Lord Matt Ridley Gives Us Reasons To Be Cheerful

Andrew Roberts: Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist, amongst many other books, and is considered one of Britain's foremost intellectuals. Matt, you've written about the science of human nature and its implications, has human nature changed much over history?

Matt Ridley: Almost by definition, I would say the answer is no.

In other words, I think when we use the phrase human nature, we kinda mean the things that don't change, the aspects of our behavior that are sort of predictable from one generation to the next. And I'm always struck when I watch a Shakespeare play how incredibly insightful that guy was about the human nature.

And that seems to me to speak to a lot of things not having changed, envy, and love, and so on are recognizable in Elizabethan England. Obviously, things do change, and one of the fascinating things Steven Pinker wrote very interestingly about how what was considered virtuous has changed pretty dramatically.

Because violently avenging some wrong was virtuous at one time, and violence is not virtuous these days, etc. So I kinda go with Adam Smith from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that we adapt out understanding of what virtue and bad behavior is, according to what we're sort of taking in from the environment around us.

So, we've got some basic human nature, but we calibrate it to what's acceptable in the society we're in, and we do so by reference to the impartial spectator, as Smith put it. And that gives us a sort of a modernization of the themes of human nature.

Andrew Roberts: And where are we on the great debate between nature and nurture?

What do the latest scientific researchers tell us about that?

Matt Ridley: Well, I wrote a whole book putting the nature-nurture debate.

Andrew Roberts: That's why I'm asking you.

Matt Ridley: About 20 years ago, and nobody read it.

Matt Ridley: It turned out to be a topic nobody particularly wants to read about.

I made a big mistake, though, I chose a punning title, which is always a mistake. Nature via Nurture was my title, and I thought this is very clever.

Matt Ridley: Nobody noticed.

Andrew Roberts: They didn't think it was clever enough.

Matt Ridley: People would have me on radio shows and they'd have the book sitting in front of them, and they'd say, you've written this book called Nature versus Nurture.

And I said, no, I haven't, I've written a book called Nature via Nurture. And they said, yes, so you have. So it was a disaster. But-

Matt Ridley: My point was serious, which is that, it's very clear, really, that the more nature we have, the more nurture we have, they go together, not against each other.

One is one side of a square, the other is the other side of a square. It's a huge mistake to think of them as oppositional. And so we have more instincts, in my view, than other animals, but the instincts are for learning things. We have an instinctive fear of snakes, but it has to be awakened by seeing someone react to a snake on a movie or whatever.

So we're very easily spooked into fearing snakes, but we're not so easily spooked into fearing flowers, for example. So there's nature coming through, but it still needs a bit of nurture. And then at the other end of the spectrum, when you remember this conversation later tonight, which I hope you will, you will do so by switch.

You will have switched on genes in neurons in your brain to change the strength of connections between nerve cells in real time as we're speaking. That's what you're doing right now. So that's genes, which is supposed to be nature, but they're at the mercy of your experience this afternoon.

So that's why the two are so inextricably entangled. But the one big mistake that far too many people make, is to try and be absolutist and blank slatist about nurture. About saying that, we've rejected any idea of genes being involved in behavior or something. It's always both in almost everything.

There's very strong evidence from twins, etc., that personalities are heritable, but they also depend on circumstance as well.

Andrew Roberts: What areas of science excite you at the moment, scientific research?

Matt Ridley: Well, I'm always excited by what's going on in genomics. I think to be alive at the point, where species became the only species ever to read its own recipe, is really quite extraordinary.

And that's happened, that's why I tried to write a book about it. And so I've been trying to understand very recently what are called human accelerated regions of the genome. And these are the bits that are different between us and chimpanzees, that seem to have been under evolutionary pressure in the last 6 million years, as it were.

However, I have to admit that there's nothing terribly thrilling in there. It's not as if suddenly, bing, there's the gene for language or anything, it's never gonna be that simple. These are bits of molecular middle management, if you like, that are turning up.

Matt Ridley: And they all add up to a big difference.

But I still think that switching on the light that shows us what's going on in genomes is one of the most exciting areas of science. And there are sort of gorgeous little facts. On the human Y chromosome, there's a palindrome, that is to say, a text that is repeated very accurately backwards that is as long as the complete works of Shakespeare.

Andrew Roberts: Wow.

Matt Ridley: What the hell is that all about?

