“So those who believe in science as philosophy are increasingly estranged from science as an institution.”
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“One motivation: Pessimism sells. “You don’t get blamed for being too pessimistic, but you do get attention. It’s like climate science. Modeled forecasts of a future that is scary is much more likely to get you on television.”
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Science begins with guessing and then proceeds to proof.
Scientists is a susceptible to cognitive biases as any human and must work to overcome them.
Separating the cranks from the visionaries requires judgment and patience.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Politics can and often do pollute science.
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Populism on the right has risen from the neglect of the values that uphold the market and lack of recognition of the market’s effect on our social values.
Populism on the left has risen from an unfulfilled promise of more democracy and then frustrating it with the administrative state, executive orders and judicial decrees.
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from National Review, Matt Ridley: Climate Change’s Rational Optimist “This is a huge global phenomenon, which is bringing enormous financial benefits to agriculture,” Ridley told me. “That means we have a genuine benefit to carbon dioxide that surely must be taken
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Progressivism can be viewed as socialism lite, paying homage to the great progress of capitalism while acknowledging some of the limitations of a free market. Social and economic theories develop, mature and evolve as they face the hard tests of
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The Secret History of the Minimum Wage by Diedre McKloskey at Reason Friedman’s Sampler from the WSJ in 2006 What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them
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Don Boudreaux in his excellent Cafe Hayek quotes from Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything. I consider this the best new book of the year followed by Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic. Ridley compares the spontaneous order of evolution with
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The internet gave rise to Google and Facebook. The iPhone gave rise to Uber. The ideologies are important only to the extent that they facilitated ideas. Our current development is less dependent on assets and physical capital than ideas. We
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Matt Ridley brings some objectivity to an issue where it is sorely lacking- Climate Change It is a long post and is a compilation of a few of his articles: excerpts: The climate change debate has been polarized into a
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From Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser at The Wall Street Journal, Your Complete Guide to the Climate Debate; To put it bluntly, climate change and its likely impact are proving slower and less harmful than we feared, while decarbonization of the
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Michael Shermer reviews Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything in The Wall Street Journal excerpt of the review Examples abound in Mr. Ridley’s analysis. To cite a few: “The growth of technology, the sanitation-driven health revolution, the quadrupling of farm
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From The Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley, The Myth of Basic Science Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either.
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Matt Ridley writes My life as a climate lukewarmer- The polarisation of the climate debate has gone too far in his blog, The Rational Optimist. Excerpts: What sealed my apostasy from climate alarm was the extraordinary history of the famous “hockey stick” graph,
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Matt Ridley writes in The Wall Street Journal, Fossil Fuels Will Save the World (Really) excerpts: Notice, too, the ways in which fossil fuels have contributed to preserving the planet. As the American author and fossil-fuels advocate Alex Epstein points
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Matt Ridley writes My life as a climate lukewarmer- The polarisation of the climate debate has gone too far in his blog, The Rational Optimist. Excerpts: I was not always a lukewarmer. When I first started writing about the threat of global warming
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Matt Ridley writes My life as a climate lukewarmer- The polarisation of the climate debate has gone too far in his blog, The Rational Optimist. Excerpts: I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real,
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Do people mind more about inequality than poverty? from Matt Ridley at his blog The Rational Optimist Excerpt: Here’s another question that I fancy the chimps would beat the people at: did poverty and inequality in Britain increase or decrease
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The real risks of cherry picking scientific data by Matt Ridley and his blog The Rational Optimist Excerpt: The Tamiflu tale is that some years ago the pharmaceutical company Roche produced evidence that persuaded the World Health Organisation that Tamiflu was effective
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Do people mind more about inequality than poverty? from Matt Ridley at his blog The Rational Optimist Excerpt: If you measure consumption inequality, it is far lower than pre-tax income inequality, because the top 40 per cent of earners pay more
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