注 释

    注 释

    第一部分 理论

    01 我们需要新型经济学

    This opening chapter is based on a draft by Richard Vigilante, my virtual “editor-in-chief” for all my books since 1982, with whom I worked out the structure of this work over many weeks. The chapter defines the element missing in all contemporary economic models: the unexpected boons of creativity. As Princeton economist Albert Hirshman wrote in an early issue of the Public Interest, creativity always comes as a surprise to us. If it didn’t, we would not need it; we could plan it, and socialism would work. Surprise is not exogenous to capitalism; it is its essence, and the essence of information and enterprise.

    1.Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics:A Rogue Economist Explains the Hidden Side of Everything, revised and expanded edition, (William Morrow, 2006); and Nobel Laureate Gary Becker with Guity Nashat Becker, The Economics of Life: From Baseball to Affirmative Action to Immigration, How Real-World Issues Affect our Everyday Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996). In Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2010), John D. Mueller debunks some of Levitt’s and Becker’s more facile crowd-pleasers, providing a different take on the need for a new economics. See especially Chapter 8, “An Empirical Test: Fatherhood and Homicide,” 185–187.
    2.Mark Skousen, Vienna & Chicago: A Tale of Two Schools of Free Market Economics (Washington, D.C.: Capital Press, 2005), is a masterpiece of pithy and learned economic history and analysis covering these canonical sources of Austrian and Chicago economic thought. Also insightful and edifying is Skousen, The Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007). Valuable background for this book is David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), and G.L.S. Shackle, Epistemics and Economics: A Critique of Economic Doctrines (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
    3.John Allison, The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012). Allison tells the story of how his bank thrived through the crash. He also offers a needed corrective for the lionization of the “big bankers,” such as Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner.
    4.The definitive statement of the knowledge problem comes in Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review XXXV (1945): 30. “The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate‘given’ resources—if ‘given’ is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these ‘data.’ It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality…. The problem is thus in no way solved if we can show that all the facts, if they were known to a single mind (as we hypothetically assume them to be given to the observing economist), would uniquely determine the solution; instead we must show how a solution is produced by the interactions of people each of whom possesses only partial knowledge. To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind in the same manner in which we assume it to be given to us as the explaining economists is to assume the problem away and to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world.”
    5.Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), introduced me to the proliferating ramifications of the subject of knowledge in economics and the damage inflicted by the intrusions of political power. His book could have been titled“Knowledge and Power,” but the source of the title for my book was Arnold Kling, Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), which begins: “This book represents an attempt to explore the problem of the discrepancy between the trends in two phenomena: knowledge is becoming more diffuse, while political power is becoming more concentrated.” My book shows that Kling’s insight finds deep roots in the information theory that underlies the modern world economy.

    02 噪声中的信号

    In this chapter, the surprise is Qualcomm corporation, which selfconsciously introduced information theory to American commerce. In a determinist economic model, entrepreneurship will seem to be noise in the channel. Qualcomm used such noise to bear information. My daughter Louisa Gilder, author of The Age of Entanglement (Knopf, 2008), shaped and edited this and the subsequent two chapters.

    1.John R. Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols,Signals, and Noise, second revised edition (New York: Dover Books, 1980). This wide-ranging text by one of Claude Shannon’s closest colleagues and disciples proceeds from physics to music and illustrates the power of information theory to illuminate all intellectual life.
    2.James Gleick, The Information (New York: Pantheon, 2011). The most comprehensive and comprehensible study of information theory, enlivened with an extensive biography of Claude Shannon.
    3.Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory, 178.
    4.Pierce,An Introduction to Information Theory. The deeper permu tations of noise are well explained in Edward Beltrami, What Is Random: Chance and Order in Mathematics and Life (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1999), 131–143, where he expounds on a spectrum of white, pink, red, and black noise.

    03 信息科学

    Such is the sequestration of disciplines in the American Academy that most economists and social scientists, as well as biologists and even physicists, have no idea of who Claude Shannon was. I hope this chapter remedies the neglect of one of the paramount thinkers of the information era. Better known is Shannon’s colleague in cryptography during World War II and co-founder of information theory after it, Alan Turing, who might possibly have rivaled Shannon in creative extensions of computer science. But following the war, Alan Turing committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple after having undergone court-mandated estrogen therapy to rein in his public homosexuality. The Apple logo, with its missing bite, is thought by some to be an homage to Turing, but Steve Jobs said he only wished he had been that smart.

    1.Shannon’s works have been collected in an IEEE Tome: Claude Shannon, Collected Papers (New York: Wiley-IEEE Press, 1993), which also include several interviews with Shannon and his colleagues. Other biographical details come from James Gleick, The Information; John Horgan, IEEE Spectrum (April 1992); and Scientific American (January, 1990): 20–22.
    2.Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe (Knopf, 2006). An essay on the information theory of physics by a leading MIT physicist and developer of the conceptual foundations of quantum computing.
    3.Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (New York: HarperCollins, 1985).

    04 熵经济学

    The title of this chapter was coined by Bret Swanson for his estimable blog of Telecom analysis and information theory. His work can be found online at http://entropyeconomics.com/index.php/about/bretswanson/.

    1.For these purposes, I take information and knowledge as kindred terms (knowledge being processed information). Peter Drucker,“The Knowledge Age,” in The Age of Discontinuity (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). Drucker sustained his pioneering preoccupation with the ascendant role of knowledge throughout his career.
    2.Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post Industrial Society (New York:Basic Books, 1973), wrote authoritatively of the increasing role of knowledge and information in a “creativity culture,” though he underestimated entrepreneurial skills in his credulous stress on professional expertise, and in his academic itch to redeem the idiom of Marxism.
    3.Among many epigrams on the media, information, and knowledge trinities, Marshall McLuhan spoke presciently in 1967 on “The Best of Ideas,” CBC radio: “One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.”
    4.Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1980) was the most detailed and articulate exposition of the move toward an information society and a knowledge economy. Selling millions of copies around the globe, it may have been the most prophetic book of the age, though intellectuals characteristically disdained it for shallowness and metaphorical aerobatics.
    5.Stewart Brand, author of The Whole Earth Catalog and of the mantra “information wants to be free,” was a pioneer of information-era companies and concepts. A swashbuckling figure who lives on a tugboat in Sausalito Harbor, Brand was immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
    6.John Perry Barlow is the poet of the information age, known for his contributions to the ardent infoscapes of the Grateful Dead (“I Need A Miracle” and “Estimated Prophet,” among many other canonical non-Robert Hunter lyrics). He also wrote incandescent tributes to the information and knowledge economy and was the author of “The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”:“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather…. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.”
    7.Shannon, “Omni interview” in Collected Papers.
    8.Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).
    9.This Henry Ford quote is said to be apocryphal, but it is always ascribed to him and it captures the essence of his approach to the market.