Andrew Roberts: Wow.

Matt Ridley: That can't be right as long as, I don't know, one of the plays of Shakespeare, something, anyway.

Matt Ridley: I may be out by an order, it's a very long palindrome.

Andrew Roberts: In the book, Rational Optimist, which was published in 2010, you argue that innovation and trade have consistently improved living standards over history.

But now, with the recent concerns about automation and AI replacing jobs and so on, how do you see this trend continuing? Do you think it's still going to be a positive development?

Matt Ridley: I mean, my huge optimism about what we could achieve by the year 2050 if we let human exchange and specialization flourish, is matched by my growing pessimism about how much of it we'll prevent.

I don't really see automation, and robotics, and AI as being the main reason we'll prevent it. I think bad policy and the general loss of confidence in the western enlightenment's values that go with innovation, is my bigger worry. Too much regulation, too much antipathy to the new, too much crony capitalism to allow barriers of entry to be put in the place of innovation.

But I am spooked by some aspects of the new generative AI tools. Quite rightly, we should all be spooked by some aspects of everything, in a way. And the one that worries me is the hallucination problem, that is to say that when you ask chat GPT something, it does sometimes make stuff up.

It lies to put it not too fine a point on it. And fair enough you catch it out, and you tell it it's lying but that lie then goes into the database of the next generation of AI tools. And so it could be that we are creating a sort of compound runaway misinformation machine.

Whereby maybe with awoke bias, some of the AI tools are going to start to treat as gospel some of the fibs that they've made up. Like that there were black nazis, for example, if you remember that example of the Microsoft image generator. If you're now scraping the Internet to find examples of, if you ask the Internet, are there any black nazis?

They'll say, yes there are, I mean, this Microsoft program generated them, so they must have existed, I've gone off track from trade and exchange here a bit. But there's possibly a sort of technology death spiral that's heading our way, I doubt it, I'm still an optimist but it's possible.

Andrew Roberts: And whilst we're into propaganda and lying and so on, what's the story with the rise of social media and digital platforms? How do you think the exchange of ideas has changed since 2010, since you published the Rational Optimist, where both of those things have exploded, essentially? Are those helping or are they hindering progress?

Matt Ridley: Well, I have to say I was too starry eyed about social media, I was reacting to the first generation of Internet and e-commerce. Where people were saying, this is turning us into nerds who stay in basements and don't talk to each other. Total lack of social engagement is going to be the result, that's a disaster, everyone's going to get very lonely.

And it turned out that, the one thing everyone used social media for was social engagement on a ridiculous scale. And so they were constantly in touch with everyone all over the world, to the point where you ignored the people next to you. And were in touch with people like you, the other side of the world, but still.

So I thought, that's great and kumbaya, we're all going to see each other's point of view. Because social media you can now get in touch with other people and see what they're thinking, and it might be different from you, isn't that lovely? Just like people said about radio when it first appeared in the 1910s and twenties, people are saying, isn't this wonderful?

They were incredibly utopian about radio. And in fact, as you know only too well, radio was used by the dictators to propagandize populations to a terrifying extent. It was an extraordinarily important tool of Mussolini and Hitler and people like that.

Andrew Roberts: But also Churchill, of course without radio, how would he have been able to.

Matt Ridley: And FDR yeah exactly, no that's true. And it's got a bit like the story of printing, isn't it, that printing comes along, everyone says, isn't that wonderful but it does polarize society. You do get a lot of wars out of it, etc. So the question, I think is can we depolarize the effect of social media, which clearly has, I think exacerbated polarization in the last 15 years, can we do that without a war?

And that's where I ask you to answer that question.

Andrew Roberts: Certainly not going to. I'm going to carry on asking you questions, including how much of the rational optimist focuses on the benefits of free markets we mentioned, and trade. In the face of the growing protectionism and anti globalization sentiment that we've had over the last, well really since the crash of 2007, 2008.

What's your perspective of the future if global trade starts to be tied down by protectionism? Do you think this might affect the sense that you had in the rational optimist back in 2010?

Matt Ridley: Yes, I am genuinely worried about protectionism, I think if you read the history of the first half of the 20th century correctly.

Tit for tat, protectionism was a big cause of not just depression, but also war. The Japanese basically had an argument with themselves about whether or not they should be getting what they needed by trade or by conquest. And the fact that there was more and more protectionism made it easier for the military side of that argument to win.

