The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.
Matt RidleyIntelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up.
Matt RidleyThe message from history is so blatantly obvious - that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty - that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise. There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer.
Matt RidleyLife is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race
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