    05 罗姆尼、贝恩和学习曲线

    This chapter was written in the expectation that Mitt Romney would be President by now. Many a slip…. But the story of Bain and Company and the learning curve remain central to this book.

    1.Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, The Real Romney (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).
    2.Michael Jensen, “The Modern Industrial Revolution, Exit, and the Failure of Internal Control Systems,” The Journal of Finance 48, no. 3 (July 1993): 831–880. Jensen delivered this paper as a keynote to the 53rd Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association in Anaheim, CA, January 5–7, 1993. Later he and his students updated the numbers.
    3.Mark Skousen, The Structure of Production, paperback edition with new introduction (1990; reprint, New York: NYU Press, 2007).
    4.Michael Rothchild, Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem, reissue edition (Hammond, IN: Owl Books, 1995).
    5.Raymond Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). A classic of technological analysis and projection, with elegantly written “dialogues” at the end of each chapter, it showed that America’s inventor-futurist is also a superb writer. His assumption that the mind is essentially a material computational machine, extended in a new seminal work, How to Build a Mind(New York: Viking, 2012), fails to persuade me, while as usual teaching me much. I just do not believe that transistors or on-off switches, however many and however fast, can transcend their programming to become conscious. Kurzweil’s book on the mind remains the most fascinating explanation of how to build a natural language speech recognizer.
    6.Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Library of American Paperback Classics, 2009). In this autobiographical meditation written at the end of the nineteenth century, Adams dubs his insight into the dynamics of economic growth “The Law of Acceleration,”and limns out a curve for energy usage that anticipates the scores of similar exponentials in Kurzweil’s work.
    7.Rand Paul, “Filibuster on U.S. Senate Floor” (speech, Washington, D.C., March 6, 2013), Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/publica tions/commentary/john-brennan-won-did-meaning-america-sur vive. “When we passed Obamacare, it was 2,000-some-odd pages. There have been 9,000 pages of regulations written since. Obamacare had 1,800 references that the Secretary of Health shall decide at a later date. We (the people) gave up that power. We gave up power that should have been ours, that should have been written into the legislation. We gave up that power to the executive branch… many of whom we call bureaucrats, unelected.”
    8.John Goodman, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis (Oakland,CA: The Independent Institute, 2012). Also, Arnold Kling, Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2006).

    06 学习的程度

    In 2010, in The Rational Optimist (Harper, 2010), an epochal achievement in the history of economic thought, Matt Ridley, in different terms, provided a crucial insight for this chapter: “The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity.” Describing “prosperity” as “exchange and specialization—more like the multiplication of labor than the division of labor,” he essentially depicts this process as the transmutation of knowledge and coal, ideas and energy, into “the ‘creation’ of time,” which enabled the abolition of slavery and the emergence of the modern world. I cannot improve on Ridley’s argument; I can only point to his book in admiration and offer a few embellishments from information theory, treating the “accretion of knowledge” as a process of learning.

    In an information economy, learning by experiment is the crucial force of progress. Falsifiability is the test of useful hypotheses of enterprise. So the extent of learning replaces the extent of the market as the measure of creativity in the division of labor. For more detailed and technical analysis of the processes of learning, Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa, Malik MagdonIsmail, and Hsuan-Tien Lin, all trained at Caltech, offer the definitive Learning from Data: A Short Course (AMLbook.com, 2012). Jeffrey L. Funk,Technology Change and the Rise of New Industries (Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books, 2013) definitively examines, with many edifying examples, the futility of demand-side approaches to innovation.

    1.George J. Stigler, “The Successes and Failures of Professor Smith,”(speech presented at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, St. Andrews, Scotland, 1976), The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, http://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/select edpapers/sp50c.pdf. The question is, “If scale economies are so important, how do small firms manage to exist at all? How do we get the sort of competition essential to the Invisible Hand?” (Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, 46). As early as 1951, George Stigler was already wrestling with this issue: “Either the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market, and, characteristically, industries are monopolized; or industries are characteristically competitive, and the [Invisible Hand] theorem is false or of little significance.” Stigler, “The Successes and Failures of Professor Smith,” 46.
    2.Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 340. This definitive tome traces the sources of Western law to the Papal Revolution of the twelfth century, when the Roman Catholic Church gained its political and legal independence from the political establishments of kings and feudal lords. The mercantile systems stemmed from this original crucible of the law.
    3.Gordon Moore ascribed his “law” to Carver Mead in an account of the history of the law on its thirtieth anniversary. The source of the Moore’s Law analysis, and much of the material in this chapter, is my book Microcosm: The Quantum Era in Economics and Technology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
    4.Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown Business, 2012). Anderson lucidly expounds the idea of a new desktop revolution, following desktop computing and desktop publishing, enabling desktop manufacture. An enthusiast who has begun his own company in the field, making do-it-yourself drones, he may well exaggerate the pace of the change, as some of us enthusiasts tend to do. But as with his previous book, The Long Tail (New York: Hyperion, 2008), he puts his finger on the impli- cations of a radical development of his epoch, a new long tail of customized manufacturing by neighborhood artisans. From the ribosome in biology to the 3D printer, programmed atoms and molecules rule. As Gregory Chaitin points out in Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical (New York: Vintage, 2012), all these long tails derive from the promethean mind of John von Neumann, whose Gdelian math and architecture underlie the conventional computer and whose cellular automata provided the math behind the 3-D printer.

    07 经济学的曙光

    David Warsh introduced me to William Norhaus’s Promethean paper on the compound learning curves of illumination. This essay shows that Moore’s Law is not an anomaly or a special effect of digital computing but a characteristic manifestation of technological advance based on learning and information.

    1.Robert Solow, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,”The Quarterly Journal of Economics 70, no. 1 (MIT Press, 1956). This paper is the starting point for David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), which in turn is the inspiration for this chapter and other chapters.
    2.Robert J. Gordon, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds” (Working Paper no. 18315, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2012):“This paper raises basic questions about the process of economic growth. It questions the assumption, nearly universal since Solow’s seminal contributions of the 1950s, that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. There was virtually no growth before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history.”
    3.Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.
    4.William D. Nordhaus, “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not,” Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University (New Haven: 1998). The epochal paper was delivered first to the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1993.
    5.Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, 336. For a more detailed and authoritative account of the Nordhaus revelation, see Chapter 24: “A Short History of the Cost of Lighting.”
    6.Eric Savitz and Bill Watkins, “How Silicon Will Spur A Boom In Solid-State Lighting,” Forbes, November 23, 2012, http://www. forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/11/23/how-silicon-will-spur-aboom-in-solid-state-lighting/.