So its not good that we have come a long way from the WTO GATT process that progressively liberated trade everywhere in the world for most of my life. And we've given up on all that. I've never heard people use the word doha round for about five years, I would guess.

So I think it feels to me the world trade agenda, the most favored nation thing, the son of Cobden and Bright if you like, is not happening. And instead were getting regionalized trade deals like the European Union, like NAFTA, like the asian ones, and some trade deals between them.

But still a terribly beggar my neighbor approach to trade. We back to the old mistake that I thought Peel and Cobden had defeated 150 years ago. That raising tariff barriers against your partners is good for your population, It's not, It's like putting rocks in your harbors, as somebody once put it.

It's imports that are the benefit, it's exports that are the price you have to pay for them. So I'm a die hard ultra free trader and would love to see the world go that way. But I've got to admit that China's entry into the WTO and the way it has pursued trade has to some extent been an abuse of that process and has done some damage.

And for geopolitical reasons and other reasons, we do have to work out how to be more cautious about trading with autocracies. So I'm just not quite sure which is the horse and which is the cart here. Is it because we're not pushing free trade harder that more countries are becoming autocracies?

And it does feel to me that the golden age, when post Deng Xiaoping China did liberate, did re embrace the world. It did become a free enterprise system, but also a free trade system within the limits imposed by the Communist Party, obviously. But the constraints were less than they were in the west for a lot of entrepreneurs in China.

That is over, Xi Jinping is not that species of creature. At all, and has imposed, really, a very dirigiste economic system on China, again, almost back to Maoism. And that ain't good news for the world. But free trade still has the chance to lift Africa and South America and other parts of Asia living standards, so let's hope we can keep some of it going.

Andrew Roberts: And where's Brexit in all of that?

Matt Ridley: Well, for me, Brexit was about rejoining the world and leaving a protectionist fortress, because whatever you think of free trade within the European Union, there were very strong tariffs outside it. And just to take very specific examples, why would we in Britain want to have a tariff against rice?

We're obviously only ever gonna import rice, we're never gonna grow it. But because there are some Italian rice growers who wanted protection, we had to tariff against rice. Same with oranges, same with tomatoes, etc, etc. So, for me, the first and greatest benefit of Brexit would be to cut the tariffs on imports into the UK and dare the rest of the world to reciprocate.

Which is exactly what Cobden got peel to do in the 1840s. So it very much was about replacing a regionalist trading block with a global trading view. And parallel with that, of course, for me, the great benefit of free trade is that at both ends of a trade, you specialize.

You say, I'm better at producing this and you're better at producing that, so I'll focus on this and you'll focus on that, we'll both benefit. The famous Ricardo example of Portugal and Britain doing wine and cloth, or whatever it was, and yet the European Union was all about harmonization.

It was all about saying, look, the rules have got to be the same everywhere. So you can't really specialize. You can't say, I'm gonna liberate this industry, but not that industry, in Britain. And that felt to me, wrong. The principle of recognizing equivalent regulation, if it's safe for your customers, it's safe for ours, is how we should be regulating products between countries, not, your rules must be the same as our rules.

So I still think all those arguments hold very good water, and I still think that Brexit was far less of a catastrophe than pretty well everybody on the remainder side thought it was going to be. And I think we mustn't let go of that. It's just that we haven't really taken the advantage to liberate, to deregulate, to become the great champion of world trade that we could.

Exports to the rest of the world are up in the UK and exports to the European Union are down. So there's been some rebalancing.

Andrew Roberts: And whose fault is that, ehy didn't we take that opportunity? What happened?

Matt Ridley: Short answer, the blob. The country is, as I increasingly discovered from my small number of years in parliament, run by bureaucrats, not politicians.

They are just the front men, the fall guys.

Andrew Roberts: Just to explain to our American readers, the blob, define the blob. Because listeners aren't necessarily gonna know what we're talking about in the States.

Matt Ridley: It's a British slang term to refer to the permanent bureaucracy, the people who don't change jobs after an election, whether they're in central government or local government or agencies of the government.

And the vast majority of them did not want to diverge from the European Union because they wanted to keep open the option of rejoining it later. And for reasons I don't fully understand, the politicians weren't able to force them to bend to their whim on that. So that's my view, is that we've not had a disaster because of Brexit, we've grown slightly faster than Europe, actually.

