Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, DL, FRSL, FMedSci (born 7 February 1958),[3][1] is a British science writer, journalist and businessman. He is known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics,[5] and has been a regular contributor to The Times newspaper. Ridley was chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, during which period it experienced the first run on a British bank in 130 years. He resigned, and the bank was bailed out by the UK government; this led to its nationalisation.[6]
From 2010 to 2013, Ridley wrote the weekly "Mind and Matter" column for The Wall Street Journal, which "explores the science of human nature and its implications".[18]
Since 2013, Ridley has written a weekly column for The Times on science, the environment, and economics.[11][19]
Ridley wrote the majority of the main article of the August 2017 edition of BBC Focus magazine.[20] The article explains his scepticism regarding resource depletion, challenging the widespread belief that resource depletion is an important issue. He cites various previous resource scares as his evidence.
Northern Rock, 1994–2007
In 1994, Ridley became a board member of the UK bank Northern Rock. His father had been a board member for 30 years, and chairman from 1987 to 1992. Ridley became chairman in 2004.[21]
In September 2007, Northern Rock became the first British bank since 1878 to suffer a run on its finances, at the start of the 2007–2008 financial crisis. The bank applied to the Bank of England for emergency liquidity funding at the beginning of the crisis,[22] but failed, and Northern Rock was nationalised. Ridley resigned as chairman in October 2007.[1][23] A parliamentary committee criticised him for not recognising the risks of the bank's financial strategy and "harming the reputation of the British banking industry".[23]
Until 2010, he was a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, which organises conferences to further education and understanding of Britons and North Americans.[26] He participated in a February 2000 Ditchley conference.[27]
Patronage
The Banks Group and Blagdon estate developed and sponsored the construction of Northumberlandia, or the Lady of the North, a land sculpture in the shape of a reclining female figure, which was part-commissioned and sponsored by Ridley.[28] Now run by a charity group called the Land Trust,[29] it is the largest landform in the world depicting the human form, and, through private funding, cost £3m to build.[30] Attracting over 100,000 people per year, the Northumberland art project, tourism and cultural landmark has won a global landscape architecture award, and has been named 'Miss World'.[31]
The Royal Agricultural Society of England awarded the Bledisloe Gold Medal in 2015 to Ridley for the work done on his Blagdon estate, saying that it "wanted to highlight the extensive environmental improvement work that has been undertaken across the land".[32]
Publications
Ridley has written a number of popular science books, listed below.
In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Alice meets the Red Queen who stays in the same place no matter how fast she runs. This book champions a Red Queen theory for the evolution of sexual reproduction: that it evolved so that the resultant genetic variation would thwart constantly mutating parasites.
The Rational Optimist primarily focuses on the benefits of the innate human tendency to trade goods and services. Ridley argues that this trait is the source of human prosperity, and that as people increasingly specialize in their skill sets, we will have increased trade and even more prosperity.[34] It was shortlisted for the 2011 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize.[35]
In The Evolution of Everything, Ridley "makes the case for evolution, rather than design, as the force that has shaped much of culture, technology and society, and that even now is shaping our future." He argues that "Change in technology, language, mortality and society is incremental, inexorable, gradual and spontaneous...Much of the human world is the result of human action, but not of human design; it emerges from the interactions of millions, not from the plans of a few."[41] The science writer Peter Forbes, writing in The Independent, describes the book as "Ridley's magnum opus, ... decades in the making." Forbes states that Ridley was inspired by the Roman poet Lucretius's long work on "atheistical atomism", De rerum natura, whose "arguments seem uncannily modern: like those of a Richard Dawkins 2000 years avant la lettre." Forbes found the chapter on technology to be "utterly convincing", the most satisfying in the book. But he finds the "sustained polemic on behalf of libertarian anti-State ideas not a million miles from those of the US Republican Tea Party." Forbes calls Ridley "a heretic on most counts", stating that the book has many excesses. All the same, he considers the book necessary reading.[42]
How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, 2020
This book argues that innovation is a disorganized, bottom-up process that emerges through the aggregate work of many low-level individuals, rather than the work of solitary geniuses at the top. Moreover, innovation is poorly understood by economists, and it is often impeded by politicians. Ridley makes his case by examining historical examples, rather than appealing solely to abstract principles.
Ridley's first book was Warts and All: The Men Who Would Be Bush (1989), which chronicled the evolution of George H. W. Bush's public image during the 1988 United States presidential election. Ridley has since described his first book as "bad" and has expressed gratitude that few people know about it.[48] He no longer promotes the book on his personal website.[49]
Ridley's 2010 TED conference talk, "When Ideas Have Sex", received over 2 million views.[50] Ridley argues that exchange and specialisation are the features of human society that lead to the development of new ideas, and that human society is therefore a "collective brain".[51]
Political and scientific views
Role of government regulation
In a 2006 edition of the online magazine Edge – the third culture, Ridley wrote a response to the question "What's your dangerous idea?" which was entitled "Government is the problem not the solution",[52] in which he describes his attitude to government regulation: "In every age and at every time there have been people who say we need more regulation, more government. Sometimes, they say we need it to protect exchange from corruption, to set the standards and police the rules, in which case they have a point, though often they exaggerate it... The dangerous idea we all need to learn is that the more we limit the growth of government, the better off we will all be."