    08 凯恩斯低估了信息的作用

    In researching this chapter, I rediscovered the rich and comprehensive economic writings of Mark Skousen, who has told the story of the overthrow of Keynesianism better than anyone else, probably because he contributed so trenchantly and relentlessly to the argument over two decades. Skousen’s work on the structure of production subsumes and transcends Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk’s original Austrian analysis in The Positive Theory of Capital (South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1959).

    1.James Livingston, Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
    2.Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics (New York:W. W. Norton, 2009) and End This Depression Now (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012).
    3.Krugman, End This Depression Now.
    4.James Livingston, Against Thrift.
    5.Livingston, “It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid!,” New York Times, October 25, 2011.
    6.Livinston, “It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid!”
    7.Mark Skousen, The Structure of Production (New York: NYU Press, 2007). An accessible summary of Skousen’s “Aggregate Production Structure” time-oriented model appears in Skousen, Economic Logic, revised third edition (Washington, D.C.: Capital Press, 2010), 59–66.
    8.Skousen, Economic Logic.
    9.Yi Wen, “Savings and Growth under Borrowing Constraints: Explaining the “High Savings Rate’ Puzzle", (Working Paper, The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, June 2010). The paper explains:“A leading alternative view is that the PIH [Milton Friedman’s famous Permanent Income Hypothesis which assumes a propensity to save governed by lifetime savings targets rather than opportunity costs] fails because it is based on, among other things, the assumption of exogenous rates of returns to financial assets (i.e., the real interest rate). In a production economy with productive assets (such as capital), the real rates of return are determined by the marginal products of such assets. When asset returns are so determined, they will respond to changes in productivity growth, which is the fundamental source of changes in permanent income. A permanent increase in total factor productivity (TFP) raises the rate of return to capital, so investment demand will increase, resulting in a higher equilibrium saving rate through a higher real interest rate. Consequently, in contrast to the prediction of the PIH [permanent income hypothesis], standard general-equilibrium growth theory suggests that household saving may increase rather than decrease in response to a higher permanent income (as implied by the analysis of Chen, Imrohoroglu, and Imrohoroglu, 2006).” A pithy summary of the argument is found in E. Katarina Vermann, “Wait, Is Saving Good or Bad? The Paradox of Thrift,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Page One Economics Newsletter.
    10.Yi Wen, “Savings and Growth.”
    11.Skousen, letter to the New York Times, personal communication.
    12.Skousen, Economic Logic.
    13.Richard Posner, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2010) and A Failure of Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). The 2010 book was apparently rushed into print to mitigate the excessive leftist credulity exhibited by the 2009 crisis volume, replete with such distractions as an alleged “climate change” crisis displacing the early “global warming.” (Posner could be blind to the comedy of “climate change” casuistry only as long as he believed he retained a chance for ascent to the Supreme Court, where admittedly he belongs).
    14.Jean-Baptiste Say, A Treatise on Political Economy (1855; reprint, Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1803), available online at www.econolib.org/library/Say/sayT15.html. “The same principle leads to the conclusion, that the encouragement of mere consumption is no benefit to commerce; for the difficulty lies in supplying the means, not in stimulating the desire of consumption; and we have seen that production alone, furnishes those means. Thus, it is the aim of good government to stimulate production, of bad government to encourage consumption.” A judicious presentation of the debate appears in Steven Kates, Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution: How Macroeconomic Theory Lost its Way (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1998).
    15.I owe this circular-flow argument, among many others in this book, to Richard Vigilante of Whitebox Investment Advisors, Minneapolis, MN.
    16.Mark Collette, “The Wildcatter: Corpus Christi’s Gregg Robertson, key member of Eagle Ford discovery, named 2012 Newsmaker of the Year,” Corpus Christi Caller-Times, December 29, 2012, www. caller.com/news/2012/dec/29/the-wildcatter-corpus-christis-greggrobertson/?partner=RSS.

    09 熵和秩序的谬误

    Howard Bloom is author of his own luminous theory of economics,The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-vision of Capitalism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2010). He stresses meaning (the cosmos as a meaning machine) and disparages Shannon’s information theory for leaving out meaning. Shannon focuses on the channels or conduits of meaning rather than on meaning itself (the content of the channel). Thus he offers a theory that can accommodate all kinds of meanings (and creations) just as DNA could accommodate all forms of creatures through all time.

    Gregory Chaitin, author of algorithmic information theory, makes the point in his iconoclastic Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical(New York: Vintage Books, 2013), “Life is plastic, creative! How can we build this out of static, eternal, perfect mathematics? We shall use postmodern math, the mathematics that comes after Godel, 1931, Turing, 1936, open not closed math, the math of creativity….”

    1.Howard Bloom, “Heresy Number Three: Prepare to be Burned at the Stake (The Second Law of Thermodynamics—Why Entropy is an Outrage),” in The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (New York: Prometheus Books, 2012).
    2.Howard Bloom, The God Problem.
    3.Howard Bloom, The God Problem.
    4.Hubert Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). This lucid, magisterial treatment of the subject is full of the author’s well-seasoned opinions that began with the first conference on information theory and biology in Gatlinburg, Maryland, in 1954, where he introduced George Gamow and his pioneering concept of a code carried in DNA. The 2005 text follows Yockey’s definitive Information Theory and Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For a less mathematical exposition of a key part of the argument, see Dean L. Overman, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
    5.Paul Krugman, The Self-Organizing Economy (New York: WileyBlackwell, 1996).
    6.Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). “[T]he ultimate aim of freedom is the enlargement of those capacities in which man surpasses his ancestors and to which each generation must endeavor to add its share—its share in the growth of knowledge and the gradual advance of moral and aesthetic beliefs, where no superior must be allowed to enforce one set of views of what is right or good and where only further experience can decide what should prevail.”

    10 罗默的经济模型及其局限性

    My daughter Louisa Gilder persuaded me to include this chapter, which presents the work of the most informative and Shannonesque of contemporary economists. She also researched and drafted much of it. But according to the usual convention, the errors and conclusions belong to Dad.