But we've missed out on a fantastic opportunity to become a really dynamic economy, which we could have done by cutting rules and regulations, getting rid of GDPR. Why do I need to click that I love cookies every time I go on a website. Somebody the other day put up an offer of a bottle of good claret to anyone who read the terms and conditions that you have to read before you click.

It took four months before anyone spotted the offer.

Andrew Roberts: Now you've mentioned China, where are we on this extraordinary coincidence that COVID started in the same place as a virology lab in Wuhan? What's the, in 2021, you wrote the book Viral, has anything come out since 2021 to make you either change your mind or go further in what you said?

Matt Ridley: Yes, our book was actually fairly balanced. We looked at the possibility it came out of the market and the possibility came out of the lab. And we came down, Alina Chan and I, my co-author, we came down on the view that it looks more likely it came out of the lab.

We now think that's very, both of us think that's very strongly likely. It's almost certain. And the reason for that is because the investigation of that market has got deeper and deeper and they found absolutely nothing that you would expect to find if that's where it started. In fact, we now know that it started much earlier than we thought, from the divergent strains that we're able to piece together, the family tree of the virus, it didn't start in November, December.

It almost certainly started in October, that kind of thing. So the market evidence has got weaker, the lab evidence has got stronger. In 2021, just as we were publishing the book, an extraordinary document dropped through a leak, which was a proposal to put exactly the right kind of sequence into exactly the right place.

In exactly the right gene, in exactly the right type of virus in exactly the right year, to make SARS-CoV-2. And this is a thing called a furin cleavage site, which has never been found in a sarbecovirus before or since. But they had a proposal to pull one in a sarbecovirus for the first time in the world, in the city of Wuhan.

That's like saying, I wanna put a horn on a horse in Wuhan, and a year later there's a unicorn running down the street. That's not a coincidence, but worse than that, at the end of 2023, we then got hold of a previous draft of the same document. It's called the defuse proposal, and it was a proposal to the American Department of Defense for funding for this work.

And not only did it say things like, we're gonna pretend we'll do some of this work in America, but we really wanna do it in China cuz it's cheaper, cuz they use lower biosafety levels. It also said, we're really focused on viruses that are 10 to 25% different from SARS.

Well, this one is exactly that. And then it specifically said, actually, this furin cleavage site, we're gonna put it at the S1/S2 junction. Now, that's exactly where it turned up in the spike gene. Now, we weren't sure about that before, so it really is just too much of a coincidence now.

And of course, the fact that the Chinese authorities simply won't come clean about which viruses they had, and were working on after After 2016, and they had a huge database with 22,000 entries in it, and they took it offline at two in the morning on the 12 September 2019, almost exactly five years ago this week, and it's never gone back up.

And all they have to do, if they want to exonerate themselves is show us what was in that database on that date. And if it doesn't contain a possible progenitor, a close progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, then fine, they're innocent, but they won't do it. And they say, well, we can't do that cuz you might hack it.

Well, what do you mean, hack it? If something's in the public domain, you can't hack it. That's the sort of whole point, so it's a very odd excuse. Now, of course, every time I say that, I've got friends who say, look, you're just. You're egging them on to publish a fake version of it.

Andrew Roberts: Well, that's exactly what I was going to say. How would you know if they had deleted or edited it?

Matt Ridley: Well, they're presumably clever enough to make it hard for us to know, but it puzzles me that they haven't even tried to do that.

Andrew Roberts: Yes.

Matt Ridley: I don't know.

Andrew Roberts: Yes, the dog didn't bark, as it were.

Matt Ridley: Yes.

Andrew Roberts: One of the criticisms of the book is that, and it was criticized by George Monbiot and Bill Gates and other people who wanted to have a crack at you. And one of the criticisms that people made was that inequality was overlooked as a growing issue despite overall progress.

How do you address the idea that the benefits of innovation and trade aren't, by their very nature, aren't going to be distributed equally?

Matt Ridley: I think they're factually, empirically wrong about that. The evidence is overwhelming that in the last 50 years, the people in poor countries have been getting rich faster than people in rich countries.

Look at China, 30 years ago, every Chinese person was poor. Now most of them are middle class. The graphical evidence is really clear that the big beneficiaries of the extraordinary growth in human living standards over the last 50 years or so has been relatively poor people rather than relatively rich people.

