George Gilder

Senior Fellow and Co-Founder of Discovery Institute

George Gilder is Chairman of Gilder Publishing LLC, located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A co-founder of Discovery Institute, Mr. Gilder is a Senior Fellow of the Center on Wealth & Poverty, and also directs Discovery's Technology and Democracy Project.

Born in 1939 in New York City, Mr. Gilder attended Exeter Academy and Harvard University. At Harvard, he studied under Henry Kissinger and helped found Advance, a journal of political thought, which he edited and helped to re-establish in Washington, DC, after his graduation in 1962. During this period he co-authored (with Bruce Chapman) The Party That Lost Its Head. He later returned to Harvard as a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics and editor of the Ripon Forum. In the 1960s Mr. Gilder also served as a speechwriter for several prominent official and candidates, including Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and Richard Nixon. In the 1970s, as an independent researcher and writer, Mr. Gilder began an excursion into the causes of poverty and wealth, which resulted in his books Men and Marriage (1972) and Visible Man (1978) — which led to his best-selling Wealth and Poverty (1981).

Mr. Gilder pioneered the formulation of supply-side economics when he served as Chairman of the Lehrman Institute's Economic Roundtable, as Program Director for the Manhattan Institute, and as a frequent contributor to Arthur Laffer's economic reports and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. In the 1980s he also consulted leaders of America's high technology businesses. According to a study of presidential speeches, Mr. Gilder was President Reagan's most frequently quoted living author. In 1986, President Reagan gave George Gilder the White House Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence.

In 1986 Gilder was made a Fellow of the International Engineering Consortium. His deeper examination of the lives of present-day entrepreneurs culminated in many articles and a book, The Spirit of Enterprise(1986), which was revised and republished in 1992. That many of the most interesting current entrepreneurs were to be found in high technology fields also led Mr. Gilder, over several years, to study this subject in depth. In his best-selling work, Microcosm (1989), he explored the quantum roots of the new electronic technologies. A subsequent book, Life After Television, was a prophecy of the future of computers and telecommunications and a prelude to his book on the future of telecommunications, Telecosm (2000). The Silicon Eye (2005) travels the rocky road of the entrepreneur on the promising path of disruption, and celebrates some of smartest and most colorful technology minds of our time. His groundbreaking book, The Israel Test (2009), relates his work on capitalism to the safety and prosperity of Israel, what Gilder calls “the central issue in international politics” in our time. What critics have hailed as a “unique contribution” to the debate, Gilder argues that hostility toward Israel arises primarily from hostility toward capitalist creativity. How we react to that creativity—by resenting it or admiring and emulating it—will impact the future of Israel, the United States, and the world.

Knowledge and Power (2013), presents a new theory of economics, based on the breakthroughs from information theory that enabled the computer revolution and the rise of the Internet. In a review, Steve Forbes stated that the book “will profoundly and positively reshape economics…[and] will rank as one of the most influential works of our era.” The book won the Leonard E. Read prize at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in 2013.

His latest book, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy (2018), Gilder waves goodbye to today's Internet.  In a rocketing journey into the very near-future, he argues that Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a “great unbundling,” which will disperse computer power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet.

Mr. Gilder is a contributing editor of Forbes magazine and a frequent writer for The Economist, The American Spectator, the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He lives in Tyringham, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Mountains, where he is an active churchman, sometime runner, and with his wife Nini, parent of four children.

Archives

Are We Passing the Israel Test? George Gilder Appears on The Bill Walton Show

George Gilder sat down with Bill Walton to discuss the new edition of his book The Israel Test. Gilder makes the case that Israel’s accomplishments are worthy of our admiration, not our envy, that we are dependent on Israel for much of our technology, and that our support of Israel at this crucial moment in history is vital to the future of the

The Israel Test

How Israel's Genius Enriches and Challenges the World
In this timely and courageous book, George Gilder demonstrates that the widespread antagonism toward the state of Israel is based — as is anti-Semitism itself — on self-defeating envy and resentment of its superior accomplishments and moral leadership.      Israel’s stunning 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 encourages intellectual curiosity and rational analysis while providing a rigorous moral framework for entrepreneurial creativity. Israel’s critics throughout the Middle East and in Western Europe — all facing socialist decline — have failed the “Israel Test” because they seek to destroy Israel’s capitalist success rather than to

An Interview with George Gilder Asks, Can You Pass the Israel Test?

Anti-Israel protests in universities, antisemite propaganda on social media and riots in American cities have given shocking new force to old prejudices about Jews and Israel. In The Israel Test, newly revised and republished by Encounter Books, George Gilder answers the antisemites, and explains the meaning of Israel as the most economically dynamic, democratic and pro-Western state in the Middle East — and a crucial US economic and defense ally.

Life After Capitalism: The Information Theory of Economics

John Tamny, Forbes Editor and author of Popular Economics, leads a discussion with George Gilder and Dennis Ridley, Professor of Global Logistics at Florida A&M University about the key themes of Gilder’s book Life After Capitalism: wealth is knowledge, growth is learning, information is surprise, and money is time, as well as Gilder’s development of the information theory of economics. Learn more about COSM2024 at

The New Israel Test

Are you for civilization or barbarism, life or death, wealth or envy? Are you an exponent of excellence and accomplishment or of a leveling creed of troglodytic envy and hatred? That is the “Israel Test,” inescapable today.

