Matt Ridley

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Matt Ridley bigraphy, stories - economist

Matt Ridley : biography

07 February 1958 –

Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, FRSL, FMedSci, DL (born 7 February 1958), known commonly as Matt Ridley, is a British scientist, journalist, and popular author – official website Matt Ridley and a member of the House of Lords.

Ridley has written several science books including The Red Queen (1994), Genome (1999) and The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010). In 2011, he won the Hayek Prize, which "honors the book published within the past two years that best reflects Hayek’s vision of economic and individual liberty." Ridley also gave the Angus Millar Lecture on "scientific heresy" at the RSA in 2011. He was recently elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and won the Julian Simon award in March 2012. Ridley became the chairman of the bank Northern Rock in 2004, resigning after a bank run in 2007.

Debate over Ridley’s political philosophy

In a 2006 edition of the on-line 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", 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. In the same newspaper Terence Kealey defended libertarianism, arguing that the performance of the government’s regulatory agencies confirmed scepticism about state intervention, because the government had crowded out the market’s own regulatory mechanisms.

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. 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." On 19 June 2010 Monbiot countered with another article on the Guardian website, further questioning Ridley’s claims and his response.

In November 2010, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy exchange between Ridley and Microsoft founder Bill Gates on topics discussed in Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist.

 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 recently 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."

In an email exchange, Ridley responded to environmental activist Mark Lynas’ repeated charges of a right wing agenda with the following reply:

Northern Rock

Ridley was chairman of Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, having joined the board in 1994. His father had been chairman from 1987 to 1992 and sat on the board for 30 years.The Times 19 September 2007