And just to put a number on it, when I was born, around 50% of the world lived in extreme poverty, defined as $1.90 a day in 2011, okay? Today that number is about 9%. Nobody has ever lived through a defeat of poverty as dramatic as that, that you and I have lived through.

So it's simply wrong to say that the benefits of trade and prosperity and innovation are going to the rich. Rich people are getting richer. Sure, yes, but poor people are getting richer at a more dramatic rate and more of them. I was going to say something else, but it slipped my mind, sorry.

Andrew Roberts: Don't worry, we'll always edit that out of the recording. In the book, you criticize the Malthusian view that population growth will lead to resource scarcity. And you've been writing a lot about resource scarcity at the moment and have been since, well, for a long time. How do you respond to the current environmental challenges, climate change being the obvious one, which some argue is evidence of resource limits and limitations?

Matt Ridley: Yeah, I think Malthus was clearly wrong about his basic thesis that population would lead to starvation in the immediate short term, and that's why we needed to be cruel to the poor. Remember that was what the Malthusians did in response to Malthus. For example, Ireland after the famine, or during the famine, the food supply did expand faster than the population in the 19th century in Britain and in the 20th century in the world.

And per capita calorie production is now about one and a half times as high as it was when there were half as many people on the planet in around 1960. And we've done that using almost exactly the same amount of land. That is to say, we've brought very little extra land under the plough in the last 50, 60 years.

We brought some extra, and then we released some as well. In fact, we're releasing land at the moment, and Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University is calculating that on current trends, we'll release an area the size of India from the plough, from farming, as it were, by 2050. And yet we'll still feed the 9 billion people we'll have on the planet at a much better level than we're feeding today.

So, clearly, land as a resource is not running up. Now, the reason for that is because technology allows us to be more productive on each acre, and the more productive you are on each acre, the fewer acres you need and the more acres you can spare for nature reserves and things like that.

So the environmentalist argument that it's all about sort of prosperity leading to using more resources is not true. We use less land. We use less water in agriculture, for every unit of food we produce now, we use less fertilizer, now we're getting more efficient about that. So an awful lot of economic growth consists of using less to produce more.

And that, to me, is conservation, if you like, conservation of energy, conservation of water, conservation of land, etcetera. And that's the bit that I think much of the environmentalist movement, which started in the 1960s with the view that, you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. That's a phrase that David Attenborough is fond of using, for example.

And it's just not true, because growth often consists of using less of something. If I halve the amount of steel you need in a car through some clever invention, I have caused a burst of economic growth, okay? By definition, I've produced more with less. So at the point where, in theory, we've used every resource on the planet, I can invent something that means we use less of it, and that will be another step of economic growth.

So I think infinite economic growth is possible in theory, of course, it's never gonna be achieved in practice. So that's my real beef with the Malthusians, is that they are still misunderstanding the nature of what a resource is. Julian Simon was the brilliant guy here, and he had a bet with Paul Ehrlich, who was a Malthusian, because he said, I think metals and other minerals are gonna get cheaper, not more expensive.

And Ehrlich said, that`s ridiculous, they`re gonna run out. This was in about 1980, so they had a bet in 1980. If by 1990, a basket of minerals, of metals, five metals, has become more expensive, then Simon will pay Ehrlich the difference. And if it's become cheaper, Ehrlich will pay Simon the difference.

Well, Simon won hands down. He won, even if you didn't take inflation into account. I now. Somewhere on the shelf behind me is the Julian Simon award, which I won some years ago. I'm very proud of it and it's made of the five metals.

Matt Ridley: The metals were chosen by Ehrlich, so there was no cheating involved, etc.

So I'm on Simon's side of that argument, not Paul Ehrlich's.

Andrew Roberts: You've spoken about Green Crony Capitalism. What do you mean by that?

Matt Ridley: Well, when you say the government is gonna pour money into wind and solar power or planting forests or whatever it is. You create an industry.

And the people in that industry happily trouser quite a lot of the pounds or dollars you give them. But some of them they keep on one side to lobby the government for more pounds and dollars, and they're very good at it. You see the wind industry the other day saying, help.

Our costs have gone up. We need more subsidies to make this very, very cheap power we're supposed to produce. Well, if you need more subsidies, how is it so cheap? Or other, if it's cheap, why do you need subsidies? And so the problem we've now got is that you've got certain industries that depend upon environmental alarm.

