Quotes from Matt Ridley

Getting richer is not the only or even the best way of getting happier. Social and political liberation is far more effective, says the political scientist Ronald Ingleheart: the big gains in happiness come from living in a society that frees you to make choices about your lifestyle – about where to live, who to marry, how to express your sexuality and so on.

Whenever you see the word equilibrium in a textbook, blot it out.' It is wrong because it assumes perfect competition, perfect knowledge and perfect rationality, none of which do or can exist.

For instance, given the choice between a safe, comfortable and long life for the individual or a risky, tiring and dangerous attempt to breed, virtually all animals (and indeed plants) choose the latter.

Friedrich Hayek argued, knowledge is dispersed throughout society, because each person has a special perspective. Knowledge can never be gathered together in one place. It is collective, not individual.

Indeed, their bodies are designed with planned obsolescence called ageing that causes them to decay after they reach breeding age – or, in the case of squid or Pacific salmon, to die at once. None of this makes any sense unless you view the body as a vehicle for the genes, as a tool used by genes in their competition to perpetuate themselves. The body's survival is secondary to the goal of

As Heraclitus put it, 'Nothing endures but change.

You inherit not your IQ but your ability to develop a high IQ under certain environmental circumstances. How does one parcel that one into nature and nurture? It is frankly impossible.

Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are random, in which case we are not responsible for them.

If culture consisted simply of learning habits from others, it would soon stagnate. For culture to turn cumulative, ideas needed to meet and mate.

Male gorillas monopolise their mates, so their sperm meets no competitors; male chimpanzees share their mates, so each needs to produce large quantities of sperm and mate frequently to increase his chances of being the father. It also explains why male birds sing so hard when already 'married'. They are looking for 'affairs'.

Depending on whose estimate you choose, and how you correct for inflation, the average person alive in the world today earns in a year between ten and twenty times as much money, in real terms, as the average person earned in 1800. Or rather, he or she can afford ten or twenty times as many goods or services.

The ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are all among the least capitalist. The ten most peaceful – Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Belgium and Norway – are all firmly capitalist.

One survey shows that throughout the world and throughout history, from thirteenth-century England to modern Canada, from Kenya to Mexico, men have killed men much more often – on average about ninety-seven

One survey shows that throughout the world and throughout history, from thirteenth-century England to modern Canada, from Kenya to Mexico, men have killed men much more often – on average about ninety-seven times more often – than women have killed women.

As Friedrich Hayek first clearly saw, knowledge 'never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess'.

Ultimatum Game

There is no country in the world that has a higher birth rate than it had in 1960, and in the less developed world as a whole the birth rate has approximately halved.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and the United States made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. 'The industrialised nations whose governments invested least in science did best economically,' says Kealey, 'and they didn't do so badly in science either.

China, meanwhile, was heading the other way, into stagnation and poverty. China went from a state of economic and technological exuberance in around AD 1000 to one of dense population, agrarian backwardness and desperate poverty in 1950. According to Angus Maddison's estimates, it was the only region in the world with a lower GDP per capita in 1950 than in 1000. The blame for this lies squarely with China's governments.

In 2003, the OECD published a paper on 'sources of growth in OECD countries' between 1971 and 1998, finding to its explicit surprise that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. Yet it is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored.

Letting good evolve, while doing bad, has been the dominant theme of history. That is why the news is full of only bad things being done, but we find when they are over that great good has happened unheralded. Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.

Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top–down description of the world, and a top–down prescription by which we should live.

there is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance.

the universe was not created for or about human beings, that we are not special, and there was no Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty in the distant past, but only a primitive battle for survival.