The Ledger, every show

“China has been relatively free economically, but relative, but very unfree politically in the last few decades. I think that's now changing. I don't think it's very free in either respect. And so I don't see it leading the world in prosperity for an awful lot …”

“The highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, bar none, second highest domestic electricity prices second to Germany.”

“Norway has drilled something like 40 new gas and oil wells just in the past 12 months, I think, Britain has drilled zero, but it's the same field.”

“You've seen what's happened to a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs, they've been swallowed up by state owned enterprises or partnerships with them.”

“By the way, the message of my argument that we had transport innovations in the 20th century, and then in the first half of the 20th century, and communications innovations in the second half, is that the first half of the 21st century may not be all about com…”

“We're reforesting the globe. There is more forest cover every year now.”

“Yes, I think on the whole, we will win our battles against most pathogens, because we have so much possibility of ingenuity now, of human ingenuity to help us defeat them.”

“So for example, you know, we've been unable to come up with new designs for nuclear power stations for several decades. That's because licensing a new design for nuclear power station would cost billions under the present licensing system. So nobody bothers to…”

“We've not grown in GDP per capita terms significantly in 15 years now.”

“And there are innovations that change the world dramatically, which don't actually depend on any inventions. Things like container shipping, which had an enormous impact on global trade by drastically cutting the cost of shipping goods overseas, which didn't i…”

“The Smithsonian Institution didn't want to give the Wright brothers credit for being the first people in the air for decades afterwards, and they had on display Langley's plane, which had been modified so that it would work after the event, but they were final…”

“The difference between him and the 20 other people who invented the light bulb around the same time is that he was prepared to put in the slog of testing 6000 different types of plant material before settling on Japanese bamboo for the filament of his light bu…”

“Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who invented Google, thought they were cataloguing the internet. They didn't think they were inventing a search engine to start with.”

“Malaria was going up until 2003. It's now going down as a cause of mortality in the world, going down pretty steeply. And it's entirely due to this, but not entirely, but it's nearly all due to this technology. It's more effective than anti-malarial drugs more…”

“There's a fascinating period in history soon after the American Revolution when Americans were engaged in rampant industrial espionage to try and steal secrets of Britain's industry. And they sent all sorts of people over to prowl around pretending to be Preac…”

“The number of humpback whales in the world, right, was down to 5000 in the mid-nineteen sixties. It's now a 130,000.”

“We've only totally extinguished one major human disease, and that's smallpox, but boy, is that an important one.”