Quotes from George Gilder

With currencies and interest rates far more volatile than the economic activity that they guide, the horizons of investment and commerce had to shrink proportionally with real economic knowledge.

Whereas Google envisages an era of machine dominance through artificial intelligence, you will rule your machines, and they will serve you as intelligent, willing slaves. You will be the "oracle" that programs your life and dictates to your tools.

Republicans have been running on tax-cut proposals since the era of Harding and Coolidge. Tax-rate reductions and simplifications are urgently needed. But again, there is no mention of the key problems of a global economy in decline—of the acceptance by economic elites of inevitable and irremediable stagnation. We have not faced the fact that the Federal Reserve's capacity to command growth is a god that has failed.

Thinking is conscious, willful, imaginative, and creative. A computer running at gigahertz speeds and playing a deterministic game like chess or Go is only a machine.

Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk. But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities.

Warren Buffett summed up the conventional view with his usual pith: "Gold gets dug out of the ground . . . we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. . . . Anyone from Mars would be scratching their head."2

Chaitin proved that physical laws alone, for example, could not explain chemistry or biology, because the laws of physics contain drastically less information than do chemical or biological phenomena.

In his eighteenth-century system of the world, Newton brought together two themes. Embodied in his calculus and physics, one Newtonian revelation rendered the physical world predictable and measurable. Another, less celebrated, was his key role in establishing a trustworthy gold standard, which made economic valuations as calculable and reliable as the physical dimensions of items in trade.

A new generation of avaricious and egocentric Americans, in the thrall of anti-industrial ideologies, shuns the productive adventures of creation to pursue the comfort and security of the welfare state, abetted by the discount windows at the Federal Reserve, guarantees for "green jobs" and solar enterprises, the triple-A assurances of Fannie and Freddie, and the bonanzas with which we reward litigation against the productive.

We begin with the proposition that capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information is best defined as surprised-what we cannot predict rather than what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition of things by the pursuit of monetary rewards but the expansion of wealth through learning and discovery.

President Obama's friend and counselor Ta-Nehisi Coates, from his perch atop the bestseller lists and at the pinnacle of power in America, denounces the American Dream, in terms that echo Obama's previous spiritual guide, Pastor Wright in Chicago, as a "genocidal weight of whiteness.

Turing showed that just as the uncertainties of physics stem from using electrons and photons to measure themselves, the limitations of computers stem from recursive self-reference. Just as quantum theory fell into self-referential loops of uncertainty because it measured atoms and electrons using instruments composed of atoms and electrons, computer logic could not escape self-referential loops as its own logical structures informed its own algorithms.12

Yet I believe the Google system of the world will fail, indeed be swept away in our time (and I am seventy-eight!). It will fail because its every major premise will fail.

All entrepreneurial and technological ventures, according to a canonical paper by the productivity theorist Robert Gordon, face the closing of the world's "productivity frontier.

Under capitalism, economic power flows not to the intellectual, who manipulates ideas and basks in their light, but to the man who gives himself to his ideas and tests them with his own wealth and work.

heaped on the hapless American student to pay for a bloated academic establishment

Oil-futures trading has risen by a factor of one hundred in some three decades, from 10 percent of oil output in 1984 to ten times oil output in 2015. Derivatives on real estate are now nine times global GDP. That's not capitalism, that's hypertrophy of finance.

Renaissance's Medallion Fund has reportedly averaged a yield of roughly 40 percent every year, through up and down markets,

after extracting the industry's highest fees—a vertiginous 5 percent of money under management and 44 percent of the profits—the Medallion Fund was said to be up 80 percent.

Most people think they are above learning the gritty and relentless details of life that allow the creation of great wealth. They leave it to the experts. But in general, you join the 1 percent of the 1 percent not by leaving it to the experts but by creating new expertise, not by knowing what the experts know but by learning what they think is beneath them.

Google after acquiring intimate knowledge of its technology may make a thousand-fold return over five to seven years. A firm such as Renaissance might make a thousand trades in a day harvesting the tiniest anomalies. With modest leverage and relentless twenty-four-hour trading around the globe,

Gilder shows how, to the contrary, Israel's growing prosperity will benefit the entire region in which it is located.

Poverty is less a matter of income than of prospects. While the incomes of the poor have steadily risen through Great Society largesse, their prospects have plummeted as families have broken into dependent fragments.

Entrepreneurs, in accepting risk, achieve security for all. In embracing change, they ensure social and economic stability.