George Gilder Quotes

The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is dispensable, his children sense it.

The rates of taxation climb and the levels of capital decline, until the only remaining wealth beyond the reach of the regime is the very protein of human flesh, and that too is finally taxed, bound, and gagged, and brought to the colossal temple of the state - a final sacrifice of carnal revenue to feed the declining elite.

Entrepreneurial knowledge has little to do with certified expertise, advanced degrees, or the learning of establishment schools. The fashionably educated and cultivated spurn the kind of fanatically focused learning commanded by the innovators. Wealth all too often comes from doing what other people consider insufferably boring or unendurably hard.

If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked.

In a world where women do not say no, the man is never forced to settle down and make serious choices. His sex drive
the most powerful compulsion in his life
is never used to make him part of civilization as the supporter of a family. If a woman does not force him to make a long-term commitment
to marry
in general, he doesn't. It is maternity that requires commitment. His sex drive only demands conquest, driving him from body to body in an unsettling hunt for variety and excitement in which much of the thrill is in the chase itself.
The man still needs to be tamed. His problem is that many young women think they have better things to do than socialize single men.

To declare enthusiasm for feminist ideals is almost a new mode of macho, a way to flaunt an invulnerable virility. Many will dismiss feminism as merely a matter of domestic logistics ... Mention procreation, and they talk about the population explosion. They believe it is just as well that many women indicate disinterest in having children.

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.

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.

People cannot be expected to learn one expertise and just apply it routinely in a job. Your expertise is in steadily renewing your knowledge base and extending it to new areas. That lifelong cycle of learning really is the foundation of the new information organization and economy.

Activity and creativity almost always flow to the least regulated arena.

The prevailing theory of capitalism suffers from one central and disabling flaw, a profound distrust and incomprehension of capitalism.

Intelligent design itself does not have any content.

The world is moving from the scientistic guilds and sects of yore toward the new sciences of information. Fragmented and futilitarian, the academic sciences are turning to politics, panics, and cartels to preserve their old privileges. Decades ago I pored through the Harvard catalogue and concluded that 80 percent of the courses stultified their students. Now those stultified students are running the country. Most of the courses they took were either self-evident or wrong, ideological or tautological, twisted or trivial.

A culture that does not aspire to the divine becomes obsessed with the fascination of evil, reveling in the frivolous, the depraved, and the bestial.

In a free economy, a high degree of apparent randomness does not mean actual randomness. An apparently random pattern is evidence not of purposelessness but of an entrepreneurial economy full of creative surprises.

A day doesn't pass that I'm not surprised.

When capitalists are thwarted, deflected, or dispossessed, the generals and politicians, ... and socialist intellectuals, are always amazed at how quickly the great physical means of production - the contested tokens of wealth and resources of nature - dissolve into so much scrap, ruined concrete, snarled wire, and wilderness.

Capitalism offers nothing but frustrations and rebuffs to those who wish - because of claimed superiority of intelligence, birth, credentials, or ideals - to get without giving, to take without risking, to profit without sacrifice, to be exalted without humbling themselves to understand others and meet their needs.

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.

All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms.

Creativity is the foundation of wealth. All progress comes from the creative minority. Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock of goods than a flow of ideas, the defining characteristic of which is surprise. If it were not surprising, we could plan it, and socialism would work.

The envy of excellence leads to perdition; the love of it leads to the light.

To the Austrian economics of subjectivity, time provides an objective foundation.

I think I'm different. I've got alpha, baby ... I think I can find the profits of surprise, the yield of real knowledge. Everyone says that, of course, but most investors are all beta
just volatility, just the random motion of the surf ... they get killed. To generate alpha, I need help, direction, signposts, analysts, and sometimes even brandy-toting salesmen.

Piketty would impose a progressive annual tax on capital. By a static analysis, such a tax might reduce the yield of capital to the rate of GDP expansion and thus eliminate the bias toward top-heavy accumulation by elites. Upholding the secular stagnation theory of permanent growth slowdown, he naturally focuses on depressing the return to capital. Taking money from the rich and giving it to government might seem to address "inequality." But by putting capital into the hands of the least productive users of it - politicians - he would aggravate the very stagnation he warns against.

The index is retrospective. The crucial alpha, the entropy, the signal modulating that linear advance ... comes from knowledge of the entrepreneurial surprises harbored on the edge of the noise.

An economics of systems only-an economics of markets but not of men-is fatally flawed.

President Obama's friend and counselor Ta-Nehisi Coates, from his perch atop the bestseller lists and at the pinnacle of power in America, denounces the American Dream, in terms that echo Obama's previous spiritual guide, Pastor Wright in Chicago, as a genocidal weight of whiteness.

