Welcome to Matt Ridley's Blog

I have taken a break from media appearances since Thursday—I needed a rest, and I'd say I like birds even more than innovation—but it was a wonderful first two weeks for me and for the book, thanks to you.

Here's an update on the launch, and what's planned for the coming weeks.

What Did You Think?

My article for the Wall Street Journal:

New research has deepened, rather than dispelled, the mystery surrounding the origin of the coronavirus responsible for Covid-19. Bats, wildlife markets, possibly pangolins and perhaps laboratories may all have played some role, but the simple story of an animal in a market infected by a bat that then infected several human beings no longer looks credible.

My blog post for Human Progress:

When you think about it, what has happened to human society in the last 300 years is pretty weird. After trundling along with horses and sailboats, slaves and swords, for millennia, we suddenly got steam engines and search engines, and planes and cars and electricity and computers and social media and DNA sequences. We gave ourselves a perpetual motion machine called innovation. The more we innovated, the more innovation became possible.

It’s by far the biggest story of the last three centuries—the main cause of the decline of extreme poverty to unprecedented levels—yet we know curiously little about why it happened, let alone when and where and how it can be made to continue. It certainly did not start as a result of deliberate policy. Even today, beyond throwing money at scientists in the hope they might start businesses, and subsidies at businesses in the hope they might deliver products, we don’t have much of an idea how to encourage innovation at the political level.

I am delighted to be launching my new book How Innovation Works this week, which has officially arrived in the United States and Canada.

If you want to read it now, you can get the Kindle or audiobook (read by myself!) instantly.

But hardcover orders are even better! More on that below.

My latest article for Spectator:

The argument that vitamin D deficiency may contribute to more severe cases of Covid is gaining ground. It is now reaching the point where it is surprising that we are not hearing from leading medical officials and politicians that people should consider taking supplements to ensure they have sufficient vitamin D.

This is not the same as arguing that vitamin D is a magic bullet that will cure the disease. Vitamins are not medication, the taking of which will have positive effects on everybody. They are top-ups: things that hurt you when you don’t have enough of them in your system but do no extra good when you have enough. Indeed, with many vitamins, including D, taking too much can be toxic.

My article for the Wall Street Journal Saturday Essay, adapted from How Innovation Works which is available Tuesday, the 19th of May:

The Covid-19 pandemic reveals that far from living in an age of incessant technological change, we have been neglecting innovation in exactly the areas where we most need it. Faced with a 17th-century plague, we are left to fall back mainly on the 17th-century response of quarantine and closing the theaters.

My article for the Telegraph:

At the start of the pandemic, China built a hospital in double-quick time and we all thought, “that’s why they are so good at economic growth”. Then Britain did the same, proving we can do it too. Medical devices have been rushed through the approval process in days. Vaccine development is being brilliantly accelerated. We have shown we can do things quickly. Why can’t we do the same in ordinary times?Like every small business owner, I find that quangos always take far, far longer than they need over decisions.A local river trust cleaning out an old fish-pass on a river took several months to get approval from the Environment Agency; the work took one day. An attempt to turn derelict farm buildings into shops has so far taken local planning officials seven years to (not yet) decide.Getting permission to extend a track by a hundred yards took Natural England many months of hesitation and several site visits.The problem that faces firms up and down the country is not that regulators say no, but that they take an age to say yes. A local firm has been trying to start a project that would bring 200 good jobs and millions of pounds of tax revenue. It has been through planning permission, an inquiry, an appeal and a court case – winning at every stage. It was promised a ministerial decision last June and is still waiting, five years after applying.From Heathrow Airport’s new runway to notifying you of a medical test result, everything seems to take far longer than necessary.For private enterprise, time is money; delay can be lethal. Companies like Amazon, for all their faults, recognise this and promise you rapid delivery. For the public sector, there is no urgency. If the rules state that you must receive a reply within three weeks, then lo and behold, the reply arrives after three weeks, never two.It can take up to six years to get a medical device – a new and faster diagnostic test for viruses, say – licensed in most European countries, including this one. Entrepreneurs cannot wait that long; their money runs out. We will never know how many innovations such delays have deterred, but they are surely one of the main reasons we were not better prepared for this pandemic.

To stay updated, follow me on Twitter @mattwridley and Facebook, or subscribe to my new newsletter!

Last week, I did an AMA with a community called whatshouldireadnext.com and the answers are now available on their blog.

I answered 23 questions in total from their community and staff as well as a few from social media, discussing the usual topics of innovation and the pandemic, but also some new ones like time management, murder hornets, and what the Earth might be like in one hundred or a thousand years. Here are some highlights:

The thing that most surprised me about this episode was realising how slow vaccine development still is. The big prize would be much faster and more oven-ready vaccines for viruses. But I suspect antiviral drugs will make big strides during this pandemic too as they did during ebola. And hand-held, instant DNA PCR testing kits will surely become a big part of the world's preparedness.

With the North America release of How Innovation Works just one week away, I am unable to travel to the US to promote the book as I would normally do. So my team and I are trying to come up with creative ways to promote the book while also sharing free content and prizes with you.When books are released, those who have helped me write the book as well as press and other insiders get free, often signed copies. We thought regular readers should have a chance to get one themselves, especially with live events being impossible right now.So we decided to give away at least ten free signed copies of How Innovation Works to fans in the US and Canada.

In fact, I recently signed over one hundred labels to mail to the US publisher to put on review copies and other copies for media and influencers. So this year, these ten fans will be among the very few to get a directly signed copy!There are three ways to enter the drawing:

My article with MP David Davis for The Telegraph:

My article for The Spectator:

We know everything about Sars-CoV-2 and nothing about it. We can read every one of the (on average) 29,903 letters in its genome and know exactly how its 15 genes are transcribed into instructions to make which proteins. But we cannot figure out how it is spreading in enough detail to tell which parts of the lockdown of society are necessary and which are futile. Several months into the crisis we are still groping through a fog of ignorance and making mistakes. There is no such thing as ‘the science’.

This is not surprising or shameful; ignorance is the natural state of things. Every new disease is different and its epidemiology becomes clear only gradually and in retrospect. Is Covid-19 transmitted mainly by breath or by touching? Do children pass it on without getting sick? Why is it so much worse in Britain than Japan? Why are obese people especially at risk? How many people have had it? Are ventilators useless after all? Why is it not exploding in India and Africa? Will there be a second wave? We do not begin to have answers to these questions.