Quotes from Matt Ridley

But is trade made possible by the milk of human kindness, or the acid of human self-interest?

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.

at this point, the analysis of gene expression in the brain isn't prectical because current (and foreseeable)techniques require that we analyze a piece of brain tissue. Most people find that unpleasant.

men have killed men much more often – on average about ninety-seven times more often – than women have killed women.

if sympathy allows you to please yourself by pleasing others, are you being selfish or altruistic?

What is miraculous is that in modern society you can trust and be trusted by a shopkeeper you do not know.

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.

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.

It is not confined to genetic systems, but explains the way that virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion.

As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size. Erectus

the rich are innately cleverer than the poor, which seems generally unlikely

The simple one-way relationship that so entrances our politicians and commentators – education spending in, economic growth out – simply doesn't exist.

the first century of the US Federal Reserve's existence has been a failure. Not only has there been incontinent inflation since 1913, the year the Fed came into existence (8 per cent in the preceding 120 years, 2,300 per cent in the succeeding hundred years), but there has been devastating deflation too, and more banking panics, more financial volatility, longer and deeper recessions.

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

It is the customer who determines what a business is.

The success of trust-based peer organizations such as eBay, Wikipedia, and the open-source movement, indicates that trust is a highly expandable network property.

By 2010 the internet had roughly as many hyperlinks as the brain has synapses, and a significant proportion of the whispering that goes on within the internet originates in devices rather than people. It is already virtually impossible to turn the internet off.

Google has likewise turned itself into a trial-and-error company, by encouraging employees to spend 20 per cent of their time on their own projects.

I find the world is full of people who think that their dependence on others is decreasing, or that they would be better off if they were more self-sufficient, or that technological progress has brought no improvement in the standard of living, or that the world is steadily deteriorating, or that the exchange of things and ideas is a superfluous irrelevance.

The Planned Parenthood Foundation was founded in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, who thought philanthropy would 'perpetuate constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents'.

So plants can withstand almost any loss, and regenerate easily. They are utterly decentralised.

In 2009, an artist named Thomas Thwaites set out to make his own toaster, of the sort that he could buy from a shop for about £4.

every innovation to this day is the result of thousands of people exchanging ideas.

This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and a degree of randomness, or trial and error, in innovation. To say that culture 'evolves' is not metaphorical.