Microcosm
By George Gilder
Touchstone Books, 1991 - 432 pages

This book, along with Microchip Fabrication: A Practical Guide to Semiconductor Processing, is what enabled me to understand the forces driving the semiconductor / computer industry and gave me a better foundation of knowledge about semiconductors. I was introduced to both books working as a junior semiconductor analyst coming out of grad school. Gilder's book Telecosm is great for those looking to better understand how telecommunications will affect the world's economies moving forward.

First off, don't read this book hoping to get investment advice. That isn't Gilder's expertise. The guy is an economist folks. His rise to fame may have been during the telecom boom but he became well known during the Reagan era when he wrote a book on entrepreneurial ventures and how it was the key to creating wealth in this country. Reagan dragged this guy around the country folks because of his insights into the entrepreneurial spirit! Gilder sits on panels at conferences with such luminaries as Peter Drucker, Lester Thurow, Andy Grove and other intellectuals.

When you read this you will find out the following

1) There is a lot of technical jargon in it. Most should be able to learn what he is saying but it isn't like reading a trashy, romance novel. You have to think. 

2) He is trying to convey the fundamental change that semiconductors will have on the economy and why. Having worked in telecom and being a closet economist with an MBA I can say this guy knows his stuff folks. 

3) Semiconductors are the core technology in any electronic equipment and it is actually the most proprietary element in a design so it is worth learning more about them since they create a lot of wealth for investors.

The one thing that Gilder emphasizes in this book is the power of individual initiative. We are in the knowledge economy folks and microprocessors and PCs are enabling us to be more productive, begin new careers and experience a quality of life that very few predicted 40 years ago. The microchip and its implications are amazing. The power of the individual in the knowledge economy are causing governments to feel more helpless as they attempt to develop industrial policies and taxation.

Other books to read for futurists and aspiring managers/leaders are Peter Drucker's The Essential Drucker, Built on Trust (social organization) and The Worldly Philsophers by Robert Heilbroner (greatest economist highlights).

Now, eight years past its initial release, many of his predictions have come true. Some may find fault with his politics, but this book and its conclusions are a convincing argument of his reasoning. If you ever read a book about the history of high-tech, this should be the one.

George Gilder is Chairman of Gilder Publishing LLC, located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He is also a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute where he directs Discovery's program on high technology and public policy.

Born in 1939 in New York City, Mr. Gilder attended Exeter Academy and Harvard University. At Harvard, he studied under Henry Kissinger and helped found Advance, a journal of political thought, which he edited and helped to re-establish in Washington, DC after his graduation in 1962. During this period he co-authored (with Bruce Chapman) a political history, The Party That Lost Its Head. He later returned to Harvard as a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics and editor of the Ripon Forum. In the 1960s Mr. Gilder also served as a speech writer for several prominent official and candidates, including Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and Richard Nixon.

In the 1970s, as an independent researcher and writer, Mr. Gilder began an excursion into the causes of poverty, which resulted in his books Men and Marriage (original version 1972) and Visible Man (1978); and hence, of wealth, which led to his best-selling Wealth and Poverty (1981). Mr. Gilder pioneered the formulation 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 A.B. Laffer's economic reports and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. In the 1980s he also consulted leaders of America's high technology businesses. According to a recent study of speeches, Mr. Gilder was President Reagan's most frequently quoted living author. In 1986, President Reagan gave George Gilder the White House Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. In 1996 he was made a Fellow of the International Engineering Consortium.

The investigation into wealth creation led Mr. Gilder into deeper examination of the lives of present-day entrepreneurs, culminating in many articles and a book, The Spirit of Enterprise (1986). The book was revised and republished in 1992. That many of the most interesting current entrepreneurs were to be found in high technology fields also led Mr. Gilder, over several years, to examine this subject in depth. In his best-selling work, Microcosm (1989), he explored the quantum roots of the new electronic technologies. A subsequent book, Life After Television, published first as a Whittle Communications monograph and then published by W.W. Norton (1992), and updated and republished in 1994, is a prophecy of the future of computers and telecommunications. This book is a prelude to his latest book on the future of telecommunications, Telecosm (2000).

Mr. Gilder is a contributing editor of Forbes magazine and a frequent writer for The Economist, the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Over the past several years, he has dismissed many of the most touted new technologies—from HDTV and interactive television to 3DO game machines and CD-I multimedia, from TDMA wireless and Nextel cellular compression to pervasive ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks. Embraced instead: All-optical networks, smart radios, Qualcomm digital wireless, Stratacom frame relay, mediaprocessors, Netscape browsers, and Sun's Java programming language.

George Gilder lives in Tyringham, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Mountains, where he is an active churchman, sometime runner, and with his wife Nini, parent of four children.