The Irony of Matt Ridley

So it turns out that the Matt Ridley who writes popular bestsellers on genomics is the same Matt Ridley who was chairman of Northern Rock until last Friday. He also was a columnist for the Londont Telegraph, where he used his pulpit to sketch out his fundamentally libertarian view of life. George Monbiot now puts all these things together, and the irony of this libertarian being bailed out by the UK government is not lost on him:

Ridley's core argument, which he explains at greater length in his books, is that humans, being the products of natural selection, act only in their own interests. But our selfish instincts encourage us to behave in ways that appear altruistic. By cooperating and by being perceived as generous, we earn other people's trust. This allows us to advance our own interests more effectively than we could by cheating, stealing and fighting...
Like Ridley, I am a biological determinist: I believe that much of our behaviour is governed by our evolutionary history. I accept the evidence he puts forward, but draw completely different conclusions. He believes that modern humans are destined to behave well if left to their own devices; I believe that they are likely to behave badly. If you belong to a small group of intelligent hominids, all of whom are well known to each other, you will be rewarded for cooperation and generosity within the group. (Though this does not stop your group from attacking or exploiting another.) If, on the other hand, you can switch communities at will, travel freely, buy in one country and sell in another, hire strangers then fire them, you will gain more from acting only in your own interest. You'll have an even stronger incentive to act against the common good if you run a bank whose lending and borrowing are so complex that hardly anyone can understand what is happening...
Under his chairmanship, the Economist notes, Northern Rock "pushed an aggressive business model to the limit, crossing its fingers and hoping that liquidity would always be there". It was allowed to do so because it was insufficiently regulated by the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority. When his libertarian business model failed, Ridley had to go begging to the detested state. If the government and its parasitic bureaucrats had not been able to use taxpayers' money to clear up his mess, thousands of people would have lost their savings. Northern Rock would have collapsed, and the resulting panic might have brought down the rest of the banking system.

I'm not convinced that there's a significant inverse correlation between cooperation and generosity, on the one hand, and globalization, on the other. Indeed, globalization acts as an incentive to improve governance standards in countries where they are significantly below the world average, for otherwise those countries tend to get frozen out of the global economy altogether. Meanwhile, globalization is great news for high-trust countries like Switzerland or Holland. But Monbiot is entirely right that the Northern Rock collapse is all the proof you need that Ridley's libertarianism could never work in practice.

(Thanks to Matt Clark for the link)

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