    1.David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (New York:Norton, 2007), 376.
    2.Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, Invisible Wealth (New York: Encounter Books, 2011), 80.
    3.Kevin Kelly, “The New Economics of Growth,” Wired, June 1996.
    4.Paul Romer, “New Goods, Old Theory, and the Welfare Costs f Trade Restrictions” (Working Paper no. 4452, National Bureau of Economic Research, September 1993).
    5.Russell Roberts, “An Interview with Paul Romer on Economic Growth,”Library of Economics and Liberty, November 5, 2007, http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2007/Romergrowth. html#.
    6.Roberts, “An Interview with Paul Romer.”
    7.Roberts, “An Interview with Paul Romer.”
    8.Ronald Bailey, “Post-Scarcity Prophet,” Reason, December 1, 2001, http://reason.com/archives/2001/12/01/post-scarcityprophet/print.
    9.Bailey, “Post-Scarcity Prophet.”
    10.Bailey, “Post-Scarcity Prophet.”
    11.Bailey, “Post-Scarcity Prophet.”
    12.Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.
    13.Nicolas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1999).
    14.Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Isaac McPherson,” August 13, 1813, available online at http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/docu ments/a1_8_8s12.html.
    15.Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, 378.
    16.Bailey, “Post-Scarcity Prophet.”
    17.Roberts, “An Interview with Paul Romer.”
    18.Bailey, “Post-Scarcity Prophet.”
    19.Roberts, “An Interview with Paul Romer.”
    20.“25 Most Influential Americans,” TIME, April 21, 1997, available online at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,137548,00.html.
    21.Steven Pearlstein, “An Economist, An Academic Puzzle, and a Lot of Promise,” Washington Post, May 8, 2009, http://articles.wash ingtonpost.com/2009-05-08/opinions/36822397_1_college-stu dents-textbooks-economics.
    22.Kling, Invisible Wealth, 90–91.
    23.Sebastian Mallaby, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty,” Atlantic, July/August 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/2010/07/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-endingpoverty/308134/.
    24.Roberts, “An Interview with Paul Romer.”
    25.Steven Landsberg, personal communication at FreedomFest, Las Vegas, 2010.
    26.George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral (New York: Random House, 2012), 252.
    27.Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 252.

    11 思想高于物质

    This was written as a final chapter, but it seemed the capstone of the“theory” section. It attempts to lift information theory above the level of mere economics. I am mindful, however, of the great Ludwig von Mises’observation that economics “did more to transform human thinking than any other scientific theory before or since.” He explained: “With good men and strong governments everything was considered feasible … [but with the advent of economic science] now it was learned that in the social realm too there is something operative which power and force are unable to alter and to which they must adjust themselves if they hope to achieve success, in precisely the same way as they must take into account the laws of nature,” as found in Israel M. Kirzner, Ludwig von Mises (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2001). I would add the laws of information. All these are paths by which knowledge imposes its laws on the wills and powers of rulers.

    1.James Watson and Andrew Berry, DNA: The Secret of Life (New York: Random House, 2009). Introduction: “Our discovery put an end to a debate as old as the human species: Does life have some magical mystical essence, or is it, like any chemical reaction carried out in a science class, the product of normal physical and chemical processes? … The double helix answered that question with a definitive No…. The double helix is an elegant structure but its message is downright prosaic: life is simply a matter of chemistry.”This is the favorite enabling false dichotomy of materialism, ignoring the possibility that life is a product of information and governed not chiefly by chemistry but by information theory.
    2.Matt Ridley, Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 107. “Crick was trying to kill a belief that had so far refused to die: the belief that the relationship between DNA and proteins was reciprocal, that DNA determined protein sequences but proteins also determined DNA sequences, and that ‘genes’ were therefore a combination of both. This was true in a biochemical sense, but it was entirely false in the sense of information. The information required to assemble a protein sequence lay in a DNA sequence; the information required to assemble a DNA sequence also lay in a DNA sequence…. Despite many attempts to topple it, the central dogma remains true: base sequences in DNA determine amino acid sequences in protein, but not vice versa.”
    3.Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 152–57.
    4.Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, second edition (Cambridge: MIT Press,1965), 132: “The mechanical brain does not secrete thought‘as the liver does bile,’ as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.”
    5.Albert Einstein, “Maxwell’s Influence on the Development of the Conception of Physical Reality,” in James Clark Maxwell, A Commemoration Volume (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1931).
    6.Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 324–325.
    7.Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

    第二部分 危机

    12 金钱丑闻

    This chapter broaches the controversial view—to which I have only lately arrived through my contemplation of information theory—that financial crises are intrinsic to capitalism and key to its success. It is crucial to remedy them without vitiating capitalism.

    1.Gary B. Gorton, Misunderstanding Financial Crises (New York:Oxford University Press, 2012).
    2.Charles Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, sixth revised edition (New York: Palgrave McMillian, 2011), with a foreword by Robert Solow. See also Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, “The aftermath of Financial Crisis” (Working Paper no. 14656, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009).
    3.George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty, A New Edition for the Twenty first Century (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2012), 150.
    4.Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, Invisible Wealth (New York: Encounter Books, 2011), 225. Superb short analysis of financial crisis.
    5.Ronald I. McKinnon, Money and Capital in Economic Develop ment (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1973).
    6.Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames, How Capitalism Will Save Us(New York: Crown Business, 2009), 242. This book is a lucid and compelling exposition of economic truth. See also, Lewis Lehrman, The True Gold Standard (New York: The Lehrman Institute, 2011),which makes the case that the U.S. economy is weakened by the unmoored dollar standard.

    13 盲目追求效率的危害性

    This chapter revives my theme from The Spirit of Enterprise that capitalism cannot be defended without grasping and vindicating the role of capitalists. Vital to capitalist profits are falsifiability: the possibility of bankruptcy. The raptorial revels of bankers with government moneys and guarantees are indefensible by any valid theory of capitalism.

    1.Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante, Panic: The Betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington (Minneapolis, MN: Richard Vigilante Books, 2010).
    2.Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, revised edition (New York: HarperBusiness, 2006).
    3.Andrew Redleaf and Richard Vigilante, The WhiteBox Investment Advisor (December 2006).
    4.Richard Posner, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2010); see also A Failure of Capitalism(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 84: “big banks increasingly became originators and sellers of debt securities rather than conventional owners of debt until maturity, [and] diversification and value-at-risk models replaced relationship-specific information, as means of controlling risk.”
    5.Posner, “The Spectre of the Great Depression” in A Failure of Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
    6.Posner, “The Spectre of the Great Depression.”
    7.Michael Lewis, The Big Short:Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
    8.Jay Richards, Infiltration (Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2013).

