298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

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.

In the 1950s it took thirty minutes work to earn the price of a McDonald’s cheeseburger; today it takes three minutes.

The simple one-way relationship that so entrances our politicians and commentators – education spending in, economic growth out – simply doesn’t exist.

It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo’s magic trick.

That is the point of agriculture: it diverts the labour of other species to providing services for human beings.

Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence.

I am just a node in a huge network of knowledge, trying to capture an ethereal and evolving entity in a few inadequate words.

Two economists recently concluded, after studying the issue, that the entire concept of food miles is ‘a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator’. Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops.

In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants, an almost unbelievable conclusion emerged: the status of a person’s job was more likely to predict their likelihood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure.