Quotes from Matt Ridley

What if morality itself was not handed down from the Judeo-Christian God as a prescription? And was not even the imitation of a Platonic ideal, but was a spontaneous thing produced by social interaction among people seeking to find ways to get along?

Education is dominated by creationist thinking. The curriculum is too prescriptive and slow to change, teachers are encouraged to teach to the exam rather than to the pupils' or their own strengths, the textbooks are infused with instructions about what to think instead of how to think, teaching methods are more about instructing than learning

When you think about it, it is rather strange that liberated, freethinking people, when their children reach the age of five, send them off to a sort of prison for the next twelve to sixteen years.

This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.

These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.

if commercial behaviour might make people more moral.

Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

That is the point of agriculture: it diverts the labour of other species to providing services for human beings.

When I go into the local superstore, I never see people driven to misery by the impossibility of choice. I see people choosing.

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.

firms are temporary aggregations of people to help them do their producing in such a way as to help others do their consuming.

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.

The more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary.

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.

Most species do not change their habits during their few million years on earth or alter their lifestyle much in different parts of their range.

These new people had something special: they were not prisoners of their ecological niche, but could change their habits quite easily if prey disappeared, or better opportunities arose.

Top–down language teaching just does not work well – it's like learning to ride a bicycle in theory, without ever getting on one.

In civilized society,' wrote Adam Smith, an individual 'stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.

It is when we go beyond instinct that we seem most idiosyncratically human. Perhaps, as Darwin suggested, the difference is one of degree rather than kind; it is quantitative, not qualitative.

Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs.

For me, the characteristic features of a mystical and therefore untrustworthy, theory are that it is not refutable, that it appeals to authority, that it relies heavily on anecdote, that it makes a virtue of consensus (look how many people believe like me!), and that it takes the moral high ground. You will notice that this applies to most religions.

Female monkeys, unaware that they are slaves to cultural stereotypes, like things with faces. Male monkeys, unaware that they are doing the bidding of human sexists, like things with moving parts.

the market system makes self interest into something thoroughly virtuous.' This is the extraordinary feature of markets: just as they can turn many individually irrational individuals into a collectively rational outcome, so they can turn many individually selfish motives into a collectively kind result.