In 2007, the environmentalist George Monbiot wrote an article in The Guardian connecting Ridley's libertarian economic philosophy and the £27 billion failure of Northern Rock.[7] On 1 June 2010 Monbiot followed up his previous article in the context of Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist, which had just been published. Monbiot took the view that Ridley had failed to learn from the collapse of Northern Rock.[53]
Ridley has responded to Monbiot on his website, stating "George Monbiot's recent attack on me in the Guardian is misleading. I do not hate the state. In fact, my views are much more balanced than Monbiot's selective quotations imply."[54] On 19 June 2010, Monbiot countered with another article on the Guardian website, further questioning Ridley's claims and his response.[55] Ridley was then defended by Terence Kealey in a further article published on the Guardian website.[56]
In November 2010, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy exchange between Ridley and the Microsoft founder Bill Gates on topics discussed in Ridley's book The Rational Optimist.[57][58] Gates said that "What Mr. Ridley fails to see is that worrying about the worst case—being pessimistic, to a degree—can actually help to drive a solution"; Ridley said "I am certainly not saying, 'Don't worry, be happy.' Rather, I'm saying, 'Don't despair, be ambitious.'"
Ridley summarised his own views on his political philosophy during the 2011 Hayek Lecture: "[T]hat the individual is not – and had not been for 120,000 years – able to support his lifestyle; that the key feature of trade is that it enables us to work for each other not just for ourselves; that there is nothing so anti-social (or impoverishing) as the pursuit of self sufficiency; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress."[59]
In an email exchange, Ridley responded to the environmental activist Mark Lynas' repeated charges of a right-wing agenda with the following reply:
On the topic of labels, you repeatedly call me a member of "the right". Again, on what grounds? I am not a reactionary in the sense of not wanting social change: I make this abundantly clear throughout my book. I am not a hierarchy lover in the sense of trusting the central authority of the state: quite the opposite. I am not a conservative who defends large monopolies, public or private: I celebrate the way competition causes creative destruction that benefits the consumer against the interest of entrenched producers. I do not preach what the rich want to hear—the rich want to hear the gospel of Monbiot, that technological change is bad, that the hoi polloi should stop clogging up airports, that expensive home-grown organic food is the way to go, that big business and big civil service should be in charge. So in what sense am I on the right? I am a social and economic liberal: I believe that economic liberty leads to greater opportunities for the poor to become less poor, which is why I am in favour of it. Market liberalism and social liberalism go hand in hand in my view.[60]
Ridley argues that the capacity of humans for change and social progress is underestimated, and denies what he sees as overly pessimistic views of global climate change[61] and Western birthrate decline.
Climate change
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In 2014, the Wall Street Journalop-ed written by Ridley, "Whatever Happened to Global Warming?" suggesting that climate scientists' explanations were implausible, was challenged by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University's Earth Institute. Sachs termed "absurd" Ridley's characterization of a paper in Science magazine by the two scientists Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung. Sachs challenged Ridley's contentions, and claimed that the "paper's conclusions are the very opposite of Ridley's".[62][63] Ridley replied that 'it is ludicrous, nasty and false to accuse me of lying or "totally misrepresenting the science..I have asked Mr. Sachs to withdraw the charges more than once now on Twitter. He has refused to do so ...."'[64]
Friends of the Earth has connected Ridley's opposition to climate science to his ties to the coal industry. He is the owner of land in the north-east of England on which the Shotton Surfacecoal mine operates, and receives payments for the mine. In 2016 he was accused of lobbying for the coal industry, based on an email he had authored to the UK government's energy minister describing a Texas-based company which planned to sequester carbon into materials useful for industrial chemical manufacturing. The complaint was summarily dismissed by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.[65]
Shale gas and fracking
Ridley was one of the earliest commentators to spot the economic significance of shale gas. He is a proponent of fracking.[66] However, he has been found to have breached the Parliamentary Code of Conduct by the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards for not orally disclosing in debates on the subject personal interests worth at least £50,000 in Weir Group,[67] which has been described as "the world's largest provider of special equipment used in the process" of fracking.[68]
Ridley wrote a 2017 column making the case for free-market anticapitalism. He makes the case that it is misleading to refer to 'capitalism' and 'markets' as the same thing because "commerce, enterprise and markets are – to me – the very opposite of corporatism and even of 'capitalism', if by that word you mean capital-intensive organisations with monopolistic ambitions. Markets and innovation are the creative-destructive forces that undermine, challenge and reshape corporations and public bureaucracies on behalf of consumers. So big business is just as much the enemy as big government, and big business in hock to big government is sometimes the worst of all."[71][72]
COVID-19
Ridley wrote in May 2020 that "research into the origins of the new coronavirus raises questions about how it became so infectious in human beings" and included as one possibility "perhaps laboratories".[73] His 2021 book Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 written with Alina Chan, which received mixed reviews, ascribes the most likely proximate origin of the virus to the COVID-19 lab leak theory.[45][47]
In 2011, the Manhattan Institute awarded Ridley its $50,000 Hayek Prize for his book The Rational Optimist. In his acceptance speech, Ridley said: "As Hayek understood, it is human collaboration that is necessary for society to work... the key feature of trade is that it enables us to work for each other not just for ourselves; that attempts at self-sufficiency are the true form of selfishness as well as the quick road to poverty; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress."[78] In 2011, Ridley gave the Angus Millar Lecture on "scientific heresy" at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA).[79]
In 2012, on the death of his father, Ridley became the 5th Viscount Ridley and Baron Wensleydale.[1] He is also the 9th Baronet Ridley.[80] In 2013, he was elected as a hereditary peer to membership in the House of Lords, as a member of the Conservative Party.[81]
^Science Salon Podcast #117: Michael Shermer with Matt Ridley – How Innovation Works: and Why It Flourishes in Freedom. May 26, 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A_zzJKDXdI>.
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