Then he pauses, searches for his next word, gives up on that sentence, and starts another. This one, too, stalls. Finally, he raises his finger at the waiter, signaling for more tea. The Millennium Conference is a block away in Yerba Buena Gardens's Center for the Arts Theater. The men in the crowd are wearing gray suits and polished shoes, which suggests they're not techies - they're just ordinary businesspeople who walked here from Montgomery Street.
Gilder is just the warm-up act.
The audience probably doesn't realize it, but the event organizers have picked speakers from the full political spectrum. Thurow is the most liberal, if you can ever call an economist liberal. A liberal economist is one who thinks the government had better do something about American illiteracy. George Gilder, by contrast, is way off to the right of the other speakers. If you were to plot them all on a chart, when you came to plotting Gilder's coordinates you'd have to get another piece of paper.