To keep the flow of support from crony government going. And the numbers are pretty astounding. So it's much more lucrative now to be in the renewables business than in the fossil fuel business. And the very people who are quick to accuse those people in the fossil fuel business, and that used to include me, it doesn't anymore.

But I've always declared it when it was true, the very people who are quick to accuse you of being corrupt if you take money from fossil fuels. Are now trousering much bigger sums from environmental businesses. And are somehow of the view that this is different, that this is all right, this is virtuous.

And I'm sorry but let me put it this way. If we woke up tomorrow and discovered that it was absolutely, incontrovertibly true that climate change is not a problem. Do you think all the people who are in the wind and solar business would say, okay, we can go back to using fossil fuels? 

Of course not, they've got a massive vested interest. That's my point.

Andrew Roberts: Are you worried about the anti evolution teaching in America at the moment? You're a true believer in Darwinism and so on, and yet in some states it's being not just questioned, but actually not being taught properly.

Is that a worry for you?

Matt Ridley: This topic comes and goes, never goes away. It doesn't feel to me as acute as it did 20 or 30 years ago, funny enough. By the way, you called me a true believer in evolution, I think I wouldn't use that word out.

I'm not big on belief generally. I think or whatever, anyway.

Matt Ridley: I'm not chastising you, I'm just making. No, so intelligent design, which is the attempt to make creationism more respectable. Which basically says, look, the complexity of the human body or whatever, is so incredible. That it's ridiculous to think that it could have come about by an evolutionary process.

And for some reason, that's always had a much greater hold on the American psyche than it has on the European psyche. It's partly because of a more devout, more protestant, more sort of biblical approach to things in the mid-west and places like that. But I think it's partly a sort of anti intellectual thing as well.

I don't quite understand it, but for me, it's a mole you've gotta keep whacking, to use that expression. You can't give up on it. And at times I've spent a lot of time on it. But I think most people now accept, even in America, that it's possible, it's easier actually, to imagine the immense complexity of the human brain or whatever.

Emerging through a process of genetic trial and error over millennia, than it is to imagine some incredibly complex being making it. Because if there was a complex being who made it, then how did that complex being come about? And you simply postpone the problem. But my cheap shot at creationists is the old joke that a couple of engineers in the bar and the electrical engineer says, God is an electric engineer.

He made the brain and the mechanical engineer says, no, no, God's a mechanical engineer, made the skeleton. And the civil engineer says, no, God is a civil engineer. Who else would put a waste disposal pipe through a recreational area?

Matt Ridley: It's actually gets quite a profound point, which is that design isn't always intelligent, actually.

Andrew Roberts: All right you've won the Hayek prize, and you might not be a true believer in a general sense. But you are a libertarian, and you've written that the more we limit the growth of the state, the better off we will be. Tell us more about your libertarianism and the advantages of it and the limits to it as well?

Matt Ridley: Yes, I spent three years living in Washington in the eighties, and it was really quite transformative for me. Because before then I didn't realize it, but I had a very sort of statist view of the world, that everything was ordered by government. And that there was some bunch of wise men in charge of the economy.

And I began to read Hayek, and the most wonderful essay of all is that brief essay called Eye Pencil by Leonard Reid.

Andrew Roberts: Yes.

Matt Ridley: About how a pencil came to be.

Andrew Roberts: Yes.

Matt Ridley: And how millions of people contributed to its manufacture, but none of them knew how to make it.

The idea of this distributed knowledge, this bottom up emergence of order. And I began to look at the rest of the world, I wrote a book called the Evolution of Everything, which is very sort of Hayekian. Because I'm looking at the rest of the world and saying, everybody thinks that somebody's in charge of things.

You look at a piece of order and you say, wouldn't that be better if we had more of a committee in charge of it. Whether it's education or technology or whatever? And actually now an awful lot of wonderful, structured, complex things emerge from below. To give you the famous example, I think it was Bastiat who first did it, talking about Paris, but you could say it about London.

10 million people eat lunch in London every day, roughly speaking, I would guess. And very few of them decide what they're gonna eat until the last minute. How come there is enough bread and avocado and cheese and whatever it is you need to feed Londoners in the right place at the right time?

Who's in charge? I mean, who is the London lunch commissioner?

