The Evolution of Everything Quotes

“Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“Market failure is a favourite phrase; government failure is not.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to lead his people to the promised land.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“There was never a better illustration of the validity of the Enlightenment dream – that order can emerge where nobody is in charge. The genome, now sequenced, stands as emphatic evidence that there can be order and complexity without any management.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evolves. The things that go well are largely unintended; the things that go badly are largely intended.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is. As a result, again and again we mistake cause for effect; we blame the sailing boat for the wind, or credit the bystander with causing the event.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than by ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military recruits rather than rounded citizens. There was formal pedagogy, in which children sat at rows of desks in front of standing teachers, rather than, say, walking around together in the ancient Greek fashion. There was the set school day, punctuated by the ringing of bells. There was a predetermined syllabus, rather than open-ended learning. There was the habit of doing several subjects in one day, rather than sticking to one subject for more than a day. These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“There are two ways to tell the story of the twentieth century. You can describe a series of wars, revolutions, crises, epidemics, financial calamities. Or you can point to the gentle but inexorable rise in the quality of life of almost everybody on the planet: the swelling of income, the conquest of disease, the disappearance of parasites, the retreat of want, the increasing persistence of peace, the lengthening of life, the advances in technology.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“The elite gets things wrong, says Douglas Carswell in The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy, ‘because they endlessly seek to govern by design a world that is best organized spontaneously from below’. Public policy failures stem from planners’ excessive faith in deliberate design. ‘They consistently underrate the merits of spontaneous, organic arrangements, and fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy,’ said Albert Shanker, long-serving President of the American Federation of Teachers.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“The market is a system of mass cooperation.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“Friedrich Hayek advanced the view that the common law contributed to greater economic welfare because it was less interventionist, less under the tutelage of the state, and was better able to respond to change than civil legal systems; indeed, it was for him a legal system that led, like the market, to a spontaneous order.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity. Here, in my own words, is what a modern version of Smithism claims. First, the spontaneous and voluntary exchange of goods and services leads to a division of labour in which people specialise in what they are good at doing. Second, this in turn leads to gains from trade for each party to a transaction, because everybody is doing what he is most productive at and has the chance to learn, practise and even mechanise his chosen task. Individuals can thus use and improve their own tacit and local knowledge in a way that no expert or ruler could. Third, gains from trade encourage more specialisation, which encourages more trade, in a virtuous circle. The greater the specialisation among producers, the greater is the diversification of consumption: in moving away from self-sufficiency people get to produce fewer things, but to consume more. Fourth, specialisation inevitably incentivises innovation, which is also a collaborative process driven by the exchange and combination of ideas. Indeed, most innovation comes about through the recombination of existing ideas for how to make or organise things. The more people trade and the more they divide labour, the more they are working for each other. The more they work for each other, the higher their living standards. The consequence of the division of labour is an immense web of cooperation among strangers: it turns potential enemies into honorary friends. A woollen coat, worn by a day labourer, was (said Smith) ‘the produce of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser . . .’ In parting with money to buy a coat, the labourer was not reducing his wealth. Gains from trade are mutual; if they were not, people would not voluntarily engage in trade. The more open and free the market, the less opportunity there is for exploitation and predation, because the easier it is for consumers to boycott the predators and for competitors to whittle away their excess profits. In its ideal form, therefore, the free market is a device for creating networks of collaboration among people to raise each other’s living standards, a device for coordinating production and a device for communicating information about needs through the price mechanism. Also a device for encouraging innovation. It is the very opposite of the rampant and selfish individualism that so many churchmen and others seem to think it is. The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“We are told that we are sinning (by emitting CO2), that we have original sin (human greed), which has banished us from Eden (the pre-industrial world), for which we must confess (by condemning irresponsible consumerism), atone (by paying carbon taxes), repent (insisting that politicians pay lip service to climate-change alarm), and seek salvation (sustainability). The wealthy can buy indulgences (carbon offsets) so as to keep flying their private jets, but none must depart from faith (in carbon dioxide) as set out in scripture (the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). It is the duty of all to condemn heretics (the ‘deniers’), venerate saints (Al Gore), heed the prophets (of the IPCC). If we do not, then surely Judgement Day will find us out (with irreversible tipping points), when we will feel the fires of hell (future heatwaves) and experience divine wrath (worsening storms). Fortunately, God has sent us a sign of the sacrifice we must make – I have sometimes been struck by the way a wind farm looks like Golgotha.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“So if gangsters become governments, does this mean that governments began as gangsters?”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“South Korea and Ghana had the same income per capita in the 1950s. One received far more aid, advice and political intervention than the other. It is now by far the poorer of the two. In general, Asian economies grew their way out of poverty in the late twentieth century, while African economies failed to be aided out of poverty. Trade, not aid, proved the best way to achieve an increase in prosperity.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“For far too long we have underestimated the power of spontaneous, organic and constructive change driven from below, in our obsession with designing change from above. Embrace the general theory of evolution. Admit that everything evolves.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“As I mentioned earlier, the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“I am just a node in a huge network of knowledge, trying to capture an ethereal and evolving entity in a few inadequate words.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“A handbook for users of the Arpanet at MIT in the 1980s reminded them that ‘sending electronic messages over the ARPAnet for commercial profit or political purposes is both antisocial and illegal’. The internet revolution might have happened ten years earlier if academics had not been dependent on a government network antipathetic to commercial use. Well,”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic Frisby points out in his book Life After the State, opportunities in finance ripple outwards from the Treasury. The state spends money before it even exists; the privileged banks then get first access to newly minted money and can invest it before assets have increased in cost. By the time it reaches ordinary people, the money is worth less. This outward percolation is known as the Cantillon Effect – after Richard Cantillon, who noticed that the creation of paper money in the South Sea Bubble benefited those closest to the source first. Frisby argues that the process of money creation by an expansionary government effectively redistributes money from the poor to the rich. ‘This is not the free market at work, but a gross, unintended economic distortion caused by the colossal government intervention.’ The”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“What if renewable energy rolled out on a grand scale proves so environmentally damaging that it does great harm? Bio-energy, a policy intended to forestall global warming, is already killing hundreds of thousands of people each year by putting up the price of food. Various”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“Some thought they were messages from Gaia to tell humanity to combat global warming.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“Further evidence for the man-made nature of gods comes from their evolutionary history. It is a little-known fact, but gods evolve.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“Friedrich Hayek’s, with his prescient warning in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that socialism and fascism were not really opposites, but had ‘fundamental similarity of methods and ideas’, that economic planning and state control were at the top of an illiberal slope that led to tyranny, oppression and serfdom, and that the individualism of free markets was the true road to liberation. Ignoring”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

“Fascism and communism were and are religions of the state.”
― Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge