WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

The deliberate frustration of golden rice is a humanitarian crime Belated posting of my recent Times column on golden rice with links: It was over harlequin ducks that we bonded. Ten years ago, at a meeting in Monterey, California, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, I bumped into […]

On the opportunity costs of huge infrastructure projects My latest column in The Times: This is an article about a railway, but it begins with a wall; bear with me. I live not far from the line of Hadrian’s Wall and I often take visitors to marvel at its almost 1,900-year-old stones. That the Romans […]

More than just a war hero and victim of persecution My Times column: Tomorrow the House of Lords gives a second reading to Lord Sharkey’s Bill to pardon Alan Turing, the mathematician, computer pioneer and code-cracking hero of the Second World War. In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for being gay (he had reported a burglary […]

The Jevons paradox in medical technology My column in The Times on healthcare costs: Babies got cheaper this week. Twice. First, Belgian scientists announced that their new method has the potential to cut the costs of some in-vitro fertilisation treatments from £5,000 to below £200. Their cut-price recipe requires little more than baking soda and […]

The extreme weather scam exposed in a new book My review of Taxing Air, by Bob Carter and John Spooner, is in The Australian newspaper: WHEN the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show […]

Evidence, not consensus, is what counts My latest (and last) Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Last week a friend chided me for not agreeing with the scientific consensus that climate change is likely to be dangerous. I responded that, according to polls, the “consensus” about climate change only extends to the […]

Oil prices look set to fall as America exploits a shale cornucopia My Times column: Exciting as Britain’s latest shale gas estimate is — 47 years’ supply or more — it pales beside what is happening in the United States. There shale gas is old hat; the shale oil revolution is proving a world changer, […]

Fashionable attacks on choice are not supported by good evidence I have an article in Spiked! on the the tyranny of consumer choice: This summer at TED Global in Edinburgh, a lively networking conference, there was a talk on one of the true and terrible scourges of the modern world. This is a bit of […]

Genomics helps head off cancer, but cures remain elusive My column in The Times: Preventing cancer is proving a lot easier than curing it. The announcement that the NHS will fund five-year courses of the drugs tamoxifen or raloxifene for healthy women who are genetically predisposed to get breast and ovarian cancer is overdue. The […]

Striking a balance between intellectual property and freedom to innovate The economist Arthur Laffer is reputed to have drawn his famous curve—showing that beyond a certain point higher taxes generate lower revenue—on a paper napkin at a dinner with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in the Washington Hotel in 1974. Another economist, Alex Tabarrok of George […]