168 of 180 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
TIME as translated into wealth, fouir-part anti-poverty plan, April 28, 2006
This review is from: Revolutionary Wealth (Hardcover)
Their first key focus is on TIME and its relation to space, knowledge, and effectiveness as translated into wealth. Innovative businesses are going 100 mph; civil collective groups at 90 mph; the US family at 60 mph, labor unions at 30 mph, government bureaucracies at 25 mph, education at 10 mph, non-governmental organizations including the United Nations at 5 mph, US politics and the participation process at 3 mph, and law enforcement and the law it enforces at 1 mph. This is really quite a helpful informed judgment as to the relative unfitness of all but two of the groups.
The TIME section of the book has some very interesting insights including the fact that anything that requires time, like filling in a form, or that adds time to a process through regulation, is in fact a TIME TAX that is more costly than an old money tax.
The Tofflers note that vice is globalizing faster than virtue. This is very important from a taxation and social goods perspective.
They spend a great deal of time discussing the intangible economy that consists of non-rival knowledge that can be shared and bartered; volunteer time that produces economy value (notably parents who teach their children sanitary habits, how to speak, and discipline or social IQ); and alternative forms of capital--social, moral, whatever. They point out that 60% of the value of the industrial era companies is intangible knowledge, while almost 100% of the new economy is intangible.
This entire book is an Information Operations reference. They discuss global battles to manage our minds in multiple domains--religious, cultural, economic, moral. We need to pay more attention to what filters the target audience uses to determine the truth, and what filters the hostile groups are using to try to shape the local perception of truth to fit their wishes.
The book moves on to discuss what the Tofflers call the "outside brain" or the sum aggregate of knowledge that is available for individual exploitation. By one account, this consists of 12,000 petabytes.
They then begin the heart of the book on "prosumption" and the economic and social value of what they believe can no longer be called capitalism in the traditional sense.
The authors spend a sufficient amount of time exploring the implications of information technology on knowledge creation and capitalization, to include cell phones or other microchip devices that serve simultaneously as identity devices, bank accounts, and knowledge devices (as WIRED said in one issue, point the phone and read the bar code, and see if this product will kill you or if someone else was killed or abused as part of the product's development)
Having explored the emergence of the new economy, they then return to their opening discussion of time, and point out that America's infrastructure and institutions are imploding. Our energy, transportation, health, and educational infrastructures are 50 years out of date and cannot be converted or upgraded fast enough. So we have two Americas, an old industrial era poor America, and a new knowledge age rich America. They articulate a battle raging between decay and revolutionary birth, noting that micro-cash and the Internet are empowering social entrepreneurs who use the Internet to mobilize both volunteers and contributions. Micro finance is liberating small innovators from the death knell of merchant banks and venture capitalists with old mind-sets.
I learned two big things relevant to government tax fraud. Although I knew of import-export tax fraud ($50 billion a year in false pricing, an advanced form of corporate money laundering) Major corporations and most nations are heavily engaged in barter or counter-trades (e.g. billions of dollars in vodka for equivalent value in Pepsi BUT the US corporation can manipulate the valuations). They say many corporations are now moving to a form of internal corporate money so that their subsidiaries can do off the books trades that do not require either taxation or foreign exchange transactions.
The final third of the book is an absorbing discussion of how knowledge can eliminate extreme poverty, which the authors believe is more important than closing the gap between rich and poor. They emphasize that both India and China are leap-frogging the industrial era, with India focusing on connectivity to reduce poverty as well as urbanization, while China is focusing on setting standards that will allow it to "own" future information technology architectures. Africa and Latin America are being lost to Chinese immigrants, language, trade, and aid.
The Toffler's articulate a four part anti-poverty plan that makes sense to me: 1) Use knowledge to wipe out subsistence agriculture, which is the foundation for extreme poverty. They discuss how bio-technology can impact on crop yield, include medical vaccinations, convert crops into fuel, allow precision farming which dramatically reduces water and seed and fertilization costs, and improve sales while sensing disease or other threats to the crops. 2) Empower women, as this one focus leads to advances across the board. 3) End corruption by using knowledge and technology to make it next to impossible and largely transparent--the carrot side of this is that knowledge and technology can lower costs and increase government salaries. 4) Avoid industrial poisons, e.g. do not go with chlorine and oil based industry
The book concludes with a review of China, India, Japan, and Europe as either threats (the first two) or potential disasters (the last two). The authors, while extolling the possibilities of Chinese capitalism, are careful to point out the many things that could go catastrophically wrong for China, and do a similarly balanced presentation on India.
