Center on Wealth & Poverty
In this book, George Gilder asserts that widespread antagonism toward the current state of Israel springs from, like anti-Semitism everywhere, envy of superior accomplishment. Israel’s sudden rise as a world capitalist and technological power, he argues, stems in part from the Jewish “culture of mind” and in part from Judaism itself, which, “perhaps more than any other religion, favors capitalist Read More ›
Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder was featured on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson. The video can be seen here.
If future historians are forced to write about how the United States saw its standard of living, its freedom, and its rule of law slip away after the turn of the 21st century, they will have to devote considerable ink to the Obama Administration and its two showcase pieces of legislation. While Obamacare received more attention, the Wall Street Reform Read More ›
Standard and Poor’s cut the United States’ AAA-rating last year, and now the second shoe is about to drop. Moody’s recently announced it would downgrade our AAA credit rating by the end of the year if President Obama can’t adopt a plan in conjunction with Congress to cut the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio. That ratio now exceeds 100% and imposes a Read More ›
This article, entitled “The New New Capitalism” and published by Los Angeles Review of Books, provides a review of Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder’s book Wealth and Poverty. George Gilder’s book, Wealth and Poverty, was originally published in 1981, in a world much different from the one we encounter today. The threat of Soviet and Chinese communism loomed large. Japan Read More ›
A year ago, Standard & Poor’s fired a shot across America’s bow, downgrading its coveted AAA rating to a AA+. S&P’s rationale for the rating cut was specifically that Congress’s Budget Control Act “fell short of the amount … necessary to stabilize the general government debt burden by the middle of the decade.” For several weeks, media pundits and Washington Read More ›
IN THE EARLY 1980s, soon after the publication of Wealth & Poverty, I received a phone call from a man with a mellow mid-Southern accent, honed from roots in rural Tennessee and long years talking down to top executives of American enterprise. William Bain was the name, “but everyone calls me Bill,” he said. I had never heard of him, or his eponymous company, a consulting firm in Boston with ambitions in venture capital, but I was soon on board calling him “Bill” and listening closely to what he had to say.
He invited me to speak to his team of Bain & Company partners, and also, if he might…no Offense…he wanted to impart some ideas of his own, some points I might have missed on supply-side economics.“We’ve done some research,” he said, “that shows the theory is much more general and powerful than even you believe.”
As one unused to charges of underestimating the power of supply-side theory, I was intrigued. I went on to give many hundreds of speeches and do scores of debates with such figures as Robert Reich, the Harvard professor who became secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton; Lester Thurow, the eminent MIT professor and bestselling author;And the legendary six-foot-eight-inch tribune of tall taxes, John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard and Gstaad, Switzerland. I received astonishing fees of up to six figures (a level I breached for an event in Cambridge, UK, for a German bank). At the time, supply-side was that hot. But every speech and book that I produced from then on bore the imprint of my conversations with people at Bain. I learned more from them than from any other audience or, if truth be told, from my four years of Harvard, which included little economics beyond disgruntled attendance at a lecture by Galbraith reading out loud word-for-word from his bestselling book.
Read More ›Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could soon be facing a David Stockman moment. Mr. Stockman was President Reagan’s young, first-term budget director assigned the titanic task of retrenching government spending in the midst of the Cold War. In this role, he made the covers of all the most fashionable magazines as “Mack the Knife” or some other compassionless conservative slashing Read More ›
Contrary to the advice of some campaign advisers, Mitt Romney should showcase his background and work at Bain Capital. In telling the Bain story, he can connect with average people and explain how his private-equity experience is really the story of American renewal and helping Main Street businesses achieve success, expand and create jobs. Voters need to understand the experience Read More ›