George Gilder

Senior Fellow and Co-Founder of Discovery Institute

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Jude Wanniski, 1936-2005

As Jude Wanniski knew, and expounded, “Economies are driven not by the dollars in people’s pockets but by the ideas in their heads.” By that measure, the U.S. economy still rides high on Jude’s ideas and Jude — who for many years wrote editorials on economics for this newspaper — ranks high on the lists of the world’s richest men. As a prime legatee of this wealth, I find it grows ever faster with the passing years. As countries from Russia to New Zealand follow the lead of his low-tax vision, I cherish more and more my winnings and my memories of him. Reaching an apogee in this newspaper with his 1978 editorial “Stupendous Steiger,” Jude’s charismatic focus on the tax on capital gains redeemed the fiscal policies of four

The Silicon Eye: George Gilder Q&A on WashingtonPost.com

Transcript of George Gilder's Washington Post Internet Discussion
This article, published by The Washington Post, contains an interview with Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder: George Gilder’s in-depth knowledge of the high-tech industry comes into full play in his new book, ” The Silicon Eye ” — a look at the image capture-innovator Foveon Inc. The firm “can do for the camera what Intel did for the computer,” writes Gilder.  Get the inside scoop on what’s brewing in Silicon Valley. The rest of the article can be found

Smoot Hawley, Chinese Style

In his insightful new book, The World Is Flat, Tom Friedman of The New York Times, though generally disdainful of anything conservative, somehow brings himself to cite an exemplary Heritage Foundation study of U.S. companies with facilities in China. These firms are not an unhealthy set of “Benedict Arnolds,” as they were quaintly dubbed by Sen. John Kerry during the last presidential campaign. They are the heart of the U.S. economy and the spearhead of global economic growth. As Friedman explains, these manufacturing outsourcers together generate 21% of the U.S. gross domestic product, 56% of U.S. exports and 60% of U.S. manufacturing employment. But even these figures understate the significance of these companies, because GDP is full of fluff — Berkshire Hathaway-type

America’s New Jingoes

With markets at last recovering from the turn-of-the-century crash and the attacks of September 11, it is an opportune time to debate America’s future in a rapidly changing world economy. America’s establishment of liberal economists and media pundits, however, are joining in a cramped new nationalism that jeopardizes the future of American technology and prosperity. Like reactionary jingoes of the past, they are priming John Kerry with the delusional view that the U.S. and its workers are somehow victims of global trade and capital movements. But as the presidential debates turn to domestic policy and economics, voters need to recognize the realities of world economic transformation and the real threats to American dominance. In a popular image, “Benedict Arnold

Market Economics and the Conservative Movement

The following speech was given by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder to The Philadelphia Society at their national meeting in Chicago, Illinois on May 1, 2004. This is a great celebration. Forty years of the Philadelphia Society devoted to the concept of ordered liberty under God. Through this it reconciles the two great themes of conservative thought: free markets and transcendent order; economic freedom and cultural stability. Bill Buckley caught this reconciliation very early in his first book, God and Man at Yale, an attack on the atheistic socialism, which was taught at Yale during his time there. He focused on the atheism as much as the socialism. They both reflected the same fundamental disorder or fallacy. Midge Decter, your new president, led me through a

Stop the Broadbandits

Rare it is in politics and life to get a second chance at a huge opportunity. But by reversing a catastrophic decision of the Federal Communications Commission that has paralyzed America’s telecom industry, a U.S. court has given the Bush administration a new chance to escape the blame for killing broadband in the U.S. Granting the FCC only 60 days to act, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Tuesday chastised the “Commission’s failure, after eight years, to develop lawful rules and its apparent unwillingness to adhere to prior judicial rulings.” This severe attack on the Bush Administration by a liberal court might seem par for the course. But by throwing out the FCC’s rump majority votes a year ago to continue micro-mismanagement

Making Broadband Bloom

Content, some say, is king. Well, I am discontent. At the moment, struggling with RealPlayer and RealOne, I conclude that streaming video does not work. What passes for broadband in the United States — 200 to 800 kilobits per second — simply cannot handle video. The paucity of video education and entertainment on the Net thwarts the “life after television” running on “worldwide webs of glass and light” that I celebrated 13 years ago. All the riches of education, culture, sports, and religion promised for decades depend on robust, reliable, jitter-free broadband. When true broadband is deployed to homes and businesses, network traffic will lurch up again by a factor of thousands, and the technology depression will end in a new boom. But before

