George Gilder Quotes About Economics
-
From the equilibrium and spontaneous order of Adam Smith and his heirs, from invisible-handed markets and perfect competition, supply and demand, and rewards and punishments, I was pushed to theories of disequilibrium and disorder, and information and noise, as the keys to understanding economic progress.
→ -
Entropy is Janus-faced. Its upside surprises are redemptive and favorable to freedom. It is freedom of choice. But the carrier itself requires constant vigilance against entropic noise. Order is not spontaneous, but it is a necessary condition for all the surprises of freedom and opportunity.
→ -
The most important feature of an information economy, in which information is defined as surprise, is the overthrow, not the attainment, of equilibrium. The science that we have come to know as information theory establishes the supremacy of the entrepreneur because it appreciates the powerful connection between destruction and what Schumpeter described as "creative destruction," between chaos and creativity.
→ -
Entrepreneurial creation is the generation, de novo, of novelty and surprise- freedom of choice originating in the world of ideas, and imagination beyond all concern with chemicals. The contrary view- that all ideas are determined by material relationships- is the materialist superstition.
→ -
In order to understand the movement of prices, you need not an oscilloscope to measure the entire market and reduce it to noise, but a microscope to investigate the creative process behind every company and its price.
→ -
Enforced by genetics, sexual reproduction, perspective, and experience, the most manifest characteristic of human beings is their diversity. The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processes-governments, monopolies, regulators, and elite institutions- all attempting to quell human diversity and impose order. Thus power always seeks centralization.
→ -
In an information economy, entrepreneurs master the science of information in order to overcome the laws of the purely physical sciences. They can succeed because of the surprising power of the laws of information, which are conducive to human creativity. The central concept of information theory is a measure of freedom of choice. The principle of matter, on the other hand, is not liberty but limitation- it has weight and occupies space.
→ -
It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. As Henry Ford said many years earlier: "If I had listened to my customers, I would have built a faster horse." Inventions in general express Shannon entropy. They come from the supply side.
→ -
At the heart of capitalism is the unification of knowledge and power. As Friedrich Hayek, the leader of the Austrian school of economics, put it, "To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind... is to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world." Because knowledge is dispersed, power must be as well.
→
Related Authors
-
Maj Sjowall Author -
Michael Novak Philosopher -
Arthur Laffer Economist -
Irving Kristol Columnist -
-
Robert Metcalfe Electrical engineer -
Michael Medved Radio host -
Nicholas Negroponte Author -
Jude Wanniski Journalist -
Steve Forbes Publisher -
Guillermo Gonzalez Astrophysicist -
Ray Kurzweil Author -
Alexander Stille Author -
William A. Dembski Mathematician -
Dennis Prager Radio host -
Robert Sirico Priest -
Henning Mankell Crime writer -
Andrea Camilleri Writer -
Bill Joy Computer Scientist -
Geoff Dyer Writer