"Intelligent design itself does not have any content." -- George Gilder
George F. Gilder (born November 29, 1939, in New York City) is an American writer, techno-utopian intellectual, Republican Party activist, and co-founder of the Discovery Institute. His 1981 bestseller Wealth and Poverty advanced a practical and moral case for capitalism during the early months of the Reagan Administration.
In the 1970s Gilder established himself as a critic of feminism and government welfare policies; he argued they eroded the "sexual constitution" that socialized men as fathers and providers. In the 1990s he became an enthusiastic evangelist of technology and the Internet through several books and his newsletter the Gilder Technology Report.
"In embracing change, entrepreneurs ensure social and economic stability.""Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.""Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.""The differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society.""The first priority of any serious program against poverty is to strengthen the male role in poor families.""The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is dispensable, his children sense it.""This is what sexual liberation chiefly accomplishes - it liberates young women to pursue married men."
Gilder was born in New York City and raised in New York and Massachusetts. His father, Richard Gilder, was killed flying in the Army Air Force in World War II when Gilder was three. He spent most of his childhood with his mother and his stepfather, Gilder Palmer, on a dairy farm in Tyringham, Massachusetts. David Rockefeller, a college roommate of his father, was deeply involved with his upbringing.
Education
Gilder attended Hamilton School in New York City, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard University, graduating in 1962. He later returned to Harvard as a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics and edited the Ripon Forum, the newspaper of a liberal Republican society.
United States Marine Corps
Gilder served briefly in the United States Marine Corps.
In the 1960s Gilder served as a speechwriter for several prominent officials and candidates, including Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and Richard Nixon. He worked as a spokesman for the liberal Republican Senator Charles Mathias as anti-war protesters surrounded the capital, some eventually scaring Gilder out of his apartment. Gilder moved to Harvard Square the following year and became a writer, modeling himself after Joan Didion.
With his college roommate Bruce Chapman, he wrote an attack on the anti-intellectual policies of Barry Goldwater titled The Party That Lost Its Head (1966).
Critic of feminism
In the early 1970s Gilder wrote an article in the Ripon Forum defending President Richard Nixon's veto of a day-care bill sponsored by Senator Walter Mondale (D-MN) and Senator Jacob Javits (R-NY). He was promptly fired as editor of the Forum.
Gilder enjoyed the controversy, appearing on Firing Line to defend himself and discovered he'd found "a way to arouse the passionate interest of women ... it was clear I had reached pay dirt." He decided to make himself into "America's number-one antifeminist".
Gilder moved to New Orleans and worked in the mornings for Ben C. Toledano, Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1972. The rest of the time he wrote Sexual Suicide (1973, revised and reissued as Men and Marriage (1986)). He argued that welfare and feminism broke the "sexual constitution" that had weaned men off their predatory instinct for sex, war, and the hunt and had subordinated them to women as fathers and providers. The book achieved a succès de scandale and Time made Gilder "Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year".
Gilder also wrote Visible Man: A True Story of Post-Racist America (1978, reissued in 1995), which the New York Times described in 1981 as "the account of a talented young black spoiled by the too-ready indolence of America's welfare system."
Supply-side economics
Supply-side economics was formulated in the mid-1970s by Jude Wanniski and Robert L. Bartley at the Wall Street Journal as a counterweight to the reigning "demand-side" Keynesian economics. At the center of the concept was the Laffer Curve, the notion that high tax rates can reduce government revenue. The opponents of supply-side economics often refer to it as "trickle-down economics."
Inspired by Wanniski and by the works of free-market economists like Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek, Gilder wrote a book extending the ideas of his Visible Man (1978) into the realm of economics, to balance his theory of poverty with a theory of wealth. The book, published as the best-selling Wealth and Poverty in 1981, communicated the ideas of supply-side economics to a wide audience in the United States and the world.
Gilder also contributed to the development 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.
Technology
The first mention of the word "Digerati" on USENET occurred in 1992, and referred to an article by George Gilder in Upside magazine. His other books include Life After Television, a 1990 book that predicted microchip "telecomputers" connected by fiberoptic cable would make broadcast-model television obsolete. The book was also notable for being published by the Federal Express company and featuring full-page advertisements for that company on every fifth page. "The single most fascinating thing about Life after Television", commented David Foster Wallace, "is that it's a book with commercials."
Microcosm, about Carver Mead and the CMOS microchip revolution; Telecosm, about the promise of fiber optics; and his latest, The Silicon Eye, about the Foveon X3 sensor, a digital camera imager chip.
American Spectator
Gilder bought the conservative political monthly magazine The American Spectator from its founder R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. in summer 2000, and switched the magazine's focus from politics to technology.
Experiencing his own financial problems in 2002 almost two years laterGilder sold the Spectator back to Tyrrell.
Speaking engagements
For nearly thirty years, George Gilder has been in high demand internationally as a speaker on economics, technology, education, and social theory. He has addressed audiences from Washington DC to the Vatican, and appears at numerous conferences, public policy events, and media outlets. Demonstrating an interest in the future of innovation-driven education models, in 2009 Gilder delivered the opening keynote address at the annual EduComm Conference, a nationwide gathering of higher education leaders pursuing breakthrough technologies with the potential to transform the college experience. His annual Telecosm Conference, which he hosts with Steve Forbes, draws technology leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, and inventors from across the globe. In 2009, the publication of Gilder's book, The Israel Test, created a new surge of demand for his insights on international politics and economics. The book has sparked a global discussion about the integral role of entrepreneurship, innovation, and enterprise in the pursuit of geo-political stability and economic growth.
After completing Visible Man in the late 1970s Gilder began writing "The Pursuit of Poverty." In early 1981 Basic Books published the result as Wealth and Poverty. It was an analysis of the roots of economic growth. Reviewing it within a month of the inauguration of the Reagan Administration the New York Times reviewer called it "A Guide to Capitalism". It offered, he wrote, "a creed for capitalism worthy of intelligent people." The book was a New York Times bestseller and eventually sold over a million copies.
In Wealth and Poverty Gilder extended the sociological and anthropological analysis of his early books in which he had advocated for the socialization of men into service to women through work and marriage. He wove these sociological themes into the economic policy prescriptions of supply-side economics. The breakup of the nuclear family and the policies of demand-side economics led to poverty. Family and supply-side policies led to wealth.
In reviewing the problems of the immediate past—the inflation, recession, and urban problems of the 1970s—and proposing his supply-side solutions, Gilder argued not just the practical but the moral superiority of supply-side capitalism over the alternatives. "Capitalism begins with giving," he asserted, while New Deal liberalism created moral hazard. It was work, family, and faith that created wealth out of poverty. "It is this supply-side moral vision that underlies all the economic arguments of Wealth and Poverty," he wrote.
He helped found the Discovery Institute with Bruce Chapman. The organization started as a moderate group which aimed to privatize and modernize Seattle's transit systems but it later became the leading think tank of the intelligent design movement, with Gilder penning many articles in favor of ID and opposing the theory of evolution. He, like others at the institute, denies that the Shannon information measure alone provides a good measure for biological information, because that measure ignores the actual function or meaning in the code, but Gilder claims that Shannon information theory actually shows that evolution cannot be explained by unintelligent physical causes. Shannon information is actually a measure of bandwidth, and it is calculated to exclude physical effects so that it measures the amount of abstract meaning that can be carried.