    14 监管的疏漏

    Jameson Campaign wrote me that any useful book on today’s crisis of capitalism must contain a chapter with a theory of regulation. Here it is.

    1.Frank Partnoy and Jesse Eisinger, “What’s Inside America’s Banks?,”Atlantic (January–February, 2013): 60–71.
    2.Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007): 113.
    3.John Allison, The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012): “The media and other statists have created a myth that the financial crisis was caused by banking deregulation and greed on Wall Street. However, banks were not deregulated. In fact, three major new regulations were passed during the Bush Administration: The Privacy Act, The Patriot Act, and Sarbanes-Oxley. Banks were misregulated, not deregulated.”
    4.Vern McKinley, Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts (Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 2011).
    5.Allison, “The Fed’s Fatal Conceit,” Cato Journal 32 no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2012): 265–278.
    6.Allison, “The Fed’s Fatal Conceit.”
    7.Allison, “The Fed’s Fatal Conceit.”
    8.Charles Gave, “GDP As a Concept: Misleading if not Outright Criminal,”GaveKal Research (December 7, 2012).
    9.McKinley, Financing Failure: 259. Vincent Reinhardt was former director of Monetary Affairs at the Fed.
    10.McKinley, Financing Failure: 263.
    11.McKinley, Financing Failure.
    12.Neal Freeman, personal communication.
    13.Alexander Tabarrok, “The Way Forward” in Launching the Innovation Renaissance: a New Path to Bring Smart Ideas to Market Fast, Kindle edition (New York, TED Conferences, 2011). “In the late 20th century we unwisely expanded our patent system. We thought that more monopoly would bring more innovation; it didn’t. We need to prune our patent system in order to make room for more growth. We need to make more use of patent buyouts, prizes, advance market commitments and other innovations in innovation policy.”
    14.Alan Reynolds, Income and Wealth (Greenwood, 2006).
    15.Ronald Baker, Economy of Mind (New York: Anacom, 2006).
    16.Kevin D. Williamson, “The Wonders of Frack,” National Review, February 20, 2012, 26–31.
    17.Williamson, “The Wonders of Frack.”
    18.Rich Trzupek, Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA is Ruining American Industry (New York: Encounter Books, 2011).
    19.Dr. Jane Orient, “EPA v. Human Health,” Civil Defense Perspectives 29, no. 1 (November 2012):“The EPA is claiming authority to regulate virtually anything it chooses based on the linear nothreshold theory … [which contends] there is no safe concentration of particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5), as is found in dust storms or diesel exhaust. So far, the EPA has not demanded the use of an N-95 mask when using a vacuum cleaner or duster…. This is a striking inconsistency since indoor PM2.5 levels are much higher than outdoors … and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told Bill Maher that in many areas of the country, ‘the best advice is don’t go outside. Don’t breathe the air. It might kill you."
    20.Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835 and 1840; reprint, New York: Penguin, 2006): xxxvii.

    15 加州的倒退

    Here is another chapter on regulation and its effects on the economy. Reading an issue of Forbes in 2012 listing “the 100 most important venture capitalists” and their holdings, I noticed that nearly every one gained the bulk of his returns from the Facebook IPO and kindred social networking ventures such as LinkedIn, Groupon, and Zynga. In my view, these companies introduced no formidable new technologies and did not even need venture capital and its special expertise. More valuable than the entire Silicon Valley venture capitalist entente, who were battling for government mandates and subsidies, were the venture capitalists of Washington state, led by Madrona and my friends Tom Alberg and Matt McIlwain. They successfully fought to defeat a proposed state income tax, perversely supported by Bill Gates and his father. Madrona also is financing better, more promising companies, such as Isilon and Impinj.

    Ironically the only winner in Kleiner Perkins’s so-called “cleantech”(“green”) portfolio is Bryan Mistele’s Inrix, which is a Seattle-based “big data” company addressing traffic congestion not through physical changes (fast trains and costly sensors implanted in highways) but through information tools. Inrix’s exhaustive real-time data collected from cars, trucks, and GPS-equipped smartphones shows no impact on traffic from mass transit deployments. See Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). The fact is that the entire onrush of technological progress, especially new cleaner fossil fuels from fracking, advances so-called green goals.

    1.“Wealthy Feel Pinch of Trio of Tax Hikes,” San Diego Union-Tribune, January 6, 2013.
    2.Robert Hefner III, The Grand Energy Transition: The Rise of Energy Gases, Sustainable Life and Growth, and the Next Great Economic Expansion (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2011).
    3.Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded:Why We Need a Green Energy Revolution—and How It Can Renew America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). Max Schulz offers a chilling account of what California’s green policies are accomplishing in“California’s Potemkin Environmentalism,” City Journal, Spring 2008. On the cost of AB32’s CO2 targets: “Consider that California could take every one of its 14 million passenger cars off the road, and still be less than halfway toward its goal…. Shutting down 100 state-of-the-art natural-gas-fired power plants still wouldn’t get us there. Closing the entire cement industry … wouldn’t finish the job.”
    4.Eugene Fitzgerald, Inside Real Innovation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).
    5.William Tucker, “The Energy Crisis is Over! How We Beat OPEC,”Harper’s, November 1981.
    6.Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist (New York: HarperCollins, 2010): 241.
    7.Peter Huber, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (New York: Basic Books, 1999). This was the first critique of environmentalism to demonstrate that the “green”movement is the world’s chief threat to the environment because it squanders precious land to obviate use of abundant subterranean resources extractable with little or no permanent damage to the environment.
    8.Ridley, The Rational Optimist, 243. In early 2013, Ridley achieved a breakthrough by calculating that the rate of plants’ absorption of CO2 exceeded the rate of incremental heat capture by atmospheric CO2 . Thus consumption of fossil fuels has the net effect of making the planet greener. Particularly benefited is the Amazon rain forest, which has shown anomalous growth in recent years in proportion to the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere. Read more online at http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/03/matt-ridley-burningfossil-fuels-is-greening-the-planet/.

    16 正确经营银行

    This chapter was prompted by my discovery that my neighbor Robert Wilmers had steered his bank, M&T, through the financial crisis with nary a down quarter, in the face of massive subsidies for his failing rivals. Then I found that John Allison had achieved a similar success. What was their secret? They favored knowledge over power.