All progress comes from the creative minority.

Hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia.

Shaul is sure that Israel's test of survival, daily undergone, is the secret of Israeli enterprise. When you're concerned about your survival, every day, you think outside of the box

Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism.

The force driving the Israelis decisively out of their socialist past into the modern world of finance was the ingenuity of Netanyahu.

Liberals force lower middle-class families, who love their children, to dispatch them to ghetto schools dominated by gangs of fatherless boys bearing knives.

Capitalists are motivated not chiefly by the desire to consume wealth or indulge their appetites, but by the freedom and power to consummate their entrepreneurial ideas.

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.

The crucial role of the rich in a capitalist economy is ... to invest; to provide unencumbered and unbureaucratized cash.

This is what sexual liberation chiefly accomplishes - it liberates young women to pursue married men.

If the government controls, guarantees, channels, or directs investment, it is not capitalism. Pivotal to the investment process is interest rates. For entrepreneurs to control capital, interest rates must reflect its real cost rather than merely the cost of printing money. Otherwise the money printers will dominate investment.

But I still don't have knowledge, interpreting the surprises that others don't know about, that will drive a new narrative. You have to work and think and stress and fret to surmise the surprises by first fathoming the pulse.

Locked in a debate over Israel's alleged vices, they miss the salient truth running through the long history of anti-Semitism: Israel is hated above all for its virtues.

History tells us that the threat to prosperity is not debt but socialism.

Warren Buffett summed up the conventional view with his usual pith: "Gold gets dug out of the ground ... we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it ... Anyone from Mars would be scratching their head."2

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.

In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.

Let us imagine the lineaments of an economics of disorder, disequilibrium, and surprise that could explain and measure the contributions of entrepreneurs. Such an economics would begin with the Smithian mold of order and equilibrium. Smith himself spoke of property rights, free trade, sound currency, and modest taxation as conditions necessary for prosperity. He was right: disorder, disequilibrium, chaos, and noise inhibit the creative acts that engender growth. The ultimate physical entropy envisaged as the heat death of the universe, in its total disorder, affords no room for invention or surprise. But entrepreneurial disorder is not chaos or mere noise. Entrepreneurial disorder is some combination of order and upheaval that might be termed informative disorder.

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.

Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.

Ignored ... was the one unbridgeable gap between physics and any such science of human behavior: the surprises that arise from free will and human creativity ... they constitute the most important economic events. For a miracle is simply an innovation, a sudden and bountiful addition of information to the system.

Egalitarians never seem to understand that promoting economic equality in theory means promoting resentments and polarization in practice, making everyone worse off. - Thomas Sowell (2016)

Even though Jews are a tiny minority of less than a tenth of 1 percent of the world's people, they comprise perhaps a quarter of the world's paramount capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Devoid of the outside influences of capital and technology, the source of bitcoin value becomes the pure irreversible passage of time. The

Wealth usually comes from doing what other people find insufferably boring.

With currencies and interest rates far more volatile than the economic activity that they guide, the horizons of investment and commerce had to shrink proportionally with real economic knowledge.

Denying the necessary role of the creative mind as expressed in capital and technology, Marx ended up vindicating the zero-sum vision of anti-Semitic envy, in which bankers, capitalists, arbitrageurs, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and traders are deemed to be parasitical shysters and dispensable middlemen.

Economic growth springs not chiefly from incentives - carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments for workers and entrepreneurs. The incentive theory of capitalism allows its critics to depict it as an inhumane scheme of clever manipulation of human needs and hungers scarcely superior to the more benign forms of slavery. Wealth actually springs from the expansion of information and learning, profits and creativity that enhance the human qualities of its beneficiaries as it enriches them. Workers' learning increasingly compensates for their labor, which imparts knowledge as it extracts work. Joining knowledge and power, capitalism focuses on the entropy of human minds and the benefits of freedom. Thus it is the most humane of all economic systems.

The point about bad money is not that it converges with the worth of the paper it is printed on. It is worse than that. Falsifying the information basis of all prices, it stultifies entrepreneurs, deceives savers, and fosters tyranny. Interest

Most of America's leading entrepreneurs are bound to the masts of their fortunes. They are allowed to keep their wealth only as long as they invest it in others. In a real sense, they can keep only what they give away. It has been given to others in the form of investments. It is embodied in a vast web of enterprises that retains its worth only through constant work and sacrifice. Capitalism is a system that begins not with taking but with giving to others.

Originating in large scale electronic warfare and anti-jamming technologies for the battlefield devised by two Russian immigrants, these now one-chip systems can fit in a handset and enable intercommunication among the towers of Babel in urban America.

Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk. But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities ...

