Customer Reviews

Revolutionary Wealth

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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

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.

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.

This book is really an update of "Powershift", the Tofflers 1990 work and the last of their now-famous trilogy. In my view, the whole "revolutionary" thing is over-hyped. Western Humanity has been in a revolutionary period for over a quarter millennium. So this current period of change is just another "chapter" in a long novel that is still evolving. A good subtitle for this book would be "How the high-tech, "intangible" business climate is forcing both corporations (and society at large) to re-shape their functions and re-examine their priorities." Even modern social trends owe their beginnings to technology - The Pill, the LP (rockn'roll), TV (images of Vietnam, among other things). But much of this stuff was covered 16 years ago in their book "Powershift", so I recommend starting there first......

A few more problems. First is the Tofflers survey-style writing approach. This really doesn't work, as the (many) trends and facts mentioned here could use a little more depth to better explain them. Besides, this method of writing gets dizzying after about the third chapter. We also don't need a "list" of every trend happening today. Much of the business trends - the author's strong point, are out of view to the average person. The next major problem is the almost no-mention of the service economy. Yes, it takes knowledge to build a computer system that's needed to support a business. But along with the development of the computer, the rise of the modern service economy is equally big news - it represents an entirely new mode of human life. A rent-car company was still unheard of when the Tofflers were writing their first book in the late 1960's. The authors also emphasize the word "knowledge" too much - it's the services, backed up by a high-tech support system that should be sharing the headlines. Their point about the volunteer work-economy is very good, however - this IS a big deal. Look at what we're doing on this website !!

The United States being a "laboratory" for social trends (as compared to the rest of the world) is a point they make but is "flat" wrong (pun - Friedman's book). It was Europe and/or New Zealand that started civil unions, stem cell reserch, liberal divorce laws, legalized abortion, medical marijuana etc, etc. They even freed the slaves before we did. America has always followed Europe - starting with Greek rationalism, then Roman-style government and continuing with today's contemporary social trends......

Lastly and most importantly, the Tofflers overlook the fact that despite the all-new way of doing things, we'll STILL be doing them. They mention "self check-out" at the grocery store (analogous to using an ATM machine) but we'll still be traveling to an external location to get our food (while still paying for it). They mention "social networking" fads that inflict today's youth but these youngsters will still have to meet the person they're talking to - if it's a serious conversation. Chatting with people you don't know over a computer network isn't NEARLY as revolutionary as what Gutenberg did for humanity a half a millenium ago, anyway. There will be new transportation fuels but we'll still HAVE fuels. There will be "auto-pilot" highways but we'll still HAVE highways (albeit with fewer accidents). On the job, we'll be working more on "teams" and on "projects" but we'll still be working !! As long as people in the Western World are working externally for someone else and still have to pay for things (some items never to own), I see no real "revolution" on the horizon.

No, I see this century as a "mass improvement" over the last, in terms of quality of life and treatment of the Earth. Everthing we have now - computers, medical care, pollution, television picture quality, cost (and quality) of food, transportation systems, "immoral" science procedures - whatever, will simply improve during this century. Because of technology, there's almost nothing we won't be able to do - take embryonic stem cells. To overcome the protesters, we'll have a myriad of ways to extract them, all of them will be "moral". We might be calling the 21st Century, once we're at the end of it, as The Great Improvement.....

Eye opener on where the world economy is today. It touches on "why the educational system is failing in the US", "the role of China in the very near future", "why the US is failing the smaller countries of the world" and "just how dumb every economist really is" this is just a few points made.
Not an easy read, it is the equivalent of taking 3 economics classes in one book, but the info is unparalleled.
If you want to know what the world has in store this is a must read.

I had high hopes for this book, but they were soon dashed. The book is terribly superficial, and is more of a lengthy series of factoids than a deep analysis of current issues. The writing style is breezy, and has the feel of Newsweek or Time articles rather than what one would expect from a nearly 400 page book.