    1.William M. Isaac and Phillip C. Meyer with foreword by Paul Volcker, Senseless Panic: How Washington Failed America (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2012): 104.
    2.Redleaf and Vigilante, Panic: The Betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington (Minneapolis, MN: Richard Vigilante Books, 2010): 179.
    3.Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Spitznagel, in a blog post at CNN Public Square from October 2012, estimate that $2.2 trillion was paid to bankers, chiefly in bonuses, in the U.S. alone between June 2000 and June 2007 and projected the total to rise to close to$5 trillion over the course of the decade. “Bankers used leverage to increase profitability and exploited the backstop of public guarantees. The profits largely flow to the employees [i.e. the bankers], while the losses are defrayed by the taxpayers and shareholders and even retirees (through artificially low interest rates). The Fed also provided $1.2 trillion in loans to banks (mostly secret at the time).”
    4.Don Luskin and Andrew Greta, I Am John Galt (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011).
    5.John Allison, The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012).
    6.Lewis E. Lehrman, “Money for Nothing,” review of The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure by John Allison, Weekly Standard, January 14, 2013, http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/moneynothing_693747.html.
    7.Allison, The Fed’s Fatal Conceit (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, Spring/Summer 2012): 265.

    17 百分之一

    I have been writing this chapter for nearly thirty years. The message is perennial. The Kessler quote comes from the Wall Street Journal.
    1.Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).
    2.Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (New York: Tarcher, 2005).
    3.Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2011). The Spirit Level was effectively refuted before publication by Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, who provides similar graphs registering the happiness of free people compared to unfree:“Free People Are Happy People,” City Journal, Spring 2008, http:// www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_happy_people.html.
    4.Kevin D. Williamson, “Everybody Gets Rich,” The New Criterion 30, no. 5 (January 2012): 4–12. Williamson, our new Tom Wolfe, asks the crucial question: “From energy used, to calories consumed, to travel enjoyed, to the size of our houses, to the variety of our diets and distractions, we are rich, rich, rich, besotted with wealth, drowning in affluence, up to our fat little earlobes in the good life. So why do we feel so poor?”
    5.Eric Schmidt wrote me in an email 1993 that “when the network runs as fast as the computer backplane, the computer will hollow out and distribute itself around the network, and profits in the industry will migrate toward the providers of ‘sort’ and ‘search’capabilities.” I called the insight “Schmidt’s Law.” Sure enough, less than a decade later, network speeds passed the barrier and he became CEO of Google. Chris Cooper of Seldon Technologies in Windsor, Vermont, invented a tunable “nanomesh” based on carbon nanotubes that can produce fresh potable water from a septic pool without power or chemicals (I am on the board of his company). Jules Urbach of Otoy corporation in Los Angeles invented and learned to program petaflop computers based on clustered graphics processors that could compensate for speed of light latency and render real-time 3-D graphics from the “Cloud” for Autodesk and Hollywood.

    第三部分 未来

    18 投资的“黑天鹅”

    Taleb rather irritated me with Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, which seemed to me to flout a key tenet of information theory: it is impossible in principle to distinguish a series of random data points from a series of creative surprises. That Wall Street and entrepreneurial returns seem random is irrelevant to the question of whether they were earned by creative contributions or through mere luck. Antifragile, however, seems to me to be an altogether different and far more interesting story.

    1.Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness (New York: Random House, 2001).
    2.Taleb, The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007).
    3.Ken Fisher, The Only Three Questions That Count, revised edition(2007; reprint, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2012). He also wrote, with Lara Hoffmans, Debunkery: Learn It, Do It, and Profit From It—Seeing through Wall Street’s Money Killing Myths (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), which followed Three Questions in debunking the impact of Black Swans, national debt, the consumer as king, and even high capital gains taxes (which is tax selling, not holding shares).
    4.Gregory Chaitin, Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical(New York: Vintage, 2013).
    5.Shannon, “Omni interview”in Collected Papers.
    6.Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012).
    7.Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, revised edition(1997; reprint, New York: HarperBusiness, 2012).

    19 局外人交易丑闻

    This is another old favorite theme that I have been touting for decades. Some day the world will come around to seeing that the idea of regulating inside trading is futile and destructive because it distorts the information and suppresses the knowledge that makes markets work. Fraud is another matter that can be managed by existing laws against it.

    1.Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, revised and updated edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
    2.John Mauldin, edit., Just One Thing (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2006).
    3.Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson, The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
    4.Thomas Cover and Joy Thomas, Elements of Information Theory, second edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2006).
    5.Cover, Elements of Information Theory.
    6.Robert Laughlin, A Different Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
    7.Fisher, Debunkery, 182 and passim.
    8.Richard Vigilante, personal communication based on Panic: The Betrayal of Capitalism by Wall Street and Washington (Minneapolis, MN: Richard Vigilante Books, 2010).

    20 自由市场对经济的重大影响

    One of my inspirations for this chapter was reading John Train’s The Unruly Monkey: Reflections on Life, Love, and Money (Maria Teresa Train MTT Scala, 2012), a scintillating collection of sage observations from a lifetime as a writer and investor: “Train’s First Law: Price Controls Increase Prices … by inhibiting production…. Train’s Second Law: The more the government does something the less there is of it. The government costs about twice as much and takes three times as long as the private sector to do any given thing…. At the limit, under Communism, the government does almost everything, and people receive little indeed. ‘We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,’ said Soviet workers. Train’s further Law: Make-work Programs Reduce Employment [as] their cost consumes the productive investment that creates real jobs.”

    Because of Train’s Laws, retrenchment of government spending and regulation releases explosive energies of growth.

