298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

Obama himself may have turned out to be something of a dud, but the cult of presidential personality that has dominated American politics for decades now still persists.

The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time.

Today we are still in thrall to Great Man history, if only because we like reading biography. American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land. Never was this messianic mood more extreme than on the day Barack Obama won the presidency.

The more a country adopted central planning, the better its education system did, but the worse its economic performance – not least because, like Egypt, it churned out many would-be bureaucrats trained to do the central planning.

The moral of this story is that autocrats get too much credit for episodes of increased economic freedom,’ wrote William Easterly.

As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth.

The internet, in other words, may be the best forum for crime, but it is also the best forum for free and fair exchange the world has ever seen.

And the good news is that there is no inevitable end to this process. The more people are drawn into the global division of labour, the more people can specialise and exchange, the wealthier we will all be. Moreover, along the way there is no reason we cannot solve the problems that beset us, of economic crashes, population explosions, climate change and terrorism, of poverty, AIDS, depression and obesity.

Thanks to a newly perfected technology, the camel, the people of the Arabian Peninsula found themselves well placed to profit from trade between East and West.