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

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 once more rocks the archetypes of modern information theory and economics with a paradigm-shifting salvo of sheer brilliance. The capitalist era is over — get ready for life after capitalism. For more than two hundred years, capitalism spread wealth around the globe, bringing unprecedented prosperity and

Life After Capitalism

The information theory of economics
Anyone determined to provide a “new economics” must haul a heavy burden of proof up a steep slope of professional resistance. At the summits of academic prestige, economics presents a Delphic façade of math and marble.

Doomed to Succeed

On Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson.
Is modern life a doom machine? Do urbanization, international trade, air transport, immigration, tourism, and travel expose humans to an ever-growing threat of plagues and catastrophes? Are we killing ourselves through our cosmopolitan bustle of business, technology, immigration, cultural exchange, agriculture, and exogamous sex?

Gold, Currency Trading, and Stealing Time

Gilder Fellows Seminar, 2021
George Gilder, Co-Founder of Discovery Institute and Senior Fellow in its Center for Wealth and Poverty, discusses a wide array of economic topics, including the gold standard, the woes of currency trading and government manipulation of money and markets, time prices, the vulnerabilities of internet, and his information theory of

Gaming AI

Why AI Can't Think but Can Transform Jobs
Pointing to the triumph of artificial intelligence over unaided humans in everything from games such as chess and Go to vital tasks such as protein folding and securities trading, many experts uphold the theory of a “singularity.” This is the trigger point when human history ends and artificial intelligence prevails in an exponential cascade of self-replicating machines rocketing toward godlike supremacy in the universe. Gaming AI suggests that this belief is both dumb and self-defeating. Gaming AI calls for a remedial immersion in the industry’s own heroic history and an understanding of the actual science of their own human minds.

George Gilder, Wealth & Poverty 40 Years Later

Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Dr. Jay Richards interviews George Gilder, Discovery Institute co-founder, author, and technology futurist, regarding his ground-breaking best-seller, Wealth and Poverty, and how the principles of capitalism articulated in the book are as applicable today as they have ever

We Need Politicians in a Pandemic

The conceit that everyone must bow to ‘science’ is not only undemocratic but dangerous in its own right.
The U.S. economy has been cratered less by the coronavirus than by the response to it — driven by the undemocratic idea that “science” should rule, even when much of the science and the data behind it remain in dispute.

The Simon Abundance Index

A New Way to Measure Availability of Resources
Are we running out of resources? That’s been a hotly debated question since the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb in 1968. The Stanford University biologist warned that population growth would result in the exhaustion of resources and a global catastrophe. University of Maryland economist and Cato Institute’s Senior Fellow Julian Simon, in contrast, argued that humans would innovate their way out of resource shortages. He believed that people were the “ultimate resource” that would make other resources more plentiful. On Earth Day 2019, David M. Simon will recall the humanism and optimism of his late father. Discovery Research Fellow Gale Pooley and Marian L. Tupy spoke at the Cato Institute to present the updated findings from their recent paper “The

Three Steps to Save America from Collapse

Our monetary system is broken. It’s given us low growth, a shrinking job force, inequality beyond what a healthy economy would produce, inefficiency, and the unnatural growth of finance as a portion of the economy. Our aging Federal Reserve System starves both small businesses and Silicon Valley of the capital needed to grow jobs and wages. Fed policy translates into zero-interest-rate loans for the government and its cronies, and little or nothing for savers or small businesses. And it has transformed Wall Street from an engine of innovation into a servant of government power. But I believe America can be set on the right path towards a robust and broadly shared capitalism again with just three steps.  Step 1: Abolish Capital Gains Tax on Currencies  This

Huawei Is an Asset, Not a Threat

Ren Zhengfei’s company should be celebrated as a triumph of the U.S.-led global trading system.
Among the world’s most inspiring business voices is Ren Zhengfei, founder-philosopher of Huawei, the disruptive and now condemned Chinese telecom-equipment company.

The Creativity of Capitalism and the Post-Google Era

Steve Forbes Podcast with George Gilder
Discovery co-founder George Gilder sat down with Steve Forbes on Forbes’s podcast What’s Ahead. There are not many minds that have been able to predict what’s ahead quite like Gilder who has proven to be a true visionary in economics and tech. In this conversation with Forbes, Gilder discusses his new book Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, and unpacks what he calls the “cryptocosm”. Gilder discounts many of the pessimistic pundits and instead foresees a future rife with flourishing innovation. What’s more, the cryptocosm will put you in charge of your data!

Google Does Not Believe in Life After Google

As the third and final speaker at the Dallas launch of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, philosopher of technology George Gilder, author of Life after Google, offered some insights into the ultimate vision of the current AI technocrats. See also: “George Gilder: Life after Google will be okay“. “Seriously, the Google people do not believe that there will be life after Google. Their vision of AI usurping human minds really represents what I call an eschaton, a final thing, almost like an eschatological vision. They believe that AI will achieve what my friend Ray Kurzweil calls the Singularity when it will attain capabilities far beyond human minds and thus be able to reproduce itself. And project itself into the universe and seed

The Ten Laws of Google versus the Ten Laws of the Cryptocosm

George Gilder Discusses Life After Google at Decentralizing the World in Hong Kong
Blockstack Decentralizing the World Tour event in Hong Kong, January 10, 2019 at HKEX Connect Hall. George Gilder, Information Theorist, Book: “Life After Google” discusses “Will Life After Google be

Economist George Gilder on Capitalism, Socialism, and Google

Life After Google author George Gilder explains the role of creativity in capitalism as he shares economic insight on Life, Liberty & Levin. Learning, he says, is the heart of capitalism. Whereas capitalism is about creativity, socialism is about planning and rests on the assumption that we already know everything we need to know in order to plan our