Millennium; Winners and Losers in the Coming Order [Paperback]

Jacques Attali (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 29, 1992

Jacques Attali, French President Mitterand's most trusted advisor and president of the new European bank of Reconstruction and development, offers a provocative and all-too-convincing view of the future in an increasingly troubled world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this outstanding essay, as terse as it is clear and challenging, French political economist Attali, adviser to Francois Mitterand, contends that "only a radical transformation of American society" can prevent Europe and Japan from supplanting the U.S. in global supremacy. The author, president of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, further charges that the decline of the U.S. is rooted in a "cult of immediate gratification" as opposed to the long-term vision of the Japanese. His "musings," seamlessly translated by Conners and Gardels, envision life in a post-Cold War, pluralistic, technology- and market-dominated society. Economic growth must be environmentally sound, he warns, and balanced by social justice adopted by underdeveloped, overpopulated nations. Finally, he counsels, the U.N. must win truly international authority to settle global problems. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Picture a world filled with select "rich nomads" roaming the world spending money and hordes of "poor nomads" endlessly migrating in search of goods beyond their reach. This is but one of Attali's descriptions of the next world order. This diverse author/thinker has produced a future view more disturbing, controversial, and gloomy than found in other futurist works, such as Taichi Sakaiya's The Knowledge-Value Revolution ( LJ 8/91) and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock ( LJ 7/70). Attali predicts a new economic order (likely to be in Europe or the Pacific Rim), instant communication, a warming, polluted atmosphere, and a bitter division between "winners and losers." His provocative, unsettling vision of a future world will startle and sober readers, and should be of interest to business leader/futurist thinkers and concerned laypeople. Recommended for larger libraries.
- Dale Farris, Groves, Tex.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 105 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press (September 29, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812920880
• ISBN-13: 978-0812920888
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,300,396 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars THE ELITE VERSUS HUMANITY, July 19, 2009

By 

G. Charles Steiner - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Millennium; Winners and Losers in the Coming Order (Paperback)

Jacques Attali has something to say, having been an advisor for ten years to President Mitterand, and has been as well a President of of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a bank he mentions in the text that was created for the specific purpose of shaping the future, and what he says is worth paying attention to, although the reward for the attention paid is Blade-Runner-like and dismaying. He is a member of the elite, and he says that it is the elite that controls the world. You may think your president and congressmen are the decision-makers, but they are not.

What the elite are interested in is making money now and for the far-off future. What country, what people, and what ideas will help toward that end is largely the content of the book, except for some information at the end of the book detailing what kind of future humanity will inhabit. The elite will need a center of power to achieve that goal and while it has been the United States for some time, that position has weakened considerably largely through overwhelming, unprecedented debt. (But wasn't it the elite who perpetrated the creation of debt and excessive spending in the first place?) That center of power may well be Japan or the Pacific region in general or it may be Europe so long as the East and West can work together economically and efficiently. Mr. Attali leaves the proposition open-ended as to where the final power center will be but asserts qualifiedly that there cannot ultimately be two or three power centers; there must be one and one only -- particularly since there is a need to have a single entity that performs global integration of all nation-states for law, health, money, and culture: a new world order.

In the future, there will be no family; we all will be nomads greedily seeking to fulfill our desires, including the desire to survive, but as well the desire to achieve our ambitions. Thus, we all will have our own iPods or some future-oriented equivalent, our own miniaturized instruction modules, our own health checkers on miniaturized computers, and the like. The physician and the teacher will be a thing of the past, replaced by portable machines each nomad can purchase -- provided that nomad lives in or near a center of power. For those who live on the periphery of a power center, their life and hopes will be considerably diminished, sad and poor. Africa (except, perhaps, for South Africa) has no real place or chance in the 21st century, according to Mr. Attali. The battles and conflicts in the Mideast will continue throughout the 21st century unless these smaller states can learn to join up with either Asia, Europe or America, an unlikely scenario at this point.

Although Mr. Attali doesn't say so explicitly, in depicting what the future will look like for generations of humans, he does assert that humanity will need a new religion which all mankind can harmoniously get behind and believe, and that new religion is what he calls "the sacred," or, more specifically, a respect for nature and an awareness of what carbon dioxide is doing to increase the temperature of the planet - or so the author claims. Humanity will see itself following the new world order -- or it will perish. Human beings will willing turn themselves into a product that can be sold like a can of beans through the marvels of genetic manipulation, cloning, and new copyright laws and there will be no difference between life and machine at all.

Mr. Attali is not without some heart for the future. He does prat about justice, pluralism and democracy somewhat palpably in the book, as if the New World Order somehow still has "soft-spot" in its cold mercenary machinations for Classical Liberalism rather than for absolute Totalitarianism. Thus, Mr. Attali has started a nonprofit (read "tax-free") loan institution to "help" impoverished nations build "micro-entrepreneurs" because he knows that these nations and peoples, if they don't "get with it" -- and soon -- are going to be valueless fodder in the 21st century.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prophetic - it now appears., August 6, 2000

By 

Dr George Armstrong (Auckland New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Millennium; Winners and Losers in the Coming Order (Paperback)

I read this book as soon as it came out and was very impressed, especially because his ideas of rich and poor "nomads" was born out in my own experience. As early as the late 70's I was meeting Koreans who had worked for engineering companies in Iraq, probably as low paid labour. One of their chaplains had come straight from expulsion by the Ayatollahs there to study in the post-graduate programme I was teaching. Then I noted the low paid horde that had been stranded in Kuweit after the Gulf War. All these were graphic examples of "poor" nomads. Since then the movement of poor or desperate peoples has become worse and is dramatised by the international "sex industry" revelations almost daily. The rich migrants are also increasingly visible, with or without the Concord Crash. Attali was right then with one of his major theses. Since he is a hardened practical economist, he is even more likely to be right in economic matters.

The fact that his economic wisdom runs counter to prevailing "conventional wisdom" in economic matters may suggest that he may have a true prophetic nose and may be on a useful scent.

I'm going to be glad to study this book carefully again, now ten years later.

7 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Even less correct now than in 1991., August 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Millennium; Winners and Losers in the Coming Order (Paperback)

Attali's intriguing thesis--the microchip will allow for a reshuffling of the world geopolitical power structure and promote the growth and social dominance of "nomadic men" with few ties to place or fellow man--is consistently undermined, and eventually rendered ineffective, by three problems:

A pervasive and thinly disguised national chauvinism;

Grossly inaccurate macroeconomic forecasting; and

A pendantic and condescending Foreward by Alvin Toffler which insists that we, as provincial and intellectually vacant Americans, must read this book simply because Attali is a stunning genius eager to save us from our own ignorance.

I will give this book one more star for each of the problems the author chooses to correct in future editions.