298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race.

Vernon Smith and his colleagues have long confirmed that markets in goods and services for immediate consumption – haircuts and hamburgers – work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation; while markets in assets are so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all.

The world’s cities already contain half the world’s people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world’s land area.

As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size. Erectus.

It makes more sense to see the body as serving the needs of the genes than vice versa. Bottom–up.

Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.

Even allowing for the hundreds of millions who still live in abject poverty, disease and want, this generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light-years, nanometres, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles, and of course dollars.

Just like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience, even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts, and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake.

Today, of Americans officially designated as ‘poor’, 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these.