George Gilder > Quotes

“The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“In the Google era, Newton’s system of the world—one universe, one money, one God—is now in eclipse. His unitary foundation of irreversible physics and his irrefragable golden money have given way to infinite parallel universes and multiple paper moneys manipulated by fiat. Money, like the cosmos, has become relativistic and reversible at will.”
― George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

“Today, on a per capita basis, Israel far leads the world in research and technological creativity.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“The envy of excellence leads to perdition; the love of it leads to the light.”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test

“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, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“Money is not a magic wand but a measuring stick, not wealth but a gauge of it.”
― George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

“Midas’s error was to mistake gold, wealth’s monetary measure, for wealth itself. But wealth is not a thing or a random sequence. It is inextricably rooted in hard won knowledge over extended time.”
― George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

“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 Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“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, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“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.”
― George Gilder, Men and Marriage

“The test distills into a few questions: What is your attitude toward people who surpass you in the creation of wealth or in other accomplishments? Do you aspire to equal their excellence, or does it make you seethe? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement, or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down?”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“If it moves tax it. If it keeps moving regulate it. If it stops moving subsidize it.”
― George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

“Far from being greedy, America’s leading entrepreneurs—with some exceptions—display discipline and self-control, hard work and austerity, excelling those found in any college of social work, Washington think tank, or congregation of bishops.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“The environmental movement has palsied two generations of American youth. It has diverted much of our high school curricula into the phony field of environmental science. (As legendary physicist Richard Feynman observed, “If a science has an adjective it probably isn’t science.”) At the same time, the movement has turned many universities into apocalyptic nature cults that divert money from education to an obscurantist debauch. Seventy-two percent of Harvard students in late 2012 actually voted to have their university disinvest from all fossil fuels. This movement has already corrupted most branches of government with a carbon dioxide fetish. Now it is debilitating America’s most precious venture assets.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“actual brains, which turn out be much more like sensory processors than logic machines.”
― George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

“An economy is a "noosphere" (a mind-based system), and it can revive as quickly as minds and policies can change.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“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, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“The risk-bearing role of the rich cannot be performed so well by anyone else. The benefits of capitalism still depend on capitalists. The other groups on the pyramid of wealth should occasionally turn from the spectacles of consumption long enough to see the adventure on the frontiers of the economy above them - an adventure not without its note of nobility...”
― George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty

“Like the railroads that bankrupted a previous generation of visionary entrepreneurs and built the foundations of an industrial nation, fiber-optic webs, storewidth breakthroughs, data centers, and wireless systems installed over the last five years will enable and endow the next generation of entrepreneurial wealth. As Mead states, "the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was to get a company going during the bubble". Now, Mead says, "there's space available; you can get fab runs; you can get vendors to answer the phone. You can make deals with people; you can sit down and they don't spend their whole time telling you how they're a hundred times smarter than you. It's absolutely amazing. You can actually get work done now, which means what's happening now is that the entrepreneurs, the technologists, are building the next generation technology that isn't visible yet but upon which will be built the biggest expansion of productivity the world has ever seen.”
― George Gilder, The Silicon Eye: Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech Innovation

“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, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“The blind spot of AI is that consciousness does not emerge from thought; it is the source of”
― George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

“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, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“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 us why, in most societies, marriage alone is consecrated in a religious ceremony and entails a permanent commitment.

As most anthropologists see it, however, the reason is simple. The very essence of marriage, Bronislaw Malinowski wrote, is not structure and intimacy; it is "parenthood and above all maternity." The male role in marriage, as Margaret Mead maintained, "in every known human society, is to provide for women and children." In order to marry, in fact, Malinowski says that almost every human society first requires the man "to prove his capacity to maintain the woman."

Marriage is not simply a ratification of an existing love. It is the conversion of that love into a biological and social continuity. . . . Regardless of what reasons particular couples may give for getting married, the deeper evolutionary and sexual propensities explain the persistence of the institution. All sorts of superficial variations--from homosexual marriage to companionate partnership--may be played on the primal themes of human life. But the themes remain. The natural fulfillment of love is a child; the fantasies and projects of the childless couple may well be considered as surrogate children.”
― George Gilder, Men and Marriage

“If the Arabs put down their weapons today there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel. BENJAMIN NETANYAHU”
― George Gilder, The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy

“A society does not run into real trouble, however, until its culture begins to adopt the unmarried male pattern, until the long-term commitments on which any enduring community is based are undermined by an opportunistic public philosophy. The public philosophy of the unmarried male focuses on immediate gratification: “What did posterity ever do for me?” A society that widely adopts this attitude is in trouble.”
― George Gilder, Men and Marriage

“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, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“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, Men and Marriage

“Alphabet, is worth nearly $800 billion, only about $100 billion less than Apple. How do you get rich by giving things away? Google does it through one of the most ingenious technical schemes in the history of commerce. Page’s and Brin’s crucial insight was that the existing advertising system, epitomized by Madison Avenue, was linked to the old information economy, led by television, which Google would overthrow.”
― George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

“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, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“The economy is a test and measurement system, and it requires reliable learning guided by an accurate meter of monetary value. The”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does