After completing Visible Man in the late 1970s Gilder began writing "The Pursuit of Poverty." In early 1981 Basic Books published the result as Wealth and Poverty. It was an analysis of the roots of economic growth. Reviewing it within a month of the inauguration of the Reagan Administration the New York Times reviewer called it "A Guide to Capitalism". It offered, he wrote, "a creed for capitalism worthy of intelligent people." The book was a New York Times bestseller and eventually sold over a million copies.
In Wealth and Poverty Gilder extended the sociological and anthropological analysis of his early books in which he had advocated for the socialization of men into service to women through work and marriage. He wove these sociological themes into the economic policy prescriptions of supply-side economics. The breakup of the nuclear family and the policies of demand-side economics led to poverty. Family and supply-side policies led to wealth.
In reviewing the problems of the immediate past—the inflation, recession, and urban problems of the 1970s—and proposing his supply-side solutions, Gilder argued not just the practical but the moral superiority of supply-side capitalism over the alternatives. "Capitalism begins with giving," he asserted, while New Deal liberalism created moral hazard. It was work, family, and faith that created wealth out of poverty. "It is this supply-side moral vision that underlies all the economic arguments of Wealth and Poverty," he wrote.
In 1994 Gilder asserted that America has no poverty problem, that the real problem is the "moral decay" of the "so-called poor", and that their real need is "Christian teaching from the churches." He calls the poor in America "the so-called poor" who have been "ruined by the overflow of American prosperity", and asserts they have more purchasing power than the middle class in Japan in the 1990s.
| “ | What the poor really need is morals...The official poor in America have higher incomes and purchasing power than the middle class in the United States in 1955 or the middle class in Japan today. The so-called “poor” are ruined by the overflow of American prosperity. What they need is Christian teaching from the churches...The poverty line in a rich country like the United States is a meaningless standard. We have no poverty problem strictly speaking, we have a desperate problem of family breakdown and moral decay. | ” |
Read more about this topic: George Gilder
Famous quotes containing the words wealth and, wealth and/or poverty:
“To get wealth and security by guile
Is like one who pours water into a pot of unbaked clay.”
—Tiruvalluvar (c. 5th century A.D.)
“I should say tact was worth much more than wealth as a road to leadership.... I mean that subtle apprehension which teaches a person how to do and say the right thing at the right time. It coexists with very ordinary qualities, and yet many great geniuses are without it. Of all human qualities I consider it the most convenient—not always the highest; yet I would rather have it than many more shining qualities.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)