298 Quotes by Matt Ridley

Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim.

It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It.

The internet has no centre and no hierarchy. All the computers that use it are equal – ‘peers’ in a network.

Countries where commerce thrives have far less violence than countries where it is suppressed. Does.

But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is. As a result, again and again we mistake cause for effect; we blame the sailing boat for the wind, or credit the bystander with causing the event.

Perhaps the internet has returned us to a world a bit like the Stone Age in which there is no place for a fraudster to hide.

Education is not a skyhook from which to hang economic policy; it is an emergent phenomenon.

It follows a narrative, going from one stage to the next; it creeps rather than jumps; it has its own spontaneous momentum, rather than being driven from outside; it has no goal or end in mind; and it largely happens by trial and error – a version of natural selection.

Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above.