    1.Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive (New York: Harper & Row, 1966): 104. “Executives … are forever bailing out the past…. Yesterday’s actions and decisions … inevitably become today’s problems, crises, and stupidities.”
    2.David Stockman, “Paul Ryan’s Fairy Tale Budget Plan,” New York Times, August 13, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/ opinion/paul-ryans-fairy-tale-budget-plan.html?_r=0.
    3.Stockman, “David Stockman Rips Romney on Jobs and the Bain Drain,”Newsweek, October 22, 2012, 25–31. Found in The Great Deformation: How Crony Capitalism Corrupts Free Markets and Democracy (New York: Perseus Books, 2013).
    4.Alan Reynolds, “David Stockman vs. Bain Capital,” National Review Online, October 22, 2012, http://www.nationalreview.com/ articles/331128/david-stockman-vs-bain-capital-alan-reynolds.
    5.Nick Gillespie, “The Triumph of Politics over Economics: David Stockman on TARP, the Fed, Ronald Reagan, and Ron Paul,”Reason, April 1, 2011, 22ff.
    6.Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
    7.Drucker, The Effective Executive, 105. “Government programs and activities age just as fast as the programs and activities of other institutions. Yet … they are welded into the structure through civil service rules and immediately become vested interests…. At a guess, at least half the bureaus and agencies … either regulate what no longer needs regulation … or they are directed, as is most of the farm program, toward investment in politicians’ egos and toward efforts that should have had results but never achieved them. There is a serious need for a new principle of effective administration under which every act, every agency, and every program of government is conceived as temporary and as expiring automatically after a fixed number of years—maybe ten—unless specifically prolonged by new legislation following careful outside study….”
    8.Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
    9.Thomas Macaulay, The History of England (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1871). This is a two-volume edition inscribed by my great-grandfather in 1878. There are newer, more accessible versions available in digital form.
    10.Macaulay, “Chapter 19” in The History of England, 398–402. This passage contains some of the greatest writing in the history of economic literature.
    11.Arnold Kling, Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). A shorter version is Jason Taylor and Richard Vedder,“Stimulus by Spending Cuts, 1946,” Cato Institute Report (August 2010): “Civilian employment grew, on net, by over 4 million between 1945 and 1947 when so many pundits were predicting economic Armageddon. Household consumption, business investment, and net exports all boomed as government spending receded. The postwar era provides a classic illustration of how government spending ‘crowds out’ private sector spending and how the economy can thrive when the government’s shadow is dramatically reduced.”
    12.Mark Skousen, “Measures of Economic Activity, Income and Wealth” in Economic Logic, revised third edition (Washington, D.C.: Capital Press, 2010), 337–354.
    13.Robert Higgs, “Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s,” The Independent Institute, March 1, 1992, http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=138. Also, Higgs, “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed after the War,” Independent Review, no. 4 (1997): 561–590.
    14.Maurice McTigue, “Rolling Back Government, Lessons from New Zealand,”Imprimis, Hillsdale College (February 11, 2004).
    15.George Gilder, The Israel Test (New York: Encounter Books, 2012), tells the story.
    16.Canada’s experience also reaps the benefit of a strong Canadian dollar, while U.S. weakness feeds on U.S. dollar decline. See David Malpass, “Sound Money, Sound Policy” in The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs, edit. Brendan Miniter (New York: Crown Business, 2012), 94–107. “Brazil’s economic boom dates from 2003, when President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva decided to stop the real’s collapse…. Russia’s frenzied economic collapse ended almost overnight when … Putin … stabilized the ruble. [Similarly in China, economic growth surge] started in mid-1993 after then-vice premier Zhu Rpongji … moved his office to the central bank to stop the communist-era black market weakness in the renmimbi…. The current dollar policy creates a circular growth crisis in which dollar weakness discourages investment in dollars…. The investment killer is that assets in the United States keep losing value in foreign-currency terms, so potential U.S. investments start with a big rate-of-return disadvantage relative to other countries with better currency policies.”
    17.Fraser Nelson, “Sweden’s Secret Recipe,” Spectator, April 14, 2012.

    21 税制改革

    My original title for this chapter was “Is Economic Growth Caused by Taxes? Or by Global Warming?” It was provoked by the timely Congressional Research Service “study” released in mid-October 2012. Sorry, I know, it’s now “climate change.”

    1.Thomas Hungerford, “Taxes and the Economy: An Economoc Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945,” Congressional Research Service, December 12, 2012, http://democrats.waysandmeans. house.gov/sites/democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/files/ Updated%20CRS%20Report%2012%3A13%3A12.pdf.
    2.In the second decade of the new millennium, Laffer was still at it, producing a unique and definitive analysis of the deadweight loss inflicted on the economy through the excessive complexity of the tax system. Arthur Laffer, Wayne Winegarden, and John Childs, The Economic Burden Caused by Tax Code Complexity (Laffer Associates: Knoxville, TN, April 2011).
    3.Keith Marsden, “Taxes and Growth,” Finance and Development 20 (September 1983), 40–43. Appraising the economic performance of twenty countries grouped in pairs of similar per capita incomes in 1970, the study found that the countries with lower effective tax burdens grew six times faster. Thus they could raise their government spending and revenues three times as fast as the countries with higher tax burdens.
    4.Jude Wanniski and David Goldman, with Jay Turner and Evan Kalimtgis, “A Flat Tax Would Produce Explosive U.S. Economic Growth” in Supply Side Analytics (Morristown, NJ: Polyconomics, 1992). Refining the Marsden analysis and extending it through the 1980s, the Polyconomics study found that marginal tax rates explained between 80–90 percent of differential growth rates among the world’s twenty-four leading economies. Fastest was Hong Kong, with a top rate of 15.9 percent; slowest was Denmark with an 80.2 percent top rate. Capital gains taxes were shown to display a particularly acute inverse ratio between rates and revenues.
    5.Chris Edwards and Daniel Mitchell, The Global Flat Tax Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2008).
    6.The flat tax movement was given its major push by Steve Forbes’presidential campaign. See Steve Forbes, The Flat Tax Revolution: Using a Postcard to Abolish the IRS (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2005).
    7.Kevin Hassett and James K. Glassman, “Spending, Taxes, and Certainty: A Road Map to 4%,” in The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs, Edited by Brendan Miniter(New York: Crown Business, 2012), 80–93.

    22 关于技术演变的错误思想

    This chapter embodies the origin and provocation for Knowledge and Power. Having innocently reveled in his previous work, Out of Control, I received Kevin Kelly’s cornucopian new book, What Technology Wants, with high expectations, and mounted its rhetorical roller coaster with high enthusiasm. However, my sense of anticipation gradually gave way to a sinking feeling that there was something wrong. The book turned out to be part of a movement among technology writers to reduce technology and its creators to epiphenomena of a physical and biological “technium.” President Obama was just boarding this bandwagon when he threw down his gauntlet to entrepreneurs: “You did not build that.” In Kelly’s pages individual inventors and entrepreneurs virtually disappear into an evolutionary “river of mutations” that “can be traced back to the life of an atom … created in the fires of the big bang.” The book ended with a kind of empty eloquence: “The expanding technium—its cosmic trajectories, its ceaseless reinvention, its inevitabilities, its self-generation—is an open-ended beginning, an infinite game calling us to play.” His prose was inspiring, but his blur of information theory into a botch of entropy and “exotropy,” order and self-organization, gave me the push to write this book.

