Knowledge and Power Quotes

“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.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“Far from being greedy, America’s leading entrepreneurs—with some exceptions—display discipline and self-control, hard work and austerity, excelling those found in any college of social work, Washington think tank, or congregation of bishops.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“From Adam Smith’s pin factory to Moore’s Law of microchips, the division of labor drives the extension of the market, not the other way around. Supply creates its own demand through the proliferation of goods and services down the curves of learning, entropy, and imagination.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“The environmental movement has palsied two generations of American youth. It has diverted much of our high school curricula into the phony field of environmental science. (As legendary physicist Richard Feynman observed, “If a science has an adjective it probably isn’t science.”) At the same time, the movement has turned many universities into apocalyptic nature cults that divert money from education to an obscurantist debauch. Seventy-two percent of Harvard students in late 2012 actually voted to have their university disinvest from all fossil fuels. This movement has already corrupted most branches of government with a carbon dioxide fetish. Now it is debilitating America’s most precious venture assets.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“Let us imagine the lineaments of an economics of disorder, disequilibrium, and surprise that could explain and measure the contributions of entrepreneurs. Such an economics would begin with the Smithian mold of order and equilibrium. Smith himself spoke of property rights, free trade, sound currency, and modest taxation as conditions necessary for prosperity. He was right: disorder, disequilibrium, chaos, and noise inhibit the creative acts that engender growth. The ultimate physical entropy envisaged as the heat death of the universe, in its total disorder, affords no room for invention or surprise. But entrepreneurial disorder is not chaos or mere noise. Entrepreneurial disorder is some combination of order and upheaval that might be termed “informative disorder.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“An economy is a "noosphere" (a mind-based system), and it can revive as quickly as minds and policies can change.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“Superfluous focus on accounting and other procedural details is preventing U.S. industry from competing with rough-and-ready rivals in Asia that can build thousands of factories and skyscrapers while the United States dithers with environmental-impact litigation, re-computation, and backup of accounting reports.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“The key issue in economics is not aligning incentives with some putative public good but aligning knowledge with power. Business investments have both a financial and an epistemic yield. Capitalism catalytically joins the two. Capitalist economies grow because they award wealth to its creators, who have already proved that they can increase it. Their tests yield knowledge because they are falsifiable; they can be exposed as wrong. Businesses are subject to failure.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“The system failed not because it was rational, but because rational choice in the face of massive ignorance—whether attributable to folly or deceit—is meaningless. Capitalism depends not on the freedom to choose but on the free flow of information across a low-entropy carrier. Corrupt the carrier with noise, and capitalism collapses. And the great corrupter of any carrier, the great generator of destructive noise, is power. And in this case the powers assembled were immense.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“Economic growth springs not chiefly from incentives—carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments for workers and entrepreneurs. The incentive theory of capitalism allows its critics to depict it as an inhumane scheme of clever manipulation of human needs and hungers scarcely superior to the more benign forms of slavery. Wealth actually springs from the expansion of information and learning, profits and creativity that enhance the human qualities of its beneficiaries as it enriches them. Workers’ learning increasingly compensates for their labor, which imparts knowledge as it extracts work. Joining knowledge and power, capitalism focuses on the entropy of human minds and the benefits of freedom. Thus it is the most humane of all economic systems.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“Ignored...was the one unbridgeable gap between physics and any such science of human behavior: the surprises that arise from free will and human creativity...they constitute the most important economic events. For a miracle is simply an innovation, a sudden and bountiful addition of information to the system.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“Spontaneous order is self-contradictory. Spontaneity connotes the ebullition of surprises. It is highly entropic and disorderly. It is entrepreneurial and complex. Order connotes predictability and equilibrium. It is what is not spontaneous. It includes moral codes, constitutional restraints, personal disciplines, educational integrity, predictable laws, reliable courts, stable money, trustworthy finance, strong families, dependable defense, and police powers. Order requires political guidance, sovereignty, and leadership. It normally entails religious beliefs. The entire saga of the history of the West conveys the courage and sacrifice necessary to enforce and defend these values against their enemies.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“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.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“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.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“The world is moving from the scientistic guilds and sects of yore toward the new sciences of information. Fragmented and futilitarian, the academic sciences are turning to politics, panics, and cartels to preserve their old privileges. Decades ago I pored through the Harvard catalogue and concluded that 80 percent of the courses stultified their students. Now those stultified students are running the country. Most of the courses they took were either self-evident or wrong, ideological or tautological, twisted or trivial.