Obviously the most enduring way to make this commitment is through marriage. Yet because sexual liberals deny the differences between the sexes, their explanations of why there are marriages and why marriage is needed and desired ignore the central truth of marriage: that it is built on sex roles. Pressed to explain the institution, they respond vaguely that human beings want "structure" or desire "intimacy." But however desirable in marriage, these values are not essential causes or explanations of it.

In many cultures, the wife and husband share very few one-to-one intimacies. Ties with others of the same sex--or even the opposite sex--often offer deeper companionship. The most intimate connections are between mothers and their children. In all societies, male groups provide men with some of their most emotionally gratifying associations. Indeed, intimacy can deter or undermine wedlock. In the kibbutz, for example, where unrelated boys and girls are brought up together and achieve a profound degree of companionate feeling, they never marry members of the same child-rearing group. In the many cultures where marriages are arranged, the desire for intimacy is subversive of marriage.

Similarly, man's "innate need for structure" can be satisfied in hundreds of forms of organization. The need for structure may explain all of them or none of them, but it does not tell us why, of all possible arrangements, marriage is the one most prevalent. It does not tell u

The war between the centrifuge of knowledge and the centripetal pull of power remains the prime conflict in all economies. Reconciling the two impulses is a new economics, an economics that puts free will and the innovating entrepreneur not on the periphery but at the center of the system. It is an economics of surprise that distributes power as it extends knowledge. It is an economics of disequilibrium and disruption that tests its inventions in the crucible of a competitive marketplace. It is an economics that accords with the constantly surprising fluctuations of our lives.

What makes capitalism succeed is not chiefly its structure of incentives but its use of knowledge and experience.

Ever since the millennial crash, the United States has been buffeted by currency shocks, interest-rate gyrations, and financial device bubbles. Government fashions move "investment" from real estate consumption to climate distractions. It was technology alone that saved the world economy.

The passion for finding the system in experience, replacing surprise with order, is a persistent part of human nature ... Science came to mean the elimination of surprise. It outlawed miracles, because miracles are above all unexpected.

The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter ... The powers of the mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.

The source and root of all monetary evil [is] the government monopoly on the issue and control of money. - Friedrich Hayek

The belief that all wealth comes from stealing is popular in prisons and at Harvard.

We begin with the proposition that capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information is best defined as surprised-what we cannot predict rather than what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition of things by the pursuit of monetary rewards but the expansion of wealth through learning and discovery.

In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb.

On every continent and in every epoch the peoples who have excelled in creating wealth have been the victims of some of society's greatest brutalities.

In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education - not in the classroom, where the old ways are taught, but in the factories and labs where new ways are wrought ... nothing has been so rare in recent years as an Ivy League graduate who has made a significant innovation in American enterprise.

Under capitalism, economic power flows not to the intellectual, who manipulates ideas and basks in their light, but to the man who gives himself to his ideas and tests them with his own wealth and work.

But if the 1 percent and the 0.1 percent are respected and allowed to risk their wealth - and new rebels are allowed to rise up and challenge them - America will continue to be the land where the last regularly become the first by serving others.

From Adam Smith's pin factory to Moore's Law of microchips, the division of labor drives the extension of the market, not the other way around. Supply creates its own demand through the proliferation of goods and services down the curves of learning, entropy, and imagination.

Innovation is always a product of individual innovators, a rare and dynamic breed not always appealing to the millions who depend on their creativity for their own comfort, health, and security.

The key role of entrepreneurs, like the most crucial role of scientists, is not to fill in the gaps in an existing market or theory, but to generate entirely new markets or theories ... They stand before a canvas as empty as any painter's; a page as blank as any poet's.

Poverty is less a matter of income than of prospects. While the incomes of the poor have steadily risen through Great Society largesse, their prospects have plummeted as families have broken into dependent fragments.

Superfluous focus on accounting and other procedural details is preventing U.S. industry from competing with rough-and-ready rivals in Asia that can build thousands of factories and skyscrapers while the United States dithers with environmental-impact litigation, re-computation, and backup of accounting reports.

Opening the book is a quotation from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that sums up the Prager-Telushkin view: It was Judaism that brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world ... The Jew carries the burden of God in history [and] for this has never been forgiven.

The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.

From Pastor Malthus to the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth; from hysteria over DDT, PCBs, and natural gas "fracking"; to continuing bouts of chemo-phobia and population panic; the achievements of capitalism have suffered a long series of detractions. The factitious and febrile campaign against global warming is only the latest binge of self-abuse among the children of prosperity.

Under Arab rule, Palestine had always been a somnolent desert land that could have sustained no authentic twentieth-century Arab awakening. Palestine without Jews is a not a nation but a naqba.

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

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.