His books have been honored repeatedly and sold more than 850,000 copies in 30 languages.
Ridley did some slumming in journalism for the Economist before returning to to his home northeastern England to produce one remarkable book after another about science and society. After getting a PhD in zoology at Oxford, Dr. Matt Ridley disagrees, and he has looked at a wider range of evidence than just about anyone else – at millions of years of evolution and tens of thousands of years of economic history. If that's the task of economics, then economists today could convene in Washington beneath a banner with large letters: "Mission Not Accomplished." Most politicians still imagine they create jobs, and most intellectuals still equate larger government with greater virtue. Instead, Matt has acted according to one of Hayek's famous pronouncements: "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." If you want to know the connection between Ice Age hunters in Europe and 13th-century bankers in Arabia, or between the political theories of Thomas Hobbes and the feeding habits of vampire bats, then Matt is your man.Īnd yet, for all Matt's knowledge, he has not succumbed to what Friedrich Hayek called the Fatal Conceit of intellectuals: the belief that wise people like themselves should be planning life for everyone else. For two decades, Matt Ridley has been charming and enlightening legions of fans with his wide-ranging insights. And thanks to the Manhattan Institute for this opportunity to celebrate an intellectual hero of mine. He lives in Newcastle, in Northern England, running a family business and property first acquired by a coal-trading eighteenth century entrepreneur ancestor, and is married to the neuroscientist Anya Hurlbert. He has also worked as a nonexecutive director of companies in banking, insurance, venture capital, and consulting. He was founding chairman of the Centre for Life, an educational charity devoted to public engagement, science education, research, and technology transfer in Newcastle, England. As well as writing, Ridley has worked in various other fields. He currently writes the "Mind and Matter" column for the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal. He later became Washington correspondent and American editor of The Economist and then a freelance writer and columnist for various newspapers and magazines. in zoology and was science editor of The Economist during the 1980s. Educated at Oxford University, Ridley has a Ph.D. He is also the author of the best-seller Genome, a biography of the biologist Francis Crick, and three widely acclaimed books on evolution The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, and Nature via Nurture.
Matt Ridley latest book is The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction books.
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