how does george gilder think about money

George Gilder approaches money with a unique perspective, emphasizing that wealth is fundamentally knowledge and growth is learning. His "Information Theory of Money" posits that money should serve as a reliable measure of learning and knowledge creation within the economy, rather than merely as a tool for government control and speculation. Here are some key points about how Gilder thinks about money:

1. **Wealth is Knowledge**:
- Gilder believes that wealth is not just material goods but is fundamentally knowledge, including inventions and recipes that differentiate us from our ancestors. He argues that the true source of wealth is the learning curves resulting from millions of experiments by economic actors in free market economies[1].

2. **Money as Information Carrier**:
- Money acts as a "vessel of information" that conveys the success or failure of economic endeavors to investors, workers, and entrepreneurs. In an ideal system, economic indicators should correlate with the creation of wealth, knowledge, and learning[1].

3. **Critique of Fiat Currencies**:
- Gilder criticizes the current fiat currency system, arguing that manipulating the value of money through printing currency or suppressing interest rates does not create wealth. Instead, it distorts the information basis of prices, leading to entrepreneurial misallocations and economic inefficiencies[1][2].

4. **Time and Money**:
- He posits that money is ultimately based on time, serving as a constraint that forces trade-offs and allows for resource allocation and prioritization. Gilder contends that the value of money should be rooted outside of what it measures, making time itself the fundamental basis[3].

5. **Importance of Reliable Metrics**:
- Gilder emphasizes the need for a reliable measuring stick like gold, which has historical roots in the passage of time and the effort of extraction. This contrasts with the labor theory of value, which he argues is flawed because it confuses the source of wealth with the processes of learning and growth[3].

6. **Entrepreneurship and Information**:
- In his view, entrepreneurs are crucial to economic growth because they create new information through experiments and learning. Gilder sees entrepreneurs not merely as agents trying to reach equilibrium but as drivers of change who disturb the equilibrium to create new economic opportunities[2].

Overall, Gilder's perspective on money is deeply intertwined with the concepts of knowledge, learning, and time, emphasizing the need for money to serve as a reliable measure of true economic value rather than a tool for political manipulation.