Matt Ridley: He's an amazing.

Matt Ridley: No, he hardly ever gets things wrong.

Matt Ridley: And of course, he doesn't exist, it's a process of supply and demand that ends up producing a beautifully complex system, way too complex for any committee to be in charge of.

Andrew Roberts: You say that you're not a conservative in that you celebrate the way that creative destruction is caused, but you've, of course, sat in the House of Lords as a conservative. What's your feeling about you yourself are a hereditary member of the House of Lords. What is your view on the Labour Party's plans to abolish the hereditary elements?

Matt Ridley: Yeah, well, I sat as a conservative, cuz it was the closest party to my libertarian instincts.

Andrew Roberts: It was in those days anyhow.

Matt Ridley: Briefly at least.

Matt Ridley: But I don't see myself as a sort of social conservative who wants to preserve things much, although I respect traditions and so on, so I'm not against that.

As far as the hereditary element of the House of Lords goes, nobody expected it to last as long. And I'm not going to die in the last ditch defending the principle that hereditary people make good parliamentarians. But I do think that there are a couple of points in their favor.

One is that they were not appointed by the current or very recent government, and that gives them a certain independence, a certain randomness as well. They aren't the usual metropolitan, well connected types necessarily. And so my view is that election is obviously one way of choosing your legislators, but we've never really explored another way, which is a sort of random stick a pin in the phone book thing.

And the Athenians did it that way, you served your time in whatever the parliament was called in ancient Athens. And so I would love to see-

Andrew Roberts: Phil Buckley, of course, famously said that it would be better to choose the first 500 people in the phone book sooner than the board of overseers of Harvard University. I think it was.

Andrew Roberts: That they would make better legislators.

Matt Ridley: Exactly, now, if there was an element of unpredictability about hereditaries, imagine what greater unpredictability you could get if after every election, you assembled for five years a massive jury and put them in the House of Lords.

I mean, some of them would be appalling people who should never-

Matt Ridley: Be allowed near parliament. And others would be rather great discoveries, and they would sort of reflect, I mean, I love the jury system. It's really good, I've only once been on a jury, and I didn't get a case, unfortunately.

The judge knew who I was, so I was kicked off the jury.

Matt Ridley: But I had to go back to the room and read a book for a week. But that's one of the systems that I would like. Another system that I would like would be to put the power back to the local authorities.

I think this is something that Lord Salisbury is talking about to elect or to choose members of the House of Lords so as to just remove it from the centre, from the prime ministerial patronage and so on. But I do also, and I think you'll probably appreciate this point, respect the evolutionary nature of the British constitution, and how it has adjusted very flexibly over the centuries, and you mess with it at your peril.

And you can sort of make an argument that hereditary peers came to the Lords with a sort of respect for the traditions of the British constitution that made them valuable members. But that argument is largely over, it's about how to replace them now. It's a damn shame that they never got around to doing phase two in 1999, because then hereditaries would have walked voluntarily out saying, right, you've done what you said.

We were supposed to be the pebble in the shoe to remind governments that they hadn't finished reforming the House of the Lords.

Andrew Roberts: Yes, they're now, or at least they won't be there for long sadly in my view. It's very rare for one set of people in parliament to throw out another set.

You saw it obviously with Henry VIII, you saw it in the abbots, you saw it with Oliver Cromwell abolishing the House of Lords for a short period of time. And you also saw it in 1997, and as you say, the 1999 second phase of the alteration of the British constitution that never took place.

And now this last 4th time in 500 years, that as I say, one set of parliamentarians are expelling another set. It's very rare, and there's no sense, do you think, that the Labour Party are going to continue with phase two and update the whole system? They're just essentially getting rid of people who tend to vote against them.

Matt Ridley: Yeah, I'm afraid there's a huge element of that. And by the way, I think you're a marvellous adornment of the House of Lords yourself.

Andrew Roberts: Thank you, well, we're not gonna edit that out.

Matt Ridley: Cuz I did once late at night-

Matt Ridley: Have a bad-tempered disagreement with George Foulkes on the Labour benches when he accused me of not being someone we should listen to because I was a viscount.

And I was sort of ready with a response, cuz I thought he might say this. So I said, well, I'm here because Lord Salisbury put my great grandfather here at the, sorry, Queen Victoria put my great grandfather here at the advice of Lord Salisbury. He's here because Queen Elizabeth put him there on the advice of Tony Blair, it's not that different.

