Photo by team voyas on Unsplash

The Wealth Formula Unveiled: Knowledge, Learning, and the Economy of Tomorrow

Have you ever wondered if there’s a hidden code that could unlock the future of wealth, reshape the economy and transform our idea of money?

In “Life After Capitalism: The Meaning of Wealth, The Future of the Economy, and The Theory of Money” by George Gilder published in 2023, a new information theory emerges, reshaping our understanding of wealth, the economy, and money.

This theory can be distilled into four propositions:

1. Wealth is knowledge.
2. Growth is learning.
3. Information is surprise.
4. Money is time.

These propositions lead to profound insights about the nature of wealth and its relationship to knowledge.

Think about the combination of these concepts:

• Money gains value when it is invested.
• Wealth is knowledge and you can only profit from what you know.
• Information is the unfolding surprise — what you didn’t know.

Here are some noteworthy quotes from the book that shed light on this paradigm shift:

1. “Money is the learning curve of time, volume and money.”
2. “Wealth is knowledge measured by money as time, which is what remains scarce when all else grows abundant.”
3. “Time is the ultimate measuring stick of economic value and abundance…. Time is the only money that politicians and their bankers cannot print or distort, counterfeit or fake.”
4. “Time, whether measured by the speed of light or the span of life — is the reigning economic and physical scarcity that regulates the measurement of value.”
5. “Surprising information, traveling freely, increasing learning and thus increasing productivity. It is knowledge and innovation that comes from surprising information.”
6. “Economic growth comes from learning, from the accumulation of knowledge, through experience and from falsifiable experiments — including profit and loss in the marketplace, the testing ground for enterprise experiments.”
7. “Economics is not about order and equilibrium, but about creativity, measured by disruption, disorder, economic growth and surprise.”
8. “Economic growth is a gauge of learning manifested in learning curves across the economy. Economics is a dance to the music of time.”
9. “…a vast and imperial “information industry” has emerged, from Apple to Amazon to Google and Meta, that dominate the list of the most valuable companies.”
10. “Life after capitalism is an economy limited only by …the limitation of human knowledge, and creativity; or put another way, it is an economics of superabundance as information and knowledge expands.”

Gilder’s new information theory challenges conventional economic wisdom, emphasizing the vital role of knowledge, learning, and the enigmatic connection between money and time. It points towards a future where wealth is not merely measured in currency but in the boundless horizons of human knowledge and innovation.