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“Innovation is always a product of individual innovators, a rare and dynamic breed not always appealing to the millions who depend on their creativity for their own comfort, health, and security.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“In a free economy, a high degree of apparent randomness does not mean actual randomness. An apparently random pattern is evidence not of purposelessness but of an entrepreneurial economy full of creative surprises.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“This process of wealth creation is offensive to levelers and planners because it yields mountains of new wealth in ways that could not possibly be planned. But unpredictability is fundamental to free human enterprise. It defies every econometric model and socialist scheme. It makes no sense to most professors, who attain their positions by the systematic acquisition of credentials pleasing to the establishment above them. By definition, innovations cannot be planned. Leading entrepreneurs—from Sam Walton to Mike Milken to Larry Page to Bill Gates— did not ascend a hierarchy; they created a new one. They did not climb to the top of anything. They were pushed to the top by their own success. They did not capture the pinnacle; they became it.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“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.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“In a parody of the supply-side economics of creative destruction, advocates of AB 32 envisaged “alternative” energy sources creating new jobs and industries and replacing existing fuels. Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded3 is the bible of this delusional sect, which has captured much of Silicon Valley. This economic model sees new wealth emerge from dismantling the existing energy economy and replacing it with a medieval system of windmills and druidical sun temples. But the destruction of the workable and efficient energy system we have does nothing to enable a new one.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“The power in capitalism must not be mindless. Unless it is combined with knowledge, mere economic power or money is fruitless. Enterprise involves memory of the past and anticipation of the future, and it is creative. It is not a simple incentive system of rewards and punishments, of carrots and sticks. It is an information system, and it is governed less by economic theory as we know it than by information theory.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“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.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“From Pastor Malthus to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth; from hysteria over DDT, PCBs, and natural gas “fracking”; to continuing bouts of chemo-phobia and population panic; the achievements of capitalism have suffered a long series of detractions. The factitious and febrile campaign against global warming is only the latest binge of self-abuse among the children of prosperity.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“Interest rates are critical for information-theory economic analysis because they are an index of real economic conditions. If the government manipulates them, they will issue false signals, breeding confusion that undermines entrepreneurial activity. For example, if the government keeps interest rates artificially low for institutions that finance it—as it has been doing in the United States—the channel is seriously distorted. The interest rates are noise rather than signal. Interest rates near zero cause finance to hypertrophy as privileged borrowers reinvest government funds in government securities. Only a small portion of these funds goes to useful “infrastructure,” while the rest is burned off in consumption beyond our means.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“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.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“John Allison is the former CEO of a North Carolina bank, BB&T, which profitably surmounted the crisis after growing from $4.5 billion in assets when he took over in 1989 to $152 billion in 2008. Allison ascribed his success to decentralization of power in the branches of his bank. But decentralized power, he warned, has to be guarded from the well-meaning elites “who like to run their system and hate deviations.” So as CEO, Allison had to insist to his managers that with localized decision-making, “We get better information, we get faster decisions, we understand the market better.”3 Allison was espousing a central insight of the new economics of information. 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.”4 Because knowledge is dispersed, power must be as well.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“While market economies are often thought of as money economies, they are still more so knowledge economies…. Economic transactions are purchases and sales of knowledge.”   “After all, the cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today…. We are all in the business of buying and selling knowledge from one another, because we are each so profoundly ignorant of what it takes to complete the whole process of which we are a part.”   “‘How could we have gone so wrong?’ … The short answer is that power trumps knowledge.”   —THOMAS SOWELL, Knowledge and Decisions, 1979 (P. 47), AND Basic Economics, 2007 (P. 424)”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“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.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“The war between the centrifuge of knowledge and the centripetal pull of power remains the prime conflict in all economies. Reconciling the two impulses is a new economics, an economics that puts free will and the innovating entrepreneur not on the periphery but at the center of the system. It is an economics of surprise that distributes power as it extends knowledge. It is an economics of disequilibrium and disruption that tests its inventions in the crucible of a competitive marketplace. It is an economics that accords with the constantly surprising fluctuations of our lives.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World

“The index is retrospective. The crucial alpha, the entropy, the signal modulating that linear advance...comes from knowledge of the entrepreneurial surprises harbored on the edge of the noise.”
― George Gilder, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World