    1.Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010).
    2.Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From (New York: Penguin, 2010).
    3.George B. Dyson, Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997).
    4.George B. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012). A dense intractable book that rewards a close reading. It tells the story of the evolution of computing from individual machines laboriously wrought from tubes and relays at the Institute for Advanced Studies to virtual machines in the “cloud” with many trillionfold gains in efficiency and accessibility in prospect.
    5.Johnson, “Conclusion: The Fourth Quadrant” in Where Good Ideas Come From, unindexed Kindle edition.
    6.James Besson, Jennifer Ford, and Michael J. Meurer, “The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls,” (Working Paper 11–45, Boston University School of Law, September 19, 2011). This is a good first take of the argument, though it does not distinguish between the costs of the issuance of trivial patents and the damage from litigation.
    7.Kelly, “Seeking Conviviality” in What Technology Wants, 239–265.
    8.Kelly, What Technology Wants, 16–17.
    9.John Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: The New York Review of Books, 1990), 109 and passim.
    10.Kelly, “Part 4: Directions” in What Technology , 325–333 and passim. But “unconscious free will” is as meaningless as an unconscious mind or a bottom-up god.
    11.Kelly, What Technology Wants, 57.
    12.Dyson, Darwin among the Machines, 10. “For those who fear mechanistic explanations of the human mind, our ignorance of how local interactions produce emergent behavior offers a reassuring fog in which to hide the soul.”
    13.Kelly, What Technology Wants, 333.
    14.Albert O. Hirschman, “The Principle of the Hiding Hand,” Public Interest, no. 6 (Winter 1967).
    15.Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, revised edition (New York: HarperBusiness, 2006).
    16.Max Delbruck, Mind From Matter? An Essay on Evolutionary Epistemology (Blackwell, 2005), 269.
    17.Robert Laughlin, A Different Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 213 and passim.

    23 以色列：信息之国

    The Israel Test (2009; reprint, Encounter Books, 2012) elaborates on these themes.
    Tom Bethell, in his scintillating biography of Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2012), 277–278, publishes Hoffer’s lapidary words on Israel: “[A]t this moment[1968 and even more today], Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us…. I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us.”
    1.Kevin Fitchard, “It’s Alive! AT&T’s Networks Become Self-Aware,”GigaOM, February 12, 2012, http://gigaom.com/2012/02/24/itsalive-atts-networks-become-self-aware/.
    2.Arthur Herman, “How Israel’s Defense Industry Can Help Save America,”Commentary, December 2011, 14–19.

    24 知识的地平线

    In recent years, I have found myself debating the superb venturer and libertarian thinker Peter Thiel (See for example “Peter Thiel and George Gilder debate on ‘The Prospects for Technology and Economic Growth,’”Youtube video, 1:16:27, posted by Intercollegiate Studies Institute “EducatingForLiberty,” March 14, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc.) I have learned much from his sharp insights, which have forced me toward hard analysis of the foibles of contemporary science and technology and the promise of the new information tools.
    1.Tyler Cowen, “The Low-Hanging Fruit We Ate” in The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, Kindle edition (New York: Dutton, 2011). The quotes are in Chapter One; Kindle edition lacks page numbers and has yet to be indexed. Peter Thiel’s more erudite expressions of innovation angst run from “The Optimistic Thought Experiment,” Policy Review, no. 147 (January 29, 2008) to “The End of the Future,” National Review, October 3, 2011.
    2.Andy Kessler has written extensively and uproariously on technology and finance through seven savvy and insightful books and indispensable articles in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. The books include Wall Street Meat (2001), Running Money (2003), The End of Medicine (2007), How We Got Here (2008), Eat People (2011), How to Kick Ass on Wall Street (2013), and the riotously savvy and only slightly fictional futurism of Furby (2012). Since some of his work is self-published (they get picked up later by HarperCollins et al), find them all, and much more, on his website at www.andykessler.com. This quote comes from “The Rise of Consumption Equality,” Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2012.
    3.Cowen, The Great Stagnation.
    4.Thiel, ibid.
    5.Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950 (New York: Harper, 2003). A great book.
    6.Ludwig von Mises, “A Draft of Guidelines for the reconstruction of Austria” in Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises: The Political Economy of International Reform and Reconstruction, edited and with an introduction by Richard M. Ebeling (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000). Cowen, The Great Stagnation. Also addressing this issue is Terence Kealey, Sex, Science & Profits (London: William Heinemann, 2008). A path-breaking book with a botched title. Sex turns out to have nothing to do with it, beyond the obvious, but profits turn out to be indispensable to scientific advance.
    7.George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2012), 6.
    8.Neal Stephenson, “Innovation Starvation” in Some Remarks (New York: William Morrow, 2012), 313. Stephenson is my favorite contemporary novelist and he has written more profoundly about science and technology than any other writer of literature.
    9.Thiel, “The End of the Future.”
    10.Richard Feynman, “There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom” (lecture given to the American Physical Society, December 1959), Engineering and Science (Caltech, 1960).
    11.For just a few accessible samples of the infinite parallel universes genre, which keeps on giving: Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Vintage, 1994); Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the Tenth Dimension (New York: Anchor, 1995); David Deutch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes—and Its Implications (New York: Penguin Books, 1998); Michio Kaku, The Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (New York Doubleday, 2011). (In case you are interested, Michio thinks it involves multiple parallel universes galore.)
    12.Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe (New York: Knopf, 2005).
    13.Gregory Chaitin, Conversations with a Mathematician: Math, Art, Science, and the Limits of Reason, (New York: Springer, 2002). The relative lack of information content in these disciplines is discussed by Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and The Origin of Life, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2, 169.
    14.Christopher A. Fuchs, Coming of Age with Quantum Information(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 133.
    15.Fuchs, Coming of Age with Quantum Information, 133
    16.Fuchs, Coming of Age with Quantum Information, 531. For a history of quantum information, see Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement (New York: Knopf, 2008).

    Note on cut text: Carver Mead, Collective Electrodynamics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). An elegant and powerful vision of a different path into the mysteries of matter, offered by the Gordon A. Moore Professor of Science and Engineering at Caltech after fifty years exploring matter from the inside in tunnel diodes, microchips, and biomorphic electronic circuitry. His story is told in my Microcosm (Simon and Schuster, 1999) and The Silicon Eye (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

    25 给予的力量

    This is an old favorite theme from Wealth and Poverty, revised and updated to focus on the entropy of giving—how gifts are most gratifying when they reveal surprising and unexpected sympathies.

    Thus gifts resemble profits, which are an index of altruism and surprise.

    1.Harvey Liebenstein, Beyond Economic Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).
    2.Burton H. Klein, Dynamic Economics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).