Matt Ridley
Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, commonly known as Matt Ridley, is a British science writer, journalist and businessman. He is known for his writings on science, the environment and economics, 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.
Ridley is a libertarian, and a staunch supporter of Brexit. He inherited the viscountcy in February 2012 and was a Conservative hereditary peer from February 2013, with an elected seat in the House of Lords, until his retirement in December 2021.
Early life and education
Ridley's parents were Matthew White Ridley, 4th Viscount Ridley, and Lady Anne Katharine Gabrielle Lumley, the daughter of Roger Lumley, 11th Earl of Scarbrough. He is the nephew of the late Conservative Member of Parliament and minister Nicholas Ridley and the great grandson of Edwin Lutyens.Ridley attended Eton College from 1970 to 1975, and then studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, earning a BA degree with first class honours in zoology. He then pursued doctoral research on the mating system of the common pheasant, supervised by Chris Perrins, and was awarded a DPhil in zoology in 1983.
Career
Journalism
Ridley joined The Economist in 1984, first working as a science editor until 1987, then as Washington, D.C., correspondent from 1987 to 1989 and as American editor from 1990 to 1992. He was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph and an editor of The Best American Science Writing 2002.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".
Since 2013, Ridley has written a weekly column for The Times on science, the environment, and economics.
Ridley wrote the majority of the main article of the August 2017 edition of BBC Focus magazine. 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.In September 2007, Northern Rock became the first British bank since 1878 to suffer a run on its finances, at the start of the 2008 financial crisis. The bank applied to the Bank of England for emergency liquidity funding at the beginning of the crisis, but failed, and Northern Rock was nationalised. Ridley resigned as chairman in October 2007. 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".
Business
From 1996 to 2003, Ridley served as founding chairman of the International Centre for Life, which opened in 2000 as a non-profit science centre in Newcastle upon Tyne; and is now its honorary life president. From July 2000 to June 2008, he was a non-executive director of PA Holdings Limited, with Victor Halberstadt.Until 2010, he was a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, which organises conferences to further education and understanding of Britons and North Americans. He participated in a February 2000 Ditchley conference.
Ridley serves on the Executive Advisory Board of the World.Minds Foundation.
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. Now run by a charity group called the Land Trust, it is the largest landform in the world depicting the human form, and, through private funding, cost £3m to build. 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'.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".
Publications
Ridley has written a number of popular science books, listed below.The Red Queen: Sex 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, 1999
Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, 2003
The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture, 2004
Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, 2006
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, 2010
The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge, 2015
How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, 2020
Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19
Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea, 2025
Ridley's first book was Warts and All: The Men Who Would Be Bush, 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. He no longer promotes the book on his personal website.
In 2006, Ridley contributed a chapter to Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, a collection of essays in honour of his friend Richard Dawkins.
Ridley's 2010 TED conference talk, "When Ideas Have Sex", received over 1.7 million views. 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".
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", 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. 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. Ridley was then defended by Terence Kealey in a further article published on the Guardian website.
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. 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: "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 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 the environmental activist Mark Lynas' repeated charges of a right-wing agenda with the following reply:
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 and Western birthrate decline.
Climate change
In 2014, the Wall Street Journal op-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". 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".Friends of the Earth has suggested that Ridley's opposition to climate science is connected to his ties to the coal industry. He is the owner of land in the north-east of England on which the Shotton Surface coal 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 House of Lords Commissioner for Standards.