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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.

George Gilder

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George Gilder
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: November 29
Economist
Philosopher
Writer
New York City
New York
Concerns
Civilized
Similar
Interests
Concern
Prurient
Television
Differentiated
Interest
Sharply
People
Vulgar

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Unlike an inexorable, Newtonian great machine, the economy is not a closed system.
George Gilder
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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.
George Gilder
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The prevailing theory of capitalism suffers from one central and disabling flaw, a profound distrust and incomprehension of capitalism.
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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.
George Gilder
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Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.
George Gilder
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Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises.
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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.
George Gilder
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On every continent and in every epoch the peoples who have excelled in creating wealth have been the victims of some of society's greatest brutalities.
George Gilder
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Capitalism begins with giving.
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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.
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People cannot be expected to learn one expertise and just apply it routinely in a job. Your expertise is in steadily renewing your knowledge base and extending it to new areas. That lifelong cycle of learning really is the foundation of the new information organization and economy.
George Gilder
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A policy of subsidizing failures will end in an economy strewn with capital-guzzling industries long past their time of profitability - old companies that cannot create jobs themselves, but can stand in the way of job creation.
George Gilder
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Wealth usually comes from doing what other people find insufferably boring.
George Gilder
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The rates of taxation climb and the levels of capital decline, until the only remaining wealth beyond the reach of the regime is the very protein of human flesh, and that too is finally taxed, bound, and gagged, and brought to the colossal temple of the state - a final sacrifice of carnal revenue to feed the declining elite.
George Gilder
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In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb.
George Gilder
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The differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society.
George Gilder
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The United States is probably the most [socially] mobile society in the history of the world. The virtues that are most valuable in it are diligence, discipline, ambition, and a willingness to take risks. Education and credentials are most important in government elsewhere most skills are learned on the job.
George Gilder
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Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk. But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities.
George Gilder
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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
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All small returns are noise. To transcend the noise and the risk, seek outsized returns from technological paradigms.
George Gilder