Or, rather, already bought via Kindle: The Israel Test. For 20 years, ever since Microcosm (and some would go back earlier, to Wealth & Poverty) Gilder has been a provocative and prescient commenter on the tech scene. For a preview of this new work, see his piece in The American last Monday: "Capitalism, Jewish Achievement, and the Israel Test."
Sample:
In a dangerous world, faced with an array of perils, the Israel test
asks whether the world can suppress envy and recognize its dependence
on the outstanding performance of relatively few men and women. The
world does not subsist on zero-sum legal niceties. It subsists on hard
and possibly reversible accomplishments in technology, pharmacology,
science, engineering, and enterprise. It thrives not on reallocating
land and resources but on releasing human creativity in a way that
exploits land and resources most productively. The survival of humanity
depends on recognizing excellence wherever it appears and nurturing it
until it prevails. It relies on a vanguard of visionary creators on the
frontiers of knowledge and truth. It depends on passing the Israel test.
Israel is the pivot, the axis, the litmus, the trial. Are you for civilization or barbarism, life or death, wealth or envy? Are you an exponent of excellence and accomplishment or of a leveling creed of frenzy and hatred?
Accord, as the legal profs say, from V. D. Hanson, writing from Venice:
Venice . . . was malarial,
without natural harbors or any readily identifiable deep ports or
surrounding cliffs. It is instead a conglomeration of over 100 islands
in the swamps of an Adriatic lagoon. Yet between 1200 and 1600, Venice
was in many ways the preeminent city of the world. People—not oil,
coal, timber, or farmland—matter most.
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