, and .. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9f1c27d | Organic farming also originated in vitalism, its founder Rudolf Steiner believing that in order 'to influence organic life on earth through cosmic and terrestrial forces', it was necessary to 'stimulate vitalizing and harmonizing processes in the soil', an insight he acquired through clairvoyance. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1cc599e | Half of the biggest American companies of 1980 have now disappeared by take-over or bankruptcy; half of today's biggest companies did not even exist in 1980. The same is not true of government monopolies: the Internal Revenue Service and the National Health Service will not die, however much incompetence they might display. Yet most anti-corporate activists have faith in the good will of the leviathans that can force you to do business with.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4787591 | Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less,' he | Matt Ridley | ||
| af3e4c4 | A handbook for users of the Arpanet at MIT in the 1980s reminded them that 'sending electronic messages over the ARPAnet for commercial profit or political purposes is both antisocial and illegal'. The internet revolution might have happened ten years earlier if academics had not been dependent on a government network antipathetic to commercial use. Well, | Matt Ridley | ||
| 9714916 | Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 27da636 | that the flywheel of history is incremental change through trial and error, with innovation driven by recombination, and that this pertains in far more kinds of things than merely those that have genes. This | Matt Ridley | ||
| e7287c6 | It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests. As my friend Matt Ridley has written, 'Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.' Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a different reason: it gives them something to do. More generally, as I shall .. | Richard Dawkins | ||
| 9e53bab | the first century of the US Federal Reserve's existence has been a failure. Not only has there been incontinent inflation since 1913, the year the Fed came into existence (8 per cent in the preceding 120 years, 2,300 per cent in the succeeding hundred years), but there has been devastating deflation too, and more banking panics, more financial volatility, longer and deeper recessions. Even the Fed's response to the crisis of 2008 has come u.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 03a4dd9 | The war is not over, however. Even organisations like Wikipedia succumbed to the authoritarian twitch, appointing editors with special privileges who could impose their own prejudices upon certain topics. The motive was understandable - to stop entries being taken over by obsessive nutters with weird views. But of course what happened, just as in the French and Russian revolutions, was that the nutters got on the committee. The way to becom.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 1ec9f4f | The number of countries that censor the internet has grown steadily, and now stands at more than forty. | Matt Ridley | ||
| cdaa439 | The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view. [...] A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have reveale.. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 45bc771 | All Britons are descended from the same set of people a mere thirty generations ago. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 99d423c | Cities, marriage, language, music, art - these manifestations of culture all change in regular and retrospectively predictable ways, but in ways that nobody did predict, let alone direct. They evolve. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 440d4a7 | Far from being choosy, female primates seemed to be initiators of much promiscuity. Hrdy began to suggest that there was something wrong with the theory rather than the females. | Matt Ridley | ||
| e0456c5 | story of a philosopher who runs when a bear charges him and his friend. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 0545f15 | It's no good, you'll never outrun a bear," says the logical friend." | Matt Ridley | ||
| ca01132 | There is a neat economic explanation for the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherers. In terms of nutrition, women generally collect dependable, staple carbohydrates whereas men fetch precious protein. Combine the two - predictable calories from women and occasional protein from men - and you get the best of both worlds. At the cost of some extra work, women get to eat some good protein without having to chase it; men get to know wher.. | game-theory sexuality | Matt Ridley | |
| efe563c | In 2009, an artist named Thomas Thwaites set out to make his own toaster, of the sort that he could buy from a shop for about PS4. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 95634c4 | The great success of ants and termites - between them they may comprise one-third of all the animal biomass of land animals - is undoubtedly down to their division of labour. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 86d0bb2 | Neanderthals had all of these: huge brains, probably complex languages, lots of technology. But they never burst out of their niche. It is my contention that in looking inside our heads, we would be looking in the wrong place to explain this extraordinary capacity for change in the species. It was not something that happened within a brain. It was some thing that happened between brains. It was a collective phenomenon. Look | Matt Ridley | ||
| 2339acd | Lectures, says Minerva's Stephen Kosslyn, are 'a great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn'. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 05d7ae9 | The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 3d7a040 | Free-market commerce is the only system of human organisation yet devised where ordinary people are in charge - unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery and socialism. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 90318d9 | The internet has no centre and no hierarchy. All the computers that use it are equal - 'peers' in a network. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 7eccc89 | Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s, with explosive results. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 2f64364 | These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 89a3fe2 | The success of human beings depends crucially, but precariously, on numbers and connections. A few hundred people cannot sustain a sophisticated technology: trade is a vital part of the story. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 2f4fc4f | Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 28f64f7 | The truth is that the wild west was without much government, but it was very far from lawless, or even violent. | Matt Ridley | ||
| a082585 | Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones? | Matt Ridley | ||
| 0b49650 | When you think about it, it is rather strange that liberated, freethinking people, when their children reach the age of five, send them off to a sort of prison for the next twelve to sixteen years. | Matt Ridley | ||
| 4dca54a | These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon. | Matt Ridley |