The Tofflers come across as cheerleaders for the future, accepting of the decay and disaster that will be required to dismantle dysfunctional systems including (my observation) the U.S. Government. They see real possibilities of eliminating poverty and stabilizing the world.
If you like this book, bookmark my review page, 1000+ non-fiction books that underlie and expand on this superb work by the Tofflers.
See also, with reviews:
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good digest of economics, geopolitics, and technology, July 18, 2007
Writing about societal trends has gotten tougher since the Tofflers published "Future Shock" nearly four decades ago. Aside from the fact that things are moving faster and getting more complicated, the authors also must compete with the vastly expanded information sources available to readers today. The Tofflers still make good use of their impressive worldwide network of movers and shakers, but the rest of us now have access to countless news outlets on the Internet and on cable/satellite TV, as well as subscriptions to trend-spotting magazines like Wired. So if you routinely follow tech trends, geopolitics, international economics, and related fields, you'll find no big surprises here. On the other hand, if you're not familiar with these areas, this book is a good education. It puts a lot of information together in a very understandable presentation.
Much of the book is devoted to illustrating how the "deep fundamentals" of time, space, and knowledge affect our lifestyles and economy, and how these are largely ignored or misrepresented by economists and decision-makers. The discussion is long, but well presented - except for one thing. This may not bother most readers, but I've never cared for the Tofflers' tinkering with the English language. They like to invent their own terms. Prominent ones in this book are "prosumer" (producer/consumer, a term they've been using since 1980) and "obsoledge" (obsolete knowledge). Also, when they mention "globalization" - already a mouthful at five syllables - they insist on calling it "re-globalization" to provide us with an unnecessary reminder that this phenomenon has occurred before. Some readers will find these word games distracting rather than helpful.
One other minor quibble: The Tofflers are fond of using cutesy but uninformative chapter titles (50 of them) and subheadings (hundreds of them). All of these confusing labels are included in the 7-page table of contents, making it almost useless for people who scan the contents to get a feel for what's in the book.
The last 100 pages or so are the book's strength (Part 9: Poverty and Part 10: The New Tectonics). This is where you'll find the best insights on the status and prospects for our world, with special attention on China, Europe, India, and the United States. Optimism is tempered with realism as the Tofflers, like other authors, emphasize that the global community needs to take actions now that take into account where the trends are going instead of trying to preserve the past. An important message backed up by a lot of good information.
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34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
AN EXCELLENT BOOK, DESPITE OVERHYPE BY PUBLISHER, May 25, 2006
This review is from: Revolutionary Wealth (Hardcover)
Tofflers are among the very best writers in the nonfiction world today, on par with David McCulloghs and Ron Chernows. There is a lucidity and simplicity that is uplifting. The book covers several key areas relevant to understanding the future, and in that sense it is a great book, but it is not at all a prediction of the future.
Here a clarification is in order. Tofflers have benefitted enormously from overhyped PR from the press and publishers, and this book is no exception, but as with the other books, this one too fails to predict the future. I do not believe the Tofflers intended to do so, and if they did indeed seek to predict the future here, have failed to do so. In that sense, they may even appear to be misleading their readership for a quick new round of celebrity.
To be clearcut about it, coining phrases like prosumer, as they most famously did before, are reflective of a fertile mind that can fuse words and ideas, but scarcely evidence of analytical or predictive powers. This book too is full of excellent phrases and subtitles, ones worthy of the best copy-editor at the best advertising agency. That has then been taken by the publisher and turned into spin unworthy of the book.
That said, the book stands on its own, and stands tall. It is very accurate, especially the detail with which it grasps China, India, Finance, Poverty, etc. It is very well organized, especially if one is a busy executive. It is very rich with ideas, especially those culled from newspaper cuttings. So if one does not regularly read the papers or periodicals, this book would be very informative.
The book does get very bad when the Tofflers try to suggest that barter is on the rise, or some other such theory of why money is about to go extinct, or why capitalism itself may go extinct. Barter exists among government-to-government trades, or big company-to-big company trades, where the controversy about internal pricing may be too high to translate into pricing. But that is relegated to corners of the non-market economy, and to the quasi governmental entities only. Ditto their idea of the Flash Market, whereby everyone customizes their own products for their own needs. Tofflers may not know this but that is commonly known as the DELL MODEL, one that has made capitalists billions already. And it is very much a furtherance of capitalism, not a reversal to the stone ages.
Finally, those who have an education in economics, social development or history, and who are avid readers of Time magazine or the Wall Street Journal, or have access to thought pieces from the investment banks, would find the book to be an excellent scrap book, full of ideas taken from those sorts of publications. They too should find the book to be a good marker of where things stood in the year 2006 but no more.
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