George Gilder

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George Gilder
Born November 29, 1939 (1939-11-29) (age 68)
Flag of the United States New York City U.S.
Education Phillips Exeter Academy
Harvard University
Occupation author
Editor in Chief,
 Gilder Technology Report

Chairman, Gilder Publishing LLC

Senior Fellow Discovery Institute
Spouse Nini (4 children)

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.

Contents

[edit] Early years

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.[1]

[edit] Education

Gilder attended Hamilton School in New York City, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard University, graduating in 1962.[2] 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.

[edit] United States Marine Corps

Gilder served briefly in the United States Marine Corps.[3]

[edit] Career

[edit] Speechwriting

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 entitled The Party That Lost Its Head (1966).

[edit] 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.[4]

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".[5]

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".[6]

In Visible Man (1978, reissued in 1995) Gilder wrote about how sexual suicide works in practice. He told the story of a disabled US Marine Corps veteran who decayed from provider to waster when the teenage mother of his child became 16 and went on welfare.

[edit] 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 headline 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.[7] 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.[8]

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.[9]

[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, 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 throughout. "The single most fascinating thing about Life after Television", commented David Foster Wallace, "is that it's a book with commercials."[10]

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 subscription newsletter called the Gilder Technology Report with Forbes magazine.

[edit] American Spectator

Gilder bought the conservative political monthly magazine The American Spectator from its founder R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. in summer 2000. The magazine had been experiencing financial difficulties arising out of its investigation of the Clintons, the Arkansas Project, supported by conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife. Gilder switched the magazine content from politics to technology.[11]

Experiencing his own financial problems in 2002 almost two years later[12] Gilder sold the Spectator back to Tyrrell.[13]

[edit] Wealth and poverty

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."[14] The book was a New York Times bestseller[15] and eventually sold over a million copies.[16]

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.[17]

[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.[18] In contrast to others at the institute who deny that Shannon information theory provides a good measure for biological information, Gilder claims that Shannon information theory actually disproves evolution.[19]

[edit] Bibliography (partial)

  • Life After Television (1990)
  • Men and Marriage (1986)
  • Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution In Economics And Technology (1989)
  • Naked Nomads: Unmarried Men in America (1974)
  • Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise
  • Sexual Suicide (1973)
  • TELECOSM: How Infinite Bandwidth will Revolutionize Our World (2000)
  • Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance (2002)
  • The Meaning of the Microcosm
  • The Party That Lost Its Head (1966)
  • The Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete (2005)
  • The Silicon Eye: Microchip Swashbucklers and the Future of High-Tech Innovation (2006)
  • Foreword to The Theology of Welfare
  • Visible Man: A True Story of Post-Racist America (1978)
  • Wealth and Poverty (1981)
  • Gilder, George F. (July 1973), “The suicide of the sexes”, Harper's, <http://www.harpers.org/archive/1973/07/0021760> 

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

[edit] See also

United States Marine Corps Portal

[edit] References

  1. ^ MacFarquhar, Larissa (May 29, 2000), “The Gilder Effect”, <boldtype>, <http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1200/macfarquhar/essay.html> 
  2. ^ Ibid.
  3. ^ Gilder anecdotally writes about his time in the Marine Corps in this Forbes article.
  4. ^ MacFarquhar, ibid.
  5. ^ Faludi, Susan (1991), Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Crown, pp. p. 285, ISBN 0517576988 
  6. ^ MacFarquhar, ibid.
  7. ^ Gilder, George (1993), Wealth and Poverty, ICS Press, pp. p. xi, ISBN 1558152407 
  8. ^ Gilder, ibid., p.xv
  9. ^ Discovery institute biography
  10. ^ David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", Review of Contemporary Fiction, 185
  11. ^ York, Byron (November 2001), “The Life and Death of the American Spectator”, The Atlantic Monthly, <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200111/york> 
  12. ^ Prince, Marcello (2006-05-08), “Where Are They Now: George Gilder”, The Wall Street Journal, <http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114433479738318882-A8pE_iAsXSSPVdrwX8oe89HANsc_20070507.html?mod=rss_free> 
  13. ^ Kurtz, Howard. "The News That Didn't Fit To Print", The Washington Post, 2002-06-10. 
  14. ^ Starr, Roger (1981-02-01), “A Guide to Capitalism”, The New York Times, <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D03E7D8123BF932A35751C0A967948260> 
  15. ^ [http://www.hawes.com/1981/1981-04-12.pdf Adult New York Times Best Seller List for April 12, 1981
  16. ^ Faludi, ibid., p. 289
  17. ^ Gilder, ibid, p.xxii
  18. ^ Chris C. Mooney, "Inferior Design", The American Prospect, September 2005, excerpt from The Republican War on Science (2005)
  19. ^ George Gilder, "Evolution and Me" National Review, July 17, 2006)
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