Broadband’s Narrow Minds

At the Federal Communications Commission these days, Commissioner Michael Powell and his one-time protege Kevin Martin have introduced a new slogan: “What, me worry?” While the communications sector suffers though a crisis of stifling overregulation, the commission seems ready to accept an outbreak of litigious new rules at the state and local levels. As the FCC prepares to meet again later this week, the telecom industry’s woes are jeopardizing the future of the U.S. economy. Since the March 2000 peak, telecom has seen a $1 trillion loss in market cap among 17 companies, not to mention another thousand related bankruptcies. But worse is how the complacence will play out internationally. If we continue along our current path we will surrender U.S. leadership in

A Corporate Crime Wave?

Crime may have declined in the streets but, by the recent inflammation of the pundits, you would think there has been an outbreak of corporate criminality. The Internet, communications, and stock-market booms of the 1990s, it seems, were based on a pervasive series of felonious acts. A wide array of businesses, from Global Crossing to Loral, from General Electric to Enron, artfully inflated the worth of their shares through the creation of Potemkin businesses. If you believe the news coverage, corporate leaders are racing to despoil, mulct, defraud, poison, pillage, and ruin their own businesses, their nation’s soils and waters, their retirement funds, and the world economy. This flood of factitious crimes, this parade of snaffled fat cats and scapegoats, happens every

Osama bin Luddite

Tragedy purges the mind of trivia. Perhaps the horror of a new Black September can rescue our culture from its thrall of humorless TV Conditry. From gossip about the moral codes of mayors and actors. From the search for the combination to the loony bin of politicians and economists who believe in the lockbox for Social Security. Instead, we can focus on what is truly important: the glass ceiling facing millionairettes at Morgan Stanley. Having survived the vaporization of its 24-floor former World Trade Center offices, the Wall Street power now faces a second wave from the gender cops. Purged too of trivia, perhaps some of the deeper minds of Silicon Valley can let go of their obsession with the threat possibly posed by computers to human dignity and supremacy, and get back to work.

Tumbling Into the Telechasm

When Bill Clinton assumed office nine years ago, I predicted he would enjoy one of the greatest economic booms in the history of the world. Impelled by the spread of the Internet, the onset of fiber optics, and a tenfold increase in venture capital — unleashed by the lower tax rates and deregulation of the Reagan administration — the Clinton economy had it made. Moreover, until the election year of 2000, Mr. Clinton actually pushed the economy along with beneficent trade policy, an astonishing opposition to Internet taxes and restrictions, and a 30% capital-gains tax cut that yielded hugely more revenues than projected by demand-side models. Devastating Crunch The Bush economy, unfortunately, not only possesses no such immunity to bad policy, but also is gravely vulnerable to

Internet in the Balance

A few weeks back, Al Gore, mocking his own penchant for hyperbole, bantered with David Letterman’s “Late Show” audience: “I gave you the Internet — and I can take it away.” This is no joke. While Republicans waste time with captious critiques of the straight-arrow Gore’s credibility and character, the real threat posed by the Democratic candidate is utterly ignored. Mr. Gore’s policies would impose an energy, tax and regulatory garrote on the Internet. The Kyoto Treaty alone would be devastating to the Net. At a time when global temperatures are significantly lower than they were 1,000 or 3,000 years ago, Mr. Gore would impose an energy clamp on the U.S. economy over the next decade. Yet billions of new Web servers and Web devices are

The Outsider Trading Scandal

Stock markets are world-wide webs of information. So why half the time do they behave like members of some candy mountain mystical sect, torn between dreams of eternal wealth and horror of a bottomless pit? Ultimately ruling markets are data about the remorselessly real facts of supply and demand, the empirical realities of finance and the intricate, unforgiving details of technology paradigms and performance. Yet the conventional wisdom is that stock markets ride on tides of greed and fear. From the Tulip mania of the 17th century to the crash of 1987 and now the plunge of 2000, chaos and volatility have all too often ruled. The promise of the Internet, however, is the instant spread of information. More information is available about more companies and securities than ever

The New Era

The computer age is over. Bandwidth and now “storewidth”, eclipse the PC paradigm. PCs remain important but peripheral. After a cataclysmic global run of 30 years, the PC revolution has stiffened into an establishment. So swiftly and subliminally did this silicon tide pass through the economy that many analysts missed much of the motion until it stopped. Then they mistook its dotage for dynamism. It congealed so fast that its Mount Rushmore giants still walk and talk. Contemplate the monumental frieze looming over the road ahead, which ends at a revolutionary shrine: Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steven Jobs of Apple, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove of Intel. Still very much around, they beam from magazine covers, iconize companies, orate at Davos and Comdex and publish books

Open Access Now!

