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This appeared in The Daily Mail; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14239533/MATT-RIDLEY-Ozempic-weight-loss-drugs-end-obesity-illnesses.html Imagine if you could eat your fill on Christmas day then dial down your appetite for January. Good news: such a prospect may be within sight. Weight-loss drugs are getting better and achieving results where decades of hectoring and dieting have failed – in yet another miracle of […]

This appeared in the Spectator; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/wuhan-wager-the-400-bio-bet-that-predicted-the-pandemic/ At the end of the year, one of the world’s most renowned scientists will send $400 to a charity to settle a wager with another of the world’s most renowned scientists. We don’t yet know which will win, but it is likely to be the wrong one, in my […]

Appeared in The Telegraph; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/12/06/explosive-truth-about-origin-covid-19-emerge/ Trump’s new lieutenants, Jay Bhattacharya and John Ratcliffe, are convinced that a lab leak was probably the source It is now five years since we woke to the news of a new outbreak of infectious pneumonia in China. Retelling the story of those early days of the Covid pandemic helps […]

This appeared in The Daily Mail; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14134949/MATT-RIDLEY-Labours-car-industry-wrecking-policy-Chinese-laughing.html   Unlucky Luton. The miserable news that Stellantis, the owner of Vauxhall, is considering laying off 1,100 workers from its van manufacturing plant is a hammer blow to the town. What makes it all the more painful is the knowledge that the damage is entirely avoidable and the […]

Appeared in the Spectator; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-experts-who-enabled-rfk-jrs-rise/ The nomination of husky-voiced, musclebound Robert F. Kennedy Jr – who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park – to be secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration has horrified ‘experts’, according to the BBC. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator […]

Appeared in The Telegraph; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/16/time-to-end-ludicrous-cop-jamboree-eco-summit-baku/ Eco-summits in petro-tyrannies sound like something out of a comic novel. Sadly, they are all too real. There is something poetic in the way that the delegates attending the 11-day COP29 climate conference in Baku were forced to listen to their moustachioed autocrat host, Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, call […]

Who is to blame for the devastating floods that hit Valencia on 29 October? The mob that surrounded King Felipe at the weekend, and drove the prime minister out of town with a hail of mud and stones, was angry at the failure to forecast the flood and warn people to get out of its […]

How is it possible that the public sector is no more productive today than it was in 1996, before the internet took off? Britain has a chronic productivity problem. As the American economy marches upwards in output per person, Britain limps behind. As Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes and Sam Bowman have calculated, if GDP per hour […]

Only today the tax-grabbing barons are public sector fat cats.. and you’re the peasant funding their gold-plated pay rises Next week, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, apparently plans to raise the rate of national insurance paid by employers. But the government itself is a large employer, through the NHS for example. It has now occurred to […]

Electricity is magical stuff. From a couple of tiny holes in a wall comes an apparently endless supply of invisible, weightless, silent ether that turns instantly into light, heat, motion or information at your command. It is a metaphor for the modern economy: we use pure energy to create useful outcomes in the real world. […]