[p2p-research] on matt ridley ..

[Michel Bauwens]

on matt ridley's recent book:
http://crookedtimber.org/2010/06/19/chutzpah-alert/

 Chutzpah alert

by Chris Bertram on June 19, 2010

Sometimes an *ad hominem* attack just seems right. Such is the case with George
Monbiot’s latest piece on Matt
Ridley<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jun/18/matt-ridley-rational-optimist-errors>,
the Dawkinsite pop-science author. I’ve been aware of Ridley in his
journalistic capacity for years, but I had no idea that he also had a
parallel career in banking. Monbiot on Ridley’s *The Rational Optimist* :

In the book, Ridley attacks the “parasitic bureaucracy”, which stifles free
enterprise and excoriates governments for, among other sins, bailing out big
corporations. If only the market is left to its own devices, he insists, and
not stymied by regulations, the outcome will be wonderful for everybody.
What Ridley glosses over is that before he wrote this book he had an
opportunity to put his theories into practice. As chairman of Northern Rock,
he was responsible, according to parliament’s Treasury select committee, for
a “high-risk, reckless business strategy”. Northern Rock was able to pursue
this strategy as a result of a “substantial failure of regulation” by the
state. The wonderful outcome of this experiment was the first run on a
British bank since 1878, and a £27bn government bail-out. But it’s not just
Ridley who doesn’t mention the inconvenient disjunction between theory and
practice: hardly anyone does. His book has now been reviewed dozens of
times, and almost all the reviewers have either been unaware of his
demonstration of what happens when his philosophy is applied or too polite
to mention it.



-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20100627/1984174a/attachment.html>