Matt Ridley is known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics and has been a regular contributor to The Times newspaper.
33 Facts About Matt Ridley
2.
Matt Ridley resigned, and the bank was bailed out by the UK government; this led to its nationalisation.
3.
Matt Ridley is a libertarian, and a staunch supporter of Brexit.
4.
Matt Ridley 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.
5.
Matt Ridley is the nephew of the late Conservative Member of Parliament and minister Nicholas Ridley and the great grandson of Edwin Lutyens.
6.
Matt Ridley attended Eton College from 1970 to 1975, and then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study zoology.
7.
Matt Ridley joined The Economist in 1984, first working as a science editor until 1987, then as Washington, DC correspondent from 1987 to 1989 and as American editor from 1990 to 1992.
8.
Matt Ridley was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph and an editor of The Best American Science Writing 2002.
9.
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".
10.
Since 2013, Matt Ridley has written a weekly column for The Times on science, the environment, and economics.
11.
Matt Ridley wrote the majority of the main article of the August 2017 edition of BBC Focus magazine.
12.
Matt Ridley cites various previous resource scares as his evidence.
13.
In 1994, Matt Ridley became a board member of the UK bank Northern Rock.
14.
Matt Ridley's father had been a board member for 30 years, and chairman from 1987 to 1992.
15.
From 1996 to 2003, Matt 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 its honorary life president.
16.
Matt Ridley had been a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, which organises conferences to further education and understanding of Britons and North Americans.
17.
Matt Ridley is best known as the author of a number of popular science books, listed below.
18.
In recent years, Matt Ridley has described his first book as "bad" and has expressed gratitude that few people know about it.
19.
In 2006, Matt 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.
20.
Matt 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".
21.
Monbiot took the view that Matt Ridley had failed to learn from the collapse of Northern Rock.
22.
Matt Ridley was then defended by Terence Kealey in a further article published on the Guardian website.
23.
Matt 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.
24.
In 2014, a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Matt Ridley was challenged by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University's Earth Institute.
25.
Matt Ridley 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.
26.
Matt Ridley was one of the earliest commentators to spot the economic significance of shale gas.
27.
Matt Ridley is a Eurosceptic and advocated the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union during the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.
28.
Matt Ridley appeared in Brexit: The Movie, arguing for Britain to return to the policy of free trade that distinguished it after 1845 until the 1930s.
29.
Matt Ridley wrote a 2017 column making the case for free-market anticapitalism.
30.
Matt Ridley wrote in May 2020 that "research into the origins of the new coronavirus raises questions about how it became so infectious in human beings" and included as one possibility "perhaps laboratories".
31.
In 2012, on the death of his father, Matt Ridley became the 5th Viscount Matt Ridley and Baron Wensleydale.
32.
When his father died in 2012, Matt Ridley succeeded him as the 5th Viscount Matt Ridley, having taken over the running of the family estate of Blagdon Hall, near Stannington, Northumberland, some years before.
33.
In 1989, Matt Ridley married Anya Hurlbert, a Professor of Neuroscience at Newcastle University; they live in northern England and have a son and a daughter.