111 Quotes by George Gilder

I think I'm different. I've got alpha, baby...I think I can find the profits of surprise, the yield of real knowledge. Everyone says that, of course, but most investors are all beta--just volatility, just the random motion of the surf...they get killed. To generate alpha, I need help, direction, signposts, analysts, and sometimes even brandy-toting salesmen.

The risk-bearing role of the rich cannot be performed so well by anyone else. The benefits of capitalism still depend on capitalists. The other groups on the pyramid of wealth should occasionally turn from the spectacles of consumption long enough to see the adventure on the frontiers of the economy above them - an adventure not without its note of nobility...

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.

Poverty, for example is primarily a matter of prospects and connections.

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.

A day doesn't pass that I'm not surprised.

Yet economics purports to be strangely exempt from this fact of life. From Adam Smith's day to our own, the chief concern of the discipline has been to render economic events unsurprising...The discernment of orderly rules governing the apparent chaos of life was a remarkable achievement and continues to amaze.

Much of the market is mindlessly indexed. That means it is all beta. The knowledge is leaching away in the surf of noise and rapid trading.

An economy is a "noosphere" (a mind-based system), and it can revive as quickly as minds and policies can change.