"Get Ready for a Global 'Reboot'," says George Gilder... The Heart of Capitalist Theory This crucial cognitive dissonance in capitalism pervades the entire literature of economics. It arose at the time of Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776). Suggesting an upper-class disdain for “men in trade,” Smith expressed his own cognitive dissonance — his belief that free enterprise can prosper even while actual enterprisers “never gather without conspiring against the interest of the public.” Compounding Smith’s suspicion of capitalists was his envy of Newton’s physics of a century before. Smith expressed a belief that an economy is analogous to “a great machine with every part adjusted with the nicest artifice to the ends they are intended to produce.” Producing this effect was the “invisible hand” of the market. According to Smith, the economy was governed by the self-interest of entrepreneurs in much the way the great machine of planetary motions was governed by the force of gravity. Smith, however, did not name the system “capitalism” or define its operations in terms of economic classes. That was left to Karl Marx in Das Capital. Expounded in four dense volumes, with the first published in Germany in 1857 and the rest edited from his notes by Friedrich Engels, Marx’s work is still the most cited book in the social sciences published before 1950. And it followed Smith in an attempt to root and anchor capitalism in materialism. At the heart of the prevailing capitalist theory is a system of incentives and responses by homo economicus, seeking pleasure and recoiling from pain, accumulating rewards and shunning penalties. Homo economicus is a function of his material environment and is motivated by his appetites, widely depicted by the pejorative of his “greed.” Even great capitalist writers, from Smith to Ayn Rand, accept this image. The mistake is fundamental and affects the very etymology of the name. Marx defined capital as embodied in machines and resources. But in fact the word and the system derive from the Latin word caput, meaning head. Today’s Prophecy Life After Capitalism will show that free enterprise is supremely a mind centered system, that material resources are essentially as infinite as the atoms in the universe, and that what governs economic growth is human creativity, in the image of the creator. Creativity is not a machine; it is a miracle of mind, measured by its surprising outcomes. In Wealth and Poverty, I showed that “greed, as by an invisible hand, leads to an ever-growing welfare state — to socialism, not freedom. In Life After Capitalism, I will explain how economics is not an incentive system but an information system. To understand it fully and measure its effects, you have to use the governing science of the 21st century economy, reaching from physics to biology, computer technology to biotech, from networks to industrial design. That science is Information Theory. Developed in its mathematical form first by Claude Shannon who defined the bit and the byte, it underlies and explains nearly all the technologies of the modern economy. It is crucial to the processes of investment and even the definition of wealth and growth and money. It defines information as entropy and surprise, not as order. It permanently refutes the idea of an economy as a great machine or a class struggle over material resources. It enshrines an economy of mind. By banishing greed as a driving force, materialism as a philosophy, and class struggle as a principle, it permanently banishes Marx and transcends the critical cognitive dissonance that reverberates through our economy and society today. In coming weeks, I will be interspersing my investment ideas with this new theory of economics, which also represents a breakthrough in the theory of investment. It will be an exciting and I hope rewarding adventure in ideas. Regards, George Gilder Editor, Gilder's Daily Prophecy P.S. The next BIG technology window is opening, and it has the potential to stack up to the Dot-Com explosion, the worldwide release of the smartphone, the social media stocks explosion, and even the great crypto boom of 2017. Early investors could see incredible gains by following one simple “tweak.” Click this link to see what I have discovered. My groundbreaking presentation will be removed from the web on Sunday, September 13th at midnight so don't wait. |
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