Matt Ridley
Tim Worstall riffs on William Baumol to fascinating effect: One way of putting which is that increasing labour productivity in services is more difficult than improving it in manufacturing. Canonically, we cannot get a symphony orchestra to be more productive by playing at twice the speed. So, ally this with wages being determined by average […]
Matt Ridley
As a general rule, if George Monbiot agrees with you, start worrying you may be wrong. The Fukushima nuclear crisis has made Monbiot a fan of nuclear power, at just the time when my doubts have been growing. You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. […]
Wealth and technology make the death toll smaller, not larger
Matt Ridley
The biggest natural killers of the last decade — Haiti’s earthquake, Burma’s cyclone and Sumatra’s tsunami — were all far, far more lethal because they struck poor countries. Robert Hardman in the Daily Mail writes: Of course, the modern world is better equipped than the ancients to survive these cataclysmic disasters. We have stronger buildings, better […]
Matt Ridley
Judith Curry has written two blogs here and here on the significance of the “hide the decline” email in the Climategate affair. They have attracted a torrent of comments, over 1400 so far, many of them interesting. I have left a comment there as follows: As a science journalist who first wrote about […]
Matt Ridley
A small increase in downpours would be vastly offset by a huge fall in winter deaths By Matt Ridley and Indur Goklany There is a lot of fuss about two new papers arguing, from mathematical models, that extreme downpours have become and will become more common in the northern hemisphere and specifically in Britain as […]
Dunbar’s number and individual differences
Matt Ridley
Certain brain lobes are bigger in those with more friends My latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal is on Dunbar’s number. As far as scientific accolades go, a Nobel Prize is rare, a law named after you is rarer, your own unit of measurement is more elusive still, but the most […]
Matt Ridley
A debate on Al Jazeera I took part in a debate on whether we can feed the world on Al Jazeera television with Dvaid Frost. Video here.
Matt Ridley
Monbiotic logic: call for peaceful debate and for people to die George Monbiot is advertising a speaking tour with a poster of himself as a boxer about to hit somebody. And yet he says in the Guardian: Let’s debate the issues and argue over the facts. But let’s drop the vitriolic abuse, and stop suggesting […]
Matt Ridley
The trajectories of missiles must have interested our ancestors deeply My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about parabolas, the evolution of throwing and angry birds: The spectacular trajectory of the Angry Birds computer game, from obscure Finnish iPhone app to global ubiquity-there are board games, maybe even movies in the […]
Matt Ridley
More evidence that ocean acidification is unlikely to do harm David Middleton has an interesting essay on ocean pH here. Like me he finds the literature replete with data suggesting that a realistic reduction in alkalinity caused by CO2 increases will do no net harm to marine ecosystems. For example: A recent paper in Geology (Ries et […]
