An economy can continue to grow only if its profits are joined with entrepreneurial knowledge. In general, wealth can increase only if the people who create it control it. Divorce the financial profits from the learning process and the economy stagnates.  Like a tree or a garden, an economy grows by photosynthesis.  Without the light of new knowledge and the roots of ownership, it withers.  …

Entrepreneurial knowledge has little to do with certified expertise of advanced degrees or the learning of establishment schools.  The fashionably educated and cultivated spurn the kind of fanatically focused learning commanded by the one percent. Wealth all too often comes from doing what other people consider insufferably boring or unendurably hard.

Most people consider themselves above learning the gritty and relentless details of life that allow the creation of great wealth.  They leave it to the experts.  But in general you join the one percent of the one percent not by leaving it to the experts, but by creating new expertise, not by knowing what the experts know but by learning what they think is beneath them.

From the new edition of Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder.  Originally published in 1980 the new version is updated with 40,000 words and views on the current scene.

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