I have just read and am now re-reading George Gilder‘s latest book, Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How It Is Revolutionizing Our World, published by Regnery (2013). As I will indicate in my review of it for various Amazon.com websites, I highly recommend it as well as an earlier book, Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century.

Here is a brief excerpt from an article Gilder published in The Weekly Standard. To read the complete article, check out others, and sign up for a free newsletter, please click here.

* * *

Why in the world do we need yet another “new” economics? Jamming the libraries and the bookstores of the world are avatars of what must be every variation on the great themes of market and managerial economics. Scores of Nobel Prizes have been awarded for various nugatory refinements of the prevailing ideas.

All these schemes, however, fail to answer the key questions about any economic theory, which were posed by Irving Kristol nearly 35 years ago. Can the theory provide a moral or “transcendental” justification for its results, so that it is politically acceptable? And can it explain growth and creativity?

Kristol was cofounder and editor first of Encounter and then of the Public Interest, two of the world’s most eminent and influential publications, which had served to give me an education after four years at Harvard failed. I made reverent visits to Kristol’s luminous lair on Central Park South in Manhattan, where he held forth with his awesomely learned wife Gertrude Himmelfarb. His monthly columns in the Wall Street Journal were the most elegant and erudite ever to appear in those commercially oriented pages. Among all the supporters of supply side economics, he was the most intellectually prestigious, giving a sheen of respectable cover to untutored cohorts like me and Jude Wanniski.

By the late 1970s, Kristol was the so-called Godfather of neoconservatism, not only reigning at the top of a speculative organizational chart spread across a centerfold of Esquire but also ruling a domain of mind that reached to every aspect of the culture. Almost alone among analysts of capitalism, he grasped the centrality of the sciences—from Newtonian physics to Darwinian biology to behavioral psychology—in shaping, informing, and even stultifying economic models. Since occasionally “editing” his column at the New Leader magazine in the mid-1960s (it was always impeccable) I had been among his most devout disciples. When he issued orders, I tended to jump to attention.

Writing Wealth and Poverty 35 years ago, as in launching Knowledge and Power this season, I was consciously picking up a gauntlet from Kristol. In all his works, he fused political, economic, and religious concerns in a critique not merely of government overreach but of all modernist culture. The adversary was not merely excessive tax rates and regulation but nihilism and anomie, “a melting away of established principles of authority” in a “spiritual crisis of modernity.”

* * *

To read the complete article, please click here.

George Gilder is Chairman of George Gilder Fund Management, LLC, host of the Gilder Telecosm Forum and Publisher of the Gilder Friday Letter. He is also a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute where he directs Discovery’s program on high technology and public policy, and the former Editor in Chief of the Gilder Technology Report (published by Gilder Publishing. LLC and Forbes Inc. from 1996 to 2007). To learn more about him and his work, please click here.