George Gilder Quotes & Sayings

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

Spontaneous order is self-contradictory. Spontaneity connotes the ebullition of surprises. It is highly entropic and disorderly. It is entrepreneurial and complex. Order connotes predictability and equilibrium. It is what is not spontaneous. It includes moral codes, constitutional restraints, personal disciplines, educational integrity, predictable laws, reliable courts, stable money, trustworthy finance, strong families, dependable defense, and police powers. Order requires political guidance, sovereignty, and leadership. It normally entails religious beliefs. The entire saga of the history of the West conveys the courage and sacrifice necessary to enforce and defend these values against their enemies. — George Gilder

Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian "great machine", the economy is not a closed system. — George Gilder

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 ... — George Gilder

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

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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 — George Gilder

In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

Yet economics purports to be strangely exempt from this fact of life. From Adam Smith's day to our own, the chief concern of the discipline has been to render economic events unsurprising ... The discernment of orderly rules governing the apparent chaos of life was a remarkable achievement and continues to amaze. — George Gilder

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

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 — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

The fact is there hasn't been a thrilling new erogenous zone discovered since de Sade. — George Gilder

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

Entrepreneurial creation is the generation, de novo, of novelty and surprise - freedom of choice originating in the world of ideas, and imagination beyond all concern with chemicals. The contrary view - that all ideas are determined by material relationships - is the materialist superstition. — George Gilder

Some economists became obsessed with market efficiency and others with market failure. Generally held to be members of opposite schools-freshwater and saltwater, Chicago and Cambridge, liberal and conservative, Austrian and Keynesian-both sides share an essential economic vision. They see their discipline as successful insofar as it eliminates surprise-insofar, that is, as the inexorable workings of the machine override the initiatives of the human actors. — George Gilder

Capitalism begins with giving. — George Gilder

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

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

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

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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

Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises. — George Gilder

All progress comes from the creative minority. — George Gilder

Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns. — George Gilder

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 — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

The United States is probably the most [socially] mobile society in the history of the world. The virtues that are most valuable in it are diligence, discipline, ambition, and a willingness to take risks. Education and credentials are most important in government; elsewhere most skills are learned on the job. — George Gilder

The differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society. — George Gilder

The system failed not because it was rational, but because rational choice in the face of massive ignorance - whether attributable to folly or deceit - is meaningless. Capitalism depends not on the freedom to choose but on the free flow of information across a low-entropy carrier. Corrupt the carrier with noise, and capitalism collapses. And the great corrupter of any carrier, the great generator of destructive noise, is power. And in this case the powers assembled were immense. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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

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

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. — George Gilder

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

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

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

In a parody of the supply-side economics of creative destruction, advocates of AB 32 envisaged "alternative" energy sources creating new jobs and industries and replacing existing fuels. Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded3 is the bible of this delusional sect, which has captured much of Silicon Valley. This economic model sees new wealth emerge from dismantling the existing energy economy and replacing it with a medieval system of windmills and druidical sun temples. But the destruction of the workable and efficient energy system we have does nothing to enable a new one. — George Gilder

[Successful] projects that entrepreneurs initiated and carried through had one essential quality. All had been thoroughly contemplated by the regnant experts and dominant companies, with their large research staffs and financial resources, and had been judged too difficult, untimely, risky, expensive and unprofitable. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

Quality is abundant. Time is the new scarcity. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

Although some observers believe that feminism and sexual liberalism no longer threaten family values, little in fact has changed. Contemporary sexual liberals are merely less honest than earlier feminists in facing the inevitable antifamily consequences of their beliefs. They continue to maintain that the differences between men and women, such as men's greater drive to produce in the workplace, are somehow artificial and dispensable. They still insist that men and women can generally share and reverse roles without jeopardizing marriage. They still encourage a young woman to sacrifice her twenties in intense rivalry with men, leaving her to clutch desperately for marriage as her youthfulness and fertility pass. Although they declare themselves supporters of the family, they are scarcely willing to define it. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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

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

The power in capitalism must not be mindless. Unless it is combined with knowledge, mere economic power or money is fruitless. Enterprise involves memory of the past and anticipation of the future, and it is creative. It is not a simple incentive system of rewards and punishments, of carrots and sticks. It is an information system, and it is governed less by economic theory as we know it than by information theory. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

An economy is a "noosphere" (a mind-based system), and it can revive as quickly as minds and policies can change. — George Gilder

Much of the market is mindlessly indexed. That means it is all beta. The knowledge is leaching away in the surf of noise and rapid trading. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

The key to growth is quite simple: creative men with money. The cause of stagnation is similarly clear: depriving creative individuals of financial power. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

A policy of subsidizing failures will end in an economy strewn with capital-guzzling industries long past their time of profitability - old companies that cannot create jobs themselves, but can stand in the way of job creation. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

Today, on a per capita basis, Israel far leads the world in research and technological creativity. — George Gilder

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. As Henry Ford said many years earlier: "If I had listened to my customers, I would have built a faster horse." Inventions in general express Shannon entropy. They come from the supply side. — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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

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. — George Gilder

Republicans have been running on tax-cut proposals since the era of Harding and Coolidge. Tax-rate reductions and simplifications are urgently needed. But again, there is no mention of the key problems of a global economy in decline - of the acceptance by economic elites of inevitable and irremediable stagnation. We have not faced the fact that the Federal Reserve's capacity to command growth is a god that has failed. — George Gilder

A new generation of avaricious and egocentric Americans, in the thrall of anti-industrial ideologies, shuns the productive adventures of creation to pursue the comfort and security of the welfare state, abetted by the discount windows at the Federal Reserve, guarantees for "green jobs" and solar enterprises, the triple-A assurances of Fannie and Freddie, and the bonanzas with which we reward litigation against the productive. — George Gilder

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) — George Gilder

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

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. — George Gilder

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 — George Gilder

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. — George Gilder

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