George Gilder
George Gilder
George Franklin Gilderis an American investor, writer, economist, techno-utopian advocate, and co-founder of the Discovery Institute. His 1981 international bestseller Wealth and Poverty advanced a practical and moral case for supply-side economics and capitalism during the early months of the Reagan administration and made him Ronald Reagan's most quoted living author. In 2013 he published Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How It is Revolutionizing Our World, which reformulated economics in terms of the information theory of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth29 November 1939
CountryUnited States of America
Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian "great machine", the economy is not a closed system.
Welfare now erodes work and family and thus keeps poor people poor. Accompanying welfare is an ideology - sustaining a whole system of federal and state bureaucracies - that also operates to destroy their faith. The ideology takes the form of false theories of discrimination and spurious claims of racism and sexism as the dominant forces in the lives of the poor.
A successful economy depends on the proliferation of the rich, on creating a large class of risk-taking men who are willing to shun the easy channels of a comfortable life in order to create new enterprise, win huge profits, and invest them again.
A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge
The belief that all wealth comes from stealing is popular in prisons and at Harvard.
Surely women's liberation is a most unpromising panacea. But the movement is working politically, because our sexuality is so confused, our masculinity so uncertain, and our families so beleaguered that no one knows what they are for or how they are sustained.
Like the Pentagon, our social science often reduces all phenomena to dollars and body counts. Sexuality, family unity, kinship, masculine solidarity, maternity, motivation, nurturing, all the rituals of personal identity and development, all the bonds of community, seem "sexist," "superstitious," "mystical," "inefficient," "discriminatory." And, of course, they are -- and they are also indispensable to a civilized society.
Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.
The prevailing theory of capitalism suffers from one central and disabling flaw, a profound distrust and incomprehension of capitalism.
The information glut has become a ruling cliche. As all resources - from energy to information - become more abundant, the presure of economic scarcity falls ever more heavily on one key residual, and that single shortage looms ever more stringent and controlling. The governing scarcity of the information economy is time: the shards of a second, the hours in a day, the years in a life, the latency of memory, the delay in aluminum wires, the time to market, the time to metastasis, the time to retirement.
Unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom empty, a limp nullity. While the female body is full of internal potentiality, the male is internally barren. Manhood at the most basic level can be validated and expressed only in action.
Nothing is more deadly to achievement than the belief that effort will not be rewarded, that the world is a bleak and discriminatory place in which only the predatory and the specially preferred can get ahead.
All progress comes from the creative minority.
In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.