Ronald Reagan’s mostquoted living author—George Gilder—is back with an allnew paradigmshifting theory of capitalism that will upturn conventional wisdom, just when our economy desperately needs a new direction. America’s struggling economy needs a better philosophy than the college students lament: I cant be out of money, I still have checks in my checkbook We’ve tried a government spending spree, and we’ve learned it doesn’t work. Now is the time to rededicate our country to the pursuit of free market capitalism, before we’re buried under a mound of debt and unfunded entitlements. But how do we navigate between government spending thats too big to sustain and financial institutions that are too big to fail? In Knowledge and Power, George Gilder proposes a bold new theory on how capitalism produces wealth and how our economy can regain its vitality and its growth.
[...]... was from the prevailing protocols in the phone industry From the equilibrium and spontaneous order of Adam Smith and his heirs, from invisiblehanded markets and perfect competition, supply and demand, and rewards and punishments, I was pushed to theories of disequilibrium and disorder, and information and noise, as the keys to understanding economic progress 3 The Science of Information THE CURRENT... mathematical apparatus, sequestered by its creators in what is called information technology, the new theory drives the most powerful machines and networks of the era Information theory treats human creations or communications as transmissions through a channel, whether a wire or the world, in the face of the power of noise, and gauges the outcomes by their news or surprise, defined as “entropy” and. .. living author In the decades between the publications of the two editions of Wealth and Poverty , I became a venture capitalist and deeply engaged myself in studying the dynamics of computer and networking technologies and the theories of information behind them In the process, I began to see a new way of addressing the issues of economics and surprise Explicitly focusing on knowledge and power allows... overcome the laws of the purely physical sciences They can succeed because of the surprising power of the laws of information, which are conducive to human creativity The central concept of information theory is a measure of freedom of choice The principle of matter, on the other hand, is not liberty but limitation—it has weight and occupies space The power of any science is limited by its information potential... the power. ”2 But as Pierce showed in 1980, doubling the bandwidth of the signal from four megahertz to eight megahertz allows for a more than thirty-three-fold drop in the power- to-noise ratio.3 Reducing the power and expanding the bandwidth was over sixteen times more efficient in the example than increasing the signal power at the same bandwidth There was a paradox of loudness One person could be... step-bystep transcendence of the physical by the informational, of matter by idea, has powered all economic development through all of history and before In previous eras, this process was less obvious because the power of information was manifested in harnessing the laws of physics rather than in transcending them From the wheel to the Roman arch to the fragile wings lifting off the sand at Kitty Hawk, man... calculated, but from the free acts of homebuyers Having bet on constantly rising home prices, they simply folded their hands and walked away when the value of their houses collapsed The bankers had accounted for everything but free will The real error, however, was a divorce between the people who understood the situation on the ground and the people who made the decisions John Allison is the former CEO... subtracting the changeless radio waves This process of recovery can occur years later if the modulated waves are sampled and stored on a disk or long term memory The great accomplishment in information theory was the development of a rigorous mathematical discipline to define and measure the information in the message sent down the channel Shannon’s entropy or surprisal defines and quantifies the information. .. information theory, it is in principle impossible to differentiate such random noise from a series of unrelated creative surprises Both are gauged by their entropy or surprisal, and both seem random Unless you have the code, they both look the same This principle of information theory stultifies all the theories that try to reduce entrepreneurial creativity to “random walks” and “fractal” markets and. .. innovation and reflecting the dispersal of human knowledge On the other hand, we have the high-powered analog signals that Lusignan and most of the rest of Silicon Valley thought were the best means to maximize the flow of entropy These signals are analogous to gigantic corporations, government programs, and banks that use their power to be certified as too big to fail Each of these strategies can work . thirty-three-fold drop in the power- to-noise ratio. 3 Reducing the power and expanding the bandwidth was over sixteen times more efficient in the example than increasing the signal power at the. ONE - The Theory Chapter 1 - The Need for a New Economics Chapter 2 - The Signal in the Noise Chapter 3 - The Science of Information Chapter 4 - Entropy Economics Chapter 5 - Romney, Bain, and. Debauch Chapter 16 - Doing Banking Right Chapter 17 - The One Percent PART THREE - The Future Chapter 18 - The Black Swans of Investment Chapter 19 - The Outsider Trading Scandal Chapter 20 - The Explosive