George Franklin Gilder (/ˈɡɪldər/; born November 29, 1939) is an American investor, writer, economist, techno-utopian advocate, and co-founder of the Discovery Institute. His 1981 international bestseller Wealth and Poverty advanced a practical and moral case for supply-side economics and capitalism during the early months of the Reagan administration. He is married to Nini Gilder, and has four children.

In the 1970s, Gilder established himself as a critic of feminism and government welfare policies, arguing that they eroded the "sexual constitution" that civilized and socialized men in the roles of fathers and providers. In the 1990s, he became an enthusiastic evangelist of technology and the Internet by several books and his newsletter, the Gilder Technology Report. He is also known as the chairman of George Gilder Fund Management, LLC.

Gilder was born in New York City and raised in New York and Massachusetts. He is a great-grandson of designer Louis Comfort Tiffany.^[2] His father, Richard Watson Gilder, was killed flying in the United States Army Air Forces in World War II when Gilder was three.

He spent most of his childhood with his mother, Anne Spring (Alsop), 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.^[3]

Gilder attended Hamilton School in New York City, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard University, graduating in 1962.^[3] He later returned to Harvard as a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, and edited the Ripon Forum, the newspaper of the liberal Republican Ripon Society.

Gilder served in the United States Marine Corps.^[4]

In the 1960s Gilder served as a speechwriter for several prominent officials and candidates, including Nelson Rockefeller, George W. Romney, and Richard Nixon. He worked as a spokesman for the liberal Republican Senator Charles Mathias, as antiwar protesters surrounded the capital; some eventually scared Gilder out of his apartment. Gilder moved to Harvard Square the following year, and he became a writer who modeled himself after Joan Didion.

With his college roommate, Bruce Chapman, he wrote an attack on the anti-intellectual policies of the 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, The Party That Lost Its Head (1966). He later recanted this attack: "The far Right — the same men I dismissed as extremists in my youth — turned out to know far more than I did. At least the 'right-wing extremists', as I confidently called them, were right on almost every major policy issue from welfare to Vietnam to Keynesian economics and defense — while I, in my Neo-Conservative sophistication, was nearly always wrong."^[5]

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 idea that high tax rates reduce government revenue. Its opponents often refer to it as "trickle-down economics".

Inspired by Wanniski and by the works of free-market economists like Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek and novelist Ayn Rand,^[6] 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 Laffer's economic reports and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.^[9]

In the 1990s, he became an enthusiastic evangelist of technology and the Internet. He uncovered emerging trends in several books and his newsletter, the Gilder Technology Report.^[10]

The first mention of the word "Digerati" on USENET occurred in 1992 and referred to an article by 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 for that company on every fifth page.^[11]

Gilder wrote the books 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. The book cover of the Silicon Eye reads, "How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete." The Foveon sensor has not achieved this goal and has not yet been used in cell phones.

Gilder is an active investor in private companies and serves as the chairman of the advisory board in Israel-based ASOCS that he discovered during his research for Israel Test.^[12]

Gilder states that men are emotionally/sexually inferior, but as a counterbalance to this existential asymmetry, are often more driven than women in the secular workplace and in creative ventures outside the home because of inborn, biologically determined differences between men and women. Woman creates the baby, as a linchpin of humanity, whereas Man creates, as metaphor, the machine that protects the family from "Nature".

Gilder also describes women as "a very physiological consciousness," and asserts that women, because of inborn, biologically determined differences from men, must give up "choice", or the family will be destroyed. Referring to women, Gilder asserted in 1994:

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-Minnesota) and Senator Jacob Javits (R-New York). He was promptly fired as editor.^[3]

Gilder enjoyed the controversy, appearing on Firing Line to defend himself. He discovered that he had 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".^[14]

Gilder moved to New Orleans and worked in the mornings for Ben Toledano, Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1972 and the party's nominee for mayor of New Orleans in 1970. Also, he wrote Sexual Suicide (1973), revised and reissued as Men and Marriage (1986). He argued that the welfare state and feminism broke the "sexual constitution" that had weaned men off their predatory instinct for sex, war, and the hunt, and it 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."^[3]

He also stated that divorce "does spread poverty, and bitterness, and feminism, and other problems."^[13]

Gilder also wrote Visible Man: A True Story of Post-Racist America (1978, reissued in 1995), which The New York Times described in 1981 as "the account of a talented young black spoiled by the too-ready indolence of America's welfare system."^[15]

Gilder has asserted that the culture of Native Americans was "corrupt and unsuccessful" and so Native American culture "failed". He describes both black and Native American cultures as "destructive cultures", "tragic failures" and "virtual social suicide". He considered that upholding Native American or black cultures is a "terrible perversion".

Gilder has stated:

Gilder has praised mass immigration as an economic boon in both the US and Israel. Although Gilder's support for mass immigration is admittedly framed by high tech hubs such as Silicon Valley's need for computer programmers, he sees recent American immigration policy as being vital to American prosperity overall going so far as to write in the Wall Street Journal in 2011:

Despite Gilder's defense of mass immigration in the Wall Street Journal, it is unclear whether or not Gilder would object to cuts in low-skilled immigration to the United States.

Gilder bought the conservative political monthly magazine The American Spectator from its founder, Emmett Tyrrell, in the summer of 2000, switching the magazine's focus from politics to technology.^[17]

Experiencing his own financial problems in 2002,^[18] Gilder sold the Spectator back to Tyrrell.^[19]

He makes regular contributions to Forbes as a contributing editor. He also contributes to The Wall Street Journal, Wired and National Review.

For nearly thirty years, he has lectured internationally on economics, technology, education, and social theory. He has addressed audiences from Washington, DC, to the Vatican, and he has appeared at numerous conferences, public policy events, and media outlets.

Demonstrating his interest in the future of innovation-driven education models, in 2009 Gilder delivered the opening keynote address at the annual EduComm Conference, a nationwide gathering of higher education leaders pursuing breakthrough technologies with the potential to transform the college experience. His annual Telecosm Conference, which he hosts with Steve Forbes, draws technology leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, engineers, and inventors from across the globe.

Today, his lectures often concern his 2009 book, The Israel Test, which deals with the relationship between entrepreneurship, innovation, and geopolitical stability.

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."^[20] The book was a The New York Times bestseller^[21] and eventually sold over a million copies.^[22]

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.^[23]

In 1994 Gilder wrote that the poor in America are “ruined by the overflow of American prosperity” and “moral decay” and that they are in need of "Christian teaching from the churches."^[13]

Gilder's 2009 book The Israel Test is partly described as follows:

Irving Kristol says, "Everyone talks about 'free enterprise', but no one understands the entrepreneurial basis of economic growth better than George Gilder."

In an interview for National Review, Gilder says the book is about "the cosmic law between success and envy" and states Israel's role as the following:

He helped found the Discovery Institute with Bruce Chapman. The organization started as a moderate group that aimed to privatize and modernize Seattle's transit systems. It later became the leading thinktank of the intelligent design movement, with Gilder writing many articles for intelligent design and against the theory of evolution.^[25][26]