Economics

Center on Wealth & Poverty

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The dead piggy bank lies upside down on coins, Economic crisis, Decrease, layoff, job fired, pay cuts, low cost, collection
The dead piggy bank lies upside down on coins, Economic crisis, Decrease, layoff, job fired, pay cuts, low cost, collection

Rich But Bankrupt: Entrepreneurs Make Us Wealthier While Government Money Managers Lead Us to Ruin

Almost everyone has far more wealth due to technological advances than anyone had 30 years ago, yet their money balance sheets and that of most governments flirt with bankruptcy. How can this be? Read More ›
Gilder Metaxas

George Gilder | Life After Capitalism on the Eric Metaxas Radio Show

Eric Metaxas interviews polymathic genius George Gilder. Gilder is an American investor, author, economist, and co-founder of the Discovery Institute. In this interview we discuss many things including his latest book: Life After Capitalism: The Meaning of Wealth, the Future of the Economy, and the Time Theory of Money.

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wheat farm hill with wind mill
wheat farm hill with wind mill

State’s Climate Act Isn’t Worth Price We’re Paying

Washington state’s 2021 Climate Commitment Act (CCA), although high-minded in spirit, will do nothing to protect the state’s economy and environment from the effects of climate change. But what the CCA is already doing is burdening state residents and businesses with higher energy costs. Read More ›
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Photo licensed via Adobe Stock

‘Public’ Schools That Aren’t Public

Teachers unions and education bureaucrats hail public schools for being open to all children while condemning private schools for limiting access. But most “public” schools aren’t public at all. Read More ›
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COSM 2023

Is AI “generative” or degenerative? Does it usurp humans, or save us from new perils? This year’s COSM Technology Summit, to be held November 1-3 in Bellevue, Washington at the Bellevue Hyatt, will transcend these limited visions.COSM is an exclusive national summit on the converging technologies remaking the world as we know it. Read More ›
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the interior metal manufacturing the view from the top
the interior metal manufacturing the view from the top

Progressive Gloom Ignores a Marvelous Historical Economic Measure

In “Life After Capitalism,” George Gilder, citing Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley in the Cato Institute’s volume “Superabundance,” writes that “between 1980 and 2022, workers have been able to buy some 300 percent more goods and services with their hours and minutes.” The secret sauce is applied knowledge. Read More ›
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Stack of Gold Coin on Black Background.
Stack of Gold Coin on Black Background.

The BRICs Go For Gold

After months of debate about various currency and commodity baskets, a Russia- and China-led consortium has apparently settled on using gold as the basis of a planned new international currency system separate from the US dollar and euro. Read More ›
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Manhattan, New York. USA
Manhattan, New York. USA

Book Review: George Gilder’s Brilliant ‘Life After Capitalism’

It was probably fifteen years ago that I was at lunch with Banknote Capital’s Jim Fitzgerald. We were finishing up when the conversation shifted to tax rates, at which point Fitzgerald dismissed the notion that lower rates stimulate more work.

To be clear, Fitzgerald was not saying that he opposed lower tax rates. He was and is very much for them. But he was expressing his disdain for the theory that lower rates cause people to work more. In his case, Fitzgerald would work a great deal precisely because there was joy in it.

Still, what he said at the time was jarring. It called into question so much that was accepted wisdom. Gradually it made lots of sense. Tax rates should be low simply because they should be low. After that, it’s perhaps unrealistic to suggest that Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and FedEx founder Fred Smith began to build their remarkable businesses only after consulting the tax code. Work for them was and is similarly joy.

The conversation with Fitzgerald, along with my own evolution on matters economic, came to mind while reading George Gilder’s essential new book, Life After Capitalism. Though Gilder penned what many view as the underlying philosophy of supply-side economics with the brilliant Wealth and Poverty in 1981, in his spectacular 2013 book Knowledge and Power Gilder began to question the “incentive” economics that at least on the surface informs supply-side.

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Life after capitalism

Life After Capitalism

Author of national bestseller Life After Google and generation-defining Wealth and Poverty, venture capitalist, futurist, and pioneering thinker extraordinaire George Gilder pinpoints how the clash of creativity with power at the heart of economic systems leads to global cognitive dissonance and argues that the creation of the novel taps capitalism’s infinite promise and is humanity’s only path of escape from stagnation and tyranny. Gilder Read More ›