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The last century was particularly pessimistic. He shows that such gloom-mongers have always been with us, and have always been proved wrong. Ridley's real target is those doomsayers who insist that everything is going from bad to worse and something must be done about it. The book's strength, however, does not lie in its economic analysis. This blanket suspicion of government is less convincing than Ridley's enthusiasm for trade. Attempts to control markets from the top down tend only to make things worse. In Ridley's view, things work better when individual economic actors construct solutions from the bottom up. Great civilisations are built when merchants find new markets, and decline when unproductive bureaucrats strangle their enterprise. Just as trade fosters prosperity, so excessive government stifles it. Sudden advances are often followed by long periods of stagnation. Of course the path of economic progress does not always run smooth. Far better to work at one thing and let the market supply the rest.

If you really had to make everything yourself, you would be back in the stone age, scrabbling around with hand axes. From this perspective, specialisation is the essence of humanity, and self-sufficiency a misguided myth. He takes us from the hunter-gatherers who first ventured out of Africa up to the modern moguls of Silicon Valley, and shows how humanity has built innovation on innovation in its never-ending search for new gizmos that people will want to buy. Ridley makes a strong case for this thesis. I make the hooks and you catch the fish – and together we achieve something that neither of us could manage on our own. Once we cottoned on to this trick, there was no stopping us. But they never saw the point of making things they could swap. Homo erectus had a large brain and probably a rudimentary language. As he sees it, we owe the forward march of humankind to the benefits of barter. What makes us so different? Why have we come so far so quickly when our hominid predecessors were stuck in a rut for thousands of generations? Matt Ridley has a simple answer. Then we modern humans arrived, and within 100,000 years or so not only devised fish hooks and farming, but steam engines, cellophane and one-click buying. It never seemed to occur to our erectus ancestors that you could make a better hand axe. If you've seen one hand axe, you've seen them all. Once they started making axes, they stuck to the same design for more than a million years. We know this because they left crafted stone axes all over the globe.

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Ridley’s talk in Iceland is a part of a series of lectures on “Europe, Iceland and the Future of Capitalism”, organised jointly with AECR, the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists.Homo erectus ape-men were avid tool users.

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Many of his previous talks are on Youtube, for example this one on TED, and this one at Reason TV and this one at the Hoover Institution. Ridley maintains a website and a regular blog. Here is the review of his book by Samuel Brittan in Financial Times, and here a review by David Papineau in The Observer. For the book, Ridley received the Hayek Prize and the Julian Simon Prize. Ridley has criticized the exaggerations of doomsday prophets, for example about climate change After his latest book, The Rational Optimist, Ridley had a lively exchange with Bill Gates in the pages of The Wall Street Journal on whether or not there were good reasons for being optimistic about the world.

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Ridley’s best-selling books on science include: The Red Queen and the Evolution of Human Nature 1993 The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation 1996 Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters 2003: Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human 2003 Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code 2006 The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves 2010. He was for many years the scientific editor of The Economist and contributes regularly to The Wall Street Journal. in zoology from the University of Oxford in 1983. Professor Ragnar Arnason will be the moderator.īorn in 1958, Ridley graduated with a D.Phil. The event is co-hosted by the Institute of Public Administration and Politics at the University of Iceland. Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley), gives a talk about ‘Why I am a Rational Optimist’, followed by a discussion with the audience. One of today’s best-known British writers, Matt Ridley (Dr. The newly founded Icelandic Research Centre for Innovation and Economic Growth (Rannsoknarsetur um nyskopun og hagvoxt, RNH) is proud to announce a lecture Friday 27 July at 5.30–7.00 pm at Askja, the Natural Science House of the University of Iceland, in meeting hall N-132.

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