Wait, Never Mind
America Online has been lobbying for months for laws mandating that cable companies offering broadband service provide “open access” to AOL and other Internet service providers. But last week AOL borrowed one of the late Gilda Radner’s old “Saturday Night Live” punch lines: “Never mind.” AOL succeeded in persuading local governments from Portland, Ore., to Broward County, Fla., to mandate open access. Its rhetoric and that of its front group, the OpenNet Coaltion, was lofty. But its motives were self-interested. AOL, which owned no cable systems and had no other broadband channels, feared that its lock on the top slot in the Internet service provider market would disappear and it would find itself out of the game in a matter of months if the

The Faith of a Futurist

In the future, as in the past, religious faith is central to the process of innovation
Every year I host a conference on the future of the Internet in a world of bandwidth abundance. On the last day, I hold a debate or panel on the religious significance of the technological disputes. Every year, some attendees object to this insertion of theology into the midst of a meeting otherwise devoted to the higher vocations of microelectronics and money. Predicting the post millennial future, so they say, is an intensely practical pursuit, with an unimpeachable test of investment results. Technologies will win or lose on the basis of their performance in the marketplace. All other disputes are merely “religious wars” that will distract the investor from his rapt contemplation of the objective facts. With any technology that will change the world so radically as

Zero-Sum Folly, From Kyoto to Kosovo

What do the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the global warming treaty in Kyoto, and the Social Security “crisis” of demand-side Keynesian economics have in common, apart from a convergence of K’s? You can even add Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Answer: They all reflect a belief in a zero-sum world. The concept of a zero-sum system originated in a branch of economics called game theory. In a zero-sum game, a gain by one party necessitates a loss for another party. It is the economics of a fixed pie that can be redistributed but cannot be enlarged. The gains and losses always add up to zero. For most of history, most people have believed that economics is ultimately a zero-sum game. Predicting a zero- or even negative-sum struggle for food, Thomas Malthus was the

C.S. Lewis and Public Life Book

Chapter 3: How Should People of Faith View the State?
Should the government be viewed as the primary agent for solving social problems? Should it seek to equalize wealth among different groups of citizens? In short, what is the proper role of government? The essays in this chapter seek to answer such questions by examining Lewis’s defense of limited government and his critique of the welfare state. Contributing authors to this chapter are: GEORGE GILDER, Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute and author of Wealth and Poverty, Men and Marriage, Life after Television and other books.TOM BETHELL, correspondent for The American Spectator. George Gilder, Discovery Institute C. S. Lewis is not normally regarded as or known to be a political writer, yet he, more than any other writer, has shaped the beginnings of my career in

Happy Birthday Wired

It's been a weird five years.
Near the turn of the last century, scientists contemplated with rising anxiety what might have been termed the Year 1900 Crisis. Embalmed in the mathematical coffins of Newton and Maxwell, the science of matter was undergoing a near-death experience. Except for extrapolating the lordly equations of gravity and electromagnetism, there seemed to be nothing left of any great consequence for scientists to do. Matter was essentially solid, opaque, and predictable. The sun never set on the British Empire. Movies were black and white. IBM was yet to create an impregnable citadel of mainframes. In physics, a few annoyingly elusive anomalies lingered – the radiance of black bodies, for one. But these too would soon fall, it was believed, to a few convenient coefficients and constants.

The Soul of Silicon

As delivered to the Vatican at a conference arranged and coordinated by the Acton Institute
Published on May 1, 1991, Centesimus Annus returns to the themes of a lapidary encyclical of 100 years before, Rerum Novarum, which refuted Marxism long before it had refracted into a global plague of tyranny and murder. The critique of socialism, however, did not signify an affirmation of capitalism. The `new things’ to which the Pope devoted his attention more than a century ago in Rerum Novarum were anything but positive or even new. Published in May 1891, Rerum Novarum addressed “the terrible conditions which the new and often violent form of industrialization had reduced great multitudes of people.” What was really new at the time was not the terrible conditions. It was the survival of unprecedented multitudes of human beings at ever increasing standards of