George Gilder on ‘Emergency Socialism,’ Accommodating Surprise, and Separating Power From Knowledge
Nearly four decades after investor George Gilder’s book “Wealth and Poverty” helped shape the economic policies of Ronald Reagan, Gilder sits down to discuss his forthcoming book “Life After Capitalism.”
“As Peter Thiel declares, in the past, when you went public as a company, you gained new influence and power and marketing ability, and new capital and freedom. Now, when you go public, you get nationalized. And you become a kind of instrument of government policy,” says Gilder.
Gilder also believes that many of the policies surrounding public health during the pandemic were actually weakening people’s immune systems under the guise of protection.
“We’re trying to engineer a new dark age for our immune systems, trying to retard the learning processes that render our immune systems capable of facing the new threats—the unexpected threats—that may arise in the future,” says Gilder.
We dive into environmental and pandemic policy, Silicon Valley and academia, and Gilder’s information theory on economics, which applies the study of how information is communicated and stored to our mental, physiological and political systems.
“This information theory that’s often applied to fiber-optic lines or wireless transmissions actually also applies to our minds and bodies,” says Gilder.
