The battle between top-down and bottom-up

Matt Ridley is a science writer and a former Member of the House of Lords

This week Wikipedia deleted a key paragraph from its entry about the origin of Covid. Why does this matter? It tells me that the real battle in this world today is not between left and right but between top-down and bottom-up. Wikipedia is a prime example of an institution that was intended to be built from the bottom up by us all and is increasingly being dictated from the top down, disastrously.

Spontaneous order describes many of the things that work best in the world: ecosystems, brains, bodies, cells, and genomes are built that way, self-assembling with no management. So are economies, markets, and languages. Nobody is in charge of the rules of the English language (thank goodness), even though it is man-made: everybody is. As the eighteenth-century Edinburgh philosopher Adam Ferguson said, “nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”.

“On coming to Paris for a visit, I said to myself: Here are a million human beings who would all die in a few days if supplies of all sorts did not flow into this great metropolis,” wrote the nineteenth-century economist Frédéric Bastiat. Nobody is in charge of deciding how Paris gets fed every day, and it would be a mess if somebody was (see Union, Soviet or European). The lesson is that we are far too ready to reach for command and control rather than, as far as possible, setting the rules so that people can negotiate complex solutions among themselves through the magic of supply and demand.

The paragraph deleted from Wikipedia this week described a document called the DEFUSE proposal. This was a grant application from scientists in Wuhan and America in 2018, which requested $14 million from the Pentagon to put a genetic sequence called a furin cleavage site into a virus 20 per cent different from SARS for the first time. A year and a half later, a virus 20 per cent different from SARS with a furin cleavage site – the only one ever found in several hundred sarbecoviruses – started infecting people with a nasty new disease called Covid, in the very same city where they had proposed to do the experiment.

This week some Wikipedia editor called “SilkTork” called the DEFUSE proposal an “unnecessary detail” and, minutes later, another editor called “Tarnished Path” removed all mention of it. He left in a verbose and bizarre paragraph about the “parallel between the Wuhan lab leak narrative, and the machinations of fictional supervillain Fu Manchu”, giving the lie to the claim that the cut was made to save words – and perhaps giving a clue as to his own nationality.

This is the reality of Wikipedia these days. A handful of powerful editors decide what you will read. They have banned 1.6 million people from contributing and spend their days shutting down anything that does not fit their prejudices. As Wikipedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger complained last year: “It is a basic principle of sound governance that we know who our leaders are, so why are the 62 Wikipedia users with the most authority—’CheckUsers’, ‘Bureaucrats’ and Arbitration Committee members—mostly anonymous? Only 14.5 per cent of such users reveal a full, real name.”

This matters because Wikipedia is the overwhelming favourite source for Google when it comes to searches, and of almost all the AI engines too. Google has been pouring money into the Wikimedia Foundation, whose boss, Katherine Maher, has said that empirical truth-seeking is a “white male Western construct”. Wikipedia was built on the principle of decentralised knowledge but, says the journalist Ashley Rindsberg, has veered into “the hyper-centralized space of top-down social justice activism and advocacy”.

It is not the left-wingery of Wikipedia that bothers me but the top-downery. We have just invented a forum called the internet where everybody and anybody can contribute. But the instinct of pretty well every politician and far too many journalists is to try to turn it into a place where nanny knows best.

Surely it was not a coincidence that this edit happened two days before Anthony Fauci appeared before a Senate committee, where he was asked to explain why he secretly thought a lab leak possible but publicly did his best to kill the idea. The DEFUSE proposal is the single most devastating document pointing to a lab leak.

We now know the pandemic probably had a top-down cause, not a bottom-up one: a Chinese research group with American backing decided that interfering in viruses – collecting them from bats, bringing them to the middle of a big city, sequencing and then altering their genomes, testing them on humanised mice – would prevent a pandemic. Instead it almost certainly caused one. For some reason, scientists who are happy to embrace the idea that climate change has a top-down cause are extremely reluctant to reach the same conclusion about Covid.

Then the response to the pandemic was also far too top-down: locking us down for months on the basis of flawed models, culminating in our government telling us whether a Scotch egg is a snack or a meal.

Conversely, we know that the Chinese economic miracle had a bottom-up cause, not a top-down one. It was not some brilliant piece of planning by the government. It was the accidental realisation by Deng Xiaoping that a bunch of farmers disobeying their collective farm rules and growing their own produce were getting results, followed by a decision to loosen the restrictions on other sectors too.

This is true of all economic miracles. When Bill Clinton asked Congress to allow e-commerce, he did not try to dictate what would happen: the Framework for Global Electronic Commerce he put forward in 1997 was one of the most libertarian documents in history. The rapid rise in living standards in countries like India, Vietnam, and Poland is not the result of good five-year plans but of government getting out of the way of entrepreneurs.

When Ludwig Erhard decided to abolish price controls and rationing over one weekend in post-war West Germany in June 1948, the head of the American occupying forces, General Lucius Clay, was horrified. He told Erhard: “My people say you are thinking of abolishing controls, and they think that’s a bad idea.” Erhard replied: “Yes, my people say it’s a bad idea too, but try and stop me.” Germany took off like a rocket after that.

This is not an argument for anarchy. Of course we need law and order. But it is an argument for humility. Don’t assume that a few clever people know best; don’t tell other people how to flourish; set the rules, hold the ring, be the referee, but let the players play the game.

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What we’re reading

1. Turning Japanese. Over at CityAM, Helen Thomas suggests that Britain faces a choice like the one that has confronted Japan in recent decades: whether to escape economic stagnation through a programme of fiscal stimulus, industrial policy and structural reform, or to accept a prolonged period of low growth and rising debt. But Thomas warns that simply borrowing and spending is unlikely to succeed without deeper reforms to boost productivity and encourage investment.

2. It’s cool (to know nothing). Are Andy Burnham and Lucy Powell bringing back stupid? That’s what Michael Gove asks over at The Spectator. He argues that the Government’s education reforms represent a retreat from academic ambition in favour of lowering standards, all under the guise of inclusivity. Rigorous academic education has been one of the most effective drivers of social mobility; steering pupils away from academic GCSEs will be an anti-intellectual mistake.

3. Millionaire move. For The Critic, James Hodgkinson poses a simple question: where are all the millionaires going? Britain is experiencing a genuine exodus of high-net-worth individuals, driven by a hostile tax environment and an erosion of the conditions that once made the country attractive to entrepreneurs and investors. The departure of wealthy individuals leaves the Treasury with less revenue and the wider economy with fewer jobs and lower growth.

4. Drink piece. Our own Christopher Snowdon has taken to his Substack to critique claims that Britain’s spike in alcohol-related deaths after 2020 was primarily down to long-term factors such as alcohol availability, advertising, or affordability. Instead, Snowdon argues that the sharp increase in alcohol-specific deaths during the pandemic was a consequence of lockdowns, social isolation, disruption to treatment services, and worsening mental health – and he has the receipts.

5. The limits of tolerance. At ConservativeHome, Harry Richer from Fighting for a Free Future has argued that Britain is failing to have an honest conversation about the limits of tolerance and our need for a stronger civic culture. Richer contends that tolerance – once understood as a liberal virtue that allowed people with different beliefs and lifestyles to live together – has increasingly become confused with the passive acceptance of behaviours that undermine social cohesion.