Quotes from Matt Ridley

because the great beauty of embryo development, the bit that human beings find so hard to grasp, is that it is a totally decentralised process...no cell need wait for instructions from authority; every cell can act on its own information and the signals it receives from its neighbours. We do not organise societies that way...Perhaps we should try.

A corollary of this perspective is that there is no such thing as a perfect market, an equilibrium or an end state.

Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.

If God is not needed for morality, and if language is a spontaneous system, then perhaps the king, the pope and the official are not quite as vital to the functioning of an orderly society as they pretend?

The new and crucial ingredient was not the availability of capital, but the advent of market-tested, consumer-driven innovation.

that the flywheel of history is incremental change through trial and error, with innovation driven by recombination, and that this pertains in far more kinds of things than merely those that have genes. This

Modern philosophers who aspire to rise above the sordid economic reality of the world would do well to recall that this trade made possible the cross-fertilisation of ideas that led to great discoveries.

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all. It is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry to put down dissent and originality,' said H.L. Mencken.

This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production

God, Smith just as surely defenestrated Leviathan.

Gutenberg made printed books affordable, which kicked off an increase in literacy, which created a market for spectacles, which led to work on lenses that in turn resulted in the invention of microscopes and telescopes, which unleashed the discovery that the earth went round the sun.

All that determinists are asking you to accept is that there cannot be effect without cause.

The brutal campaign of mass sterilisation, forced abortion and infanticide was exacerbated by the voluntary murder of baby girls on a genocidal scale as parents tried to ensure that their one legal child was a boy. Fertility fell, but not much faster than it would have done if a policy of economic development, public health and education had been adopted instead. What

For most of history, the state has been an 'ever-present predator and all-around abuser of human rights'

And even modern governments have an element of the crime syndicate about them. Police forces repeatedly harbour criminals all over the world: the US Department of Homeland Security is only a little more than a decade old, but in 2011 over three hundred of its employees were arrested for crimes such as drug smuggling, child pornography and selling intelligence to drug cartels. Like

Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones? In recent years the United States government (not the military) has purchased 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, enough to shoot the entire population five times over.

Fundamentally, other animals do not do barter.

Before Medicaid and Medicare existed, writes the American politician and former doctor Ron Paul, 'every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate, and free medical care for the poor was the norm'.

Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons.

Today, the drumbeat has become a cacophony. The generation that has experiences more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones, and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity.

This was socialism without the state. There is no doubt that it would have continued to expand and evolve.

The moral of this story is that autocrats get too much credit for episodes of increased economic freedom,' wrote William Easterly.

Smith went one step further, and suggested that morality emerged unbidden and unplanned from a peculiar feature of human nature: sympathy.

The influential 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica goes to the opposite extreme from the Encyclopédie: social history is buried within biography. So to read about the post-Roman world you must look up the entry on Attila the Hun.