George Gilder

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article, especially its introduction, section layout, and relevant internal links. (help)

George Gilder (born 1939, in New York City) is a prominent American antifeminist, anti-evolution, techno-utopian intellectual.

Contents

[edit] Early years

Gilder's father was killed at a young age in World War II. His father was a college roommate of David Rockefeller and Gilder was raised by the Rockefellers after his own father's death.

Gilder attended Exeter Academy and Harvard University. With his college roommate Bruce Chapman, he wrote an attack on the anti-intellectual policies of Barry Goldwater entitled The Party That Lost Its Head. 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.

In the 1960s Gilder served as a speechwriter for several prominent official 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. As an independent researcher and writer, he wrote extensively on the causes of poverty, which resulted in his books Men and Marriage (1972), Visible Man (1978), and his best-selling Wealth and Poverty (1981).

Gilder pioneered the formulation 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.

[edit] Antifeminism

After he wrote an article for the Forum opposing a day care bill in Congress, some lobbied for his removal. Gilder responded, appearing on Crossfire 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". (quoted in Backlash, 285)

He went on to write four books attacking feminism: Sexual Suicide, Naked Nomads, Visible Man, and Men and Marriage (a revised and reissued version of Sexual Suicide).

[edit] 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, about the death of TV; 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.

Gilder publishes a subcription newsletter called the Gilder Technology Report which at its peak, prior to the Nasdaq meltdown, had 75,000 subscribers. The number of subscribers has since shrunk to 5,000. At its peak, the newsletter was highly influential and a positive mention of a company could make its stock price surge. Gilder invested his own money in the companies he covered in the newsletter, leading to accusations of "front running". While Gilder has on several occasions maintained that he saw the Nasdaq meltdown coming, he never shared this insight with his subscribers, who suffered catastrophic losses. "The typical Gilder subscriber lost all his money and that made it very hard for me to market the newsletter" remarked Gilder in a Wall Street Journal interview.

He was a long time supporter of The American Spectator magazine, and after becoming a dot-com millionaire he purchased the magazine. His goal was to turn it into a profit-making glossy with significant media buzz. Numerous staff members, demoralized by the ever-looming budget crises, were laid off or departed after Gilder's hand-picked but inexperienced editors Richard Vigilante and George's cousin Joshua Gilder took the reins and vowed to reach a new technology- and business-savvy audience. Circulation and budget losses continued and even increased in the Gilder era, and at one point the entire Washington-based staff other than founder R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., and executive editor and web-site editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski were laid off as operations were moved to rural Massachusetts, where the rest of George Gilder's businesses were based. Not long thereafter George Gilder, who had lost most of his fortune with the bursting of the Internet stock bubble, sold the magazine back to Tyrrell and the American Alternative Foundation for $1 in 2003, and it moved operations once-again to the Washington-D.C. area.

[edit] Intelligent design

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.

[edit] Sources

[edit] Bibliography (partial)

By Gilder:

  • Life After Television
  • Men and Marriage
  • Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution In Economics And Technology
  • Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise
  • TELECOSM: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World
  • Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance
  • The Meaning of the Microcosm
  • The Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete
  • The Silicon Eye: Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech Innovation
  • The Theology of Welfare
  • Wealth and Poverty

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../g/e/o/George_Gilder_c6a9.html"
In other languages