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
George Gilder quotes about
Most people consider themselves above the gritty and relentless details of life that allow the creation of great wealth. They leave it to the experts. But in general you join the one percent of the one percent not by leaving it to the experts but by creating new expertise, not by knowing what the experts know but by learning what they think is beneath them.
All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms.
The most important feature of an information economy, in which information is defined as surprise, is the overthrow, not the attainment, of equilibrium. The science that we have come to know as information theory establishes the supremacy of the entrepreneur because it appreciates the powerful connection between destruction and what Schumpeter described as "creative destruction," between chaos and creativity.
In order to understand the movement of prices, you need not an oscilloscope to measure the entire market and reduce it to noise, but a microscope to investigate the creative process behind every company and its price.
Entropy is Janus-faced. Its upside surprises are redemptive and favorable to freedom. It is freedom of choice. But the carrier itself requires constant vigilance against entropic noise. Order is not spontaneous, but it is a necessary condition for all the surprises of freedom and opportunity.
The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.
The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state.
From the equilibrium and spontaneous order of Adam Smith and his heirs, from invisible-handed markets and perfect competition, supply and demand, and rewards and punishments, I was pushed to theories of disequilibrium and disorder, and information and noise, as the keys to understanding economic progress.
In an information economy, entrepreneurs master the science of information in order to overcome the laws of the purely physical sciences. They can succeed because of the surprising power of the laws of information, which are conducive to human creativity. The central concept of information theory is a measure of freedom of choice. The principle of matter, on the other hand, is not liberty but limitation- it has weight and occupies space.
In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.
Enforced by genetics, sexual reproduction, perspective, and experience, the most manifest characteristic of human beings is their diversity. The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processes-governments, monopolies, regulators, and elite institutions- all attempting to quell human diversity and impose order. Thus power always seeks centralization.
All progress comes from the creative minority.
By merely foreswearing violence and taking advantage of their unique position contiguous with the world’s most creative people, the Palestinians could be rich and happy.
History tells us that the threat to prosperity is not debt but socialism.