Matt Ridley: It is different, though, great line.

Andrew Roberts: And you sum up, I think, at some stage your thoughts at least with rational optimists saying, don't despair, be ambitious. I think that's a marvelous thing. But there's time gloom and doom around it, isn't there? And there seems to be more now than ever, especially Keir Starmer loves his eeyore like stance towards everything.

Matt Ridley: Fulfilling prophecy, can't it?

Andrew Roberts: Now, tell me, what book are you reading, history book or biography at the moment?

Matt Ridley: Well, I've just finished reading a biography of Ian Fleming by Nicholas Shakespeare. It's a very well-done book, I think, and I've spoken. To Ian Fleming's niece, Kate Grimmond, who said that she's quite happy with the book, so the previous.

Well, now, I haven't spoken to her, I spoke to her husband, Johnny, but the family seems relatively content with it, because there was a previous biography that apparently wasn't very good. I thought it was very well written, and it's a very interesting life, not a particularly attractive life in some ways.

He was a frightful cad in many ways, tremendous womanizer and, smoked and drank and was rich and all that.

Andrew Roberts: Kind of acted like James Bond, in that case.

Matt Ridley: Exactly. But what's so fascinating, I think, to me about it, is the sort of family aspect. He matures under the shadow of his only, just older brother, Peter, who was only about a year and a bit older than him.

And who was the golden boy of his generation, the most brilliant scholar at Eton and Christchurch, the beautiful writer, the charming, good looking chap who marries the famous actress Celia Johnson. And Fleming is kicked out of, I can't remember whether he's kicked out of Eton, but he's certainly kicked out of Sandhurst, doesn't go to Oxford and kicked out of finishing school in Austria for, I think, chasing girls, etcetera.

And, then along comes the Second World War and the brilliant Peter does some brave things and goes to Norway and works in intelligence, but none of his schemes ever quite come off. And the less brilliant Ian pulls off these rather brilliant schemes, like the one about Fernando Poe and Operation mincemeat and things like this, and becomes rather a success.

And then after the war, Peter tries to put his experience of working in military intelligence into writing a novel. And he writes a short novel about a spy, and he gives it to his brother Ian to read, and Ian thinks, this is terrible, I could do better than this.

And that's where James Bond came from. And he used to go to GoldenEye, his house in Jamaica, every January, taking a three month leave of absence from the Sunday Times. Write a book for three months, finish it in that time. You do that, Andrew, I know, but the rest of us.

Andrew Roberts: I wish they take me five years.

Matt Ridley: And then spend the rest of the year researching the next book and then do it again the following year. And for a long time, the books were well reviewed and quite popular, and then the breakthrough came when JFK said he loved the James Bond books.

Interestingly, that was a real breakthrough, and then, of course, the films took off like rockets and the rest was history.

Andrew Roberts: And your “what if”.

Matt Ridley: My what if is a funny one, I was thinking this the other day. We were listening to some rather beautiful Beethoven on the car radio, my wife and I, and I just suddenly had the thought Shakespeare never heard Beethoven.

Shakespeare never read George Orwell. Shakespeare never knew about DNA or evolution or relativity or gravity. Imagine what he'd have done with some of those topics. I mean, he did such a spectacular job with sort of human nature, dealing with sort of ghastly twerps who stabbed each other and had sort of second rate battles in a provincial country.

He writes such eternal stuff about really quite small stuff, and I just love to know what. Maybe his career would have been a complete flop, if he came much later in history with all these things, because he wouldn't have been able to make up his mind what to do.

Maybe he would be no better than Peter Fleming, a perfectly good travel writer.

Andrew Roberts: Or Hamlet, changing his mind and not quite deciding what he wants to do either.

Matt Ridley: Yes, exactly.

Andrew Roberts: Matt Ridley, fifth viscount and 9th Baronet Ridley, you've been denounced as a heretic on most counts, so of course we had to have you on. And thank you so much for coming on, Secrets of Statecraft.

Matt Ridley: Andrew, thank you.

Andrew Roberts: Thank you, Matt. On the next secrets of statecraft, I'll be speaking to Natalia Bugayova, a fellow at the Washington based Institute for War and an expert on Ukraine.

Presenter: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas advancing freedom.

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