Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up.
Matt RidleyProsperity has brought complications. Our lives are busier, faster, more stressful. They're nostalgic for a simpler, slower time.
Matt RidleyHow much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.
Matt RidleyThe interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. In the gap between those words lies freedom.
Matt RidleyBecause it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.
Matt Ridley