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New Releases by Matt RidleyMatt Ridley is the author of Birds, Sex, and Beauty (2025), Birds, Sex and Beauty: The extraordinary implications of Charles Darwin’s strangest idea (2025), Viral (2022), How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time (2020), How Innovation Works (2020).
release date: Apr 01, 2025
Birds, Sex and Beauty: The extraordinary implications of Charles Darwin’s strangest idea
release date: Mar 13, 2025
release date: Jun 28, 2022
How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time
release date: Jun 03, 2020
release date: May 19, 2020
Building on his national bestseller The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley chronicles the history of innovation, and how we need to change our thinking on the subject. Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation that will shape the twenty-first century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen alike. Matt Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, involving trial and error, not a matter of lonely genius. It happens mainly in just a few parts of the world at any one time. It still cannot be modeled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine. Ridley derives these and other lessons from the lively stories of scores of innovations, how they started and why they succeeded or failed. Some of the innovation stories he tells are about steam engines, jet engines, search engines, airships, coffee, potatoes, vaping, vaccines, cuisine, antibiotics, mosquito nets, turbines, propellers, fertilizer, zero, computers, dogs, farming, fire, genetic engineering, gene editing, container shipping, railways, cars, safety rules, wheeled suitcases, mobile phones, corrugated iron, powered flight, chlorinated water, toilets, vacuum cleaners, shale gas, the telegraph, radio, social media, block chain, the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, fake bomb detectors, phantom games consoles, fraudulent blood tests, hyperloop tubes, herbicides, copyright, and even life itself.
How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take to Change the World?
release date: Nov 21, 2019
Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead
release date: Nov 03, 2016
Do Humankind’s Best Days Lie Ahead?
release date: Jun 07, 2016
The Evolution of Everything
release date: Oct 27, 2015
release date: Mar 26, 2013
release date: Feb 14, 2012
release date: Jan 17, 2012
release date: Jun 07, 2011
release date: Jan 01, 2011
A Book of Birds of Britain and Southern Africa
release date: Jan 01, 2009
Francis Crick/Alexis de Tocqueville 6c Mix Ctr
release date: Jun 01, 2006
release date: Jan 01, 2006
release date: Apr 29, 2003
The Best American Science Writing 2002
release date: Sep 03, 2002
Genoma: La autobiografia de una especie en 23 capitulos
release date: Jan 01, 2001
release date: Jan 01, 2001
release date: Jan 01, 2000
release date: Jan 01, 1999
release date: Apr 01, 1998
release date: Jan 01, 1998
release date: Jan 01, 1997
release date: Jan 01, 1995
release date: Oct 06, 1994
release date: Jan 01, 1990
release date: Jan 01, 1989
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