George Franklin Gilder (/ˈɡɪldər/; born November 29, 1939) is an American investor, author, economist, and co-founder of the Discovery Institute.

His 1981 book, Wealth and Poverty, advanced a case for supply-side economics and capitalism during the early months of the Reagan administration.

[3][4] He spent most of his childhood with his mother, Anne Spring Denny (Alsop), and his stepfather, Gilder Palmer, on a dairy farm in Tyringham, Massachusetts.

[2] Gilder attended Hamilton School in New York City, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard University, graduating in 1962.

[a][5] In the 1960s Gilder served as a speechwriter for several prominent officials and candidates, including Nelson Rockefeller, George W. Romney, and Richard Nixon.

He worked as a spokesman for the liberal Republican Senator Charles Mathias, as anti-war protesters surrounded the capital; some eventually scared Gilder out of his apartment.

With his college roommate, Bruce Chapman, he wrote an attack on the anti-intellectual policies of the 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, The Party That Lost Its Head (1966).

At least the 'right-wing extremists', as I confidently called them, were right on almost every major policy issue from welfare to Vietnam to Keynesian economics and defense — while I, in my Neo-Conservative sophistication, was nearly always wrong.

[7] The book, published as the best-selling Wealth and Poverty in 1981, communicated the ideas of supply-side economics to a wide audience in the United States and the world.

[10] Gilder wrote the books Microcosm, about Carver Mead and the CMOS microchip revolution; Telecosm, about the promise of fiber optics; and The Silicon Eye, about the Foveon X3 sensor, a digital camera imager chip.

[citation needed] Gilder is an investor in private companies and serves as the chairman of the advisory board in Israel-based ASOCS that he discovered during his research for Israel Test.

[19] 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.