As to the substance, the Tofflers point to "deep fundamentals" of social activity, consisting of time, space, and knowledge. These fundamentals are undergoing change, as the pace of life and innovation accelerate, more knowledge is generated, and we shift into the "third wave" of civilization. They also claim that we are in a new era of "revolutionary wealth," in which monetary, measurable wealth of consumers and producers is joined with the value provided by "prosumers," a neologism that describes those who provide value for themselves, or engage in volunteer activity to help others. I don't see how the mere recognition of this element of activity is revolutionary, however, inasmuch as it has always existed.

Much of the book engages in digressions that do not really further the thesis of the book. I also found that they emphasized their criticisms of "antiscientific" activities of environmentalists and animal rights activists, but paid scant attention to those in American society who deny and attack evolution theory, resist efforts to have governmental sponsorship of stem cell research, and who advocate a radical right wing political agenda. These concerns, which are prominent in Kevin Phillips's far more insightful book American Theocracy, are never explored by the Tofflers.

Ironically, the Tofflers engage in what I would call "second wave" logic and analysis in pursuing what they call "third wave" ideas. They perfunctorily dismiss any ways of knowing outside the reductionist scientific paradigm.

I would not recommend this book as one that is particularly edifying. There are some interestng vignettes and factoids in it, however. Most of the endnotes are citations to newspaper and magazine articles, and website entries. Occasionally there is a book or journal article citation, but the flavor of this book is more of a journalistic essay than an analytical study with well-considered insights about how the future will unfold.

Well for a generation that cut its teeth on Future Shock and The Third Wave there are few surprises in Tofflers' approach to the issues. They re-emphasize the impact of Wave Three (the Third Knowledge revolution) with more reference to the growth of Prosumser ( open source, You Tube, home schooling, NGOs) arising as much from the failure of second wave institutions ("industrial society" creations like manufacturing factories, schools and their attached stakeholders). The analysis if Europe and the EU is quite different. They believe that the EU is using too centralized a control and growth strategy that makes Europe less competitive and further into the Second (industrial ) Wave each passing year as the Third (knowledge) Wave continues to roll out. He points out the real fears that we should be aware of with China as it follows a dual wave strategy. India and the other Asian countries receive quite a review as well. Their analysis of the deep fundamentals of Time, space and knowledge is worthwhile as the impacts can be seen further along multiple directions. Simple to follow and readable as they use shorter chapters, but as a 447pp tome, this is good for long flights and/or your summer reading selection. They end up optimistic despite the pitfalls but a bit short on suggestions as to what are the business opportunities coming forward.

Amazon appears to have eaten a review I created when this book first came out. I have been a fan of the Tofflers since I was first introduced to their work in the 1970's.

Although they were ahead of everyone else with their book Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century, which I described at the time as one of the top five books on the future of knowledge, ever; with this book they are dotting the i's and crossing the t's, connecting disparate dots such as I list below, and confirming that we are indeed at the beginning of a completely new era, at the very beginning of massive innovation that will make the early Silocon Valley days look like the Stone Age.

I'll take a look at my notes and see about expanding this review later, but for now the best value I can render is to list other books that reinforce what the Tofflers, intellectual parents to us all, are affirming.

I strongly recommend that you not limit yourself to this book, but go back and get PowerShift as well as the books listed below, which are but the top of the pyramid. We the People are coming back into power, and our first priority must be to help the five billion poor create infinite stabilizing wealth so that we might fulfill Buckminster Fuller's vision of being able to use existing resources and existing technology to create a good life for all--what his partner, Medard Gabel, in a forthcoming book, calls "seven billion billionaries."

See also:
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
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 Knowledge Executive
Information Payoff
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Five Minds for the Future

Very rarely do I recommend my own books, but in this instance, since they wrote about me, I want to highlight just one of my books:
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

You may find my review biased as I have been a BIG fan of Alvin Toffler since his first book.

As with all of his/their books before, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have surpassed themselves again with the new concept of revolutionary wealth. The book has been written over a period of time, which is evident once you read through the book. Many events described as 'recent' have occured at least 2-3 years ago. But this is no way reduces the importance of the book.

Tofflers talk about knowledge as a form of wealth and how this new economy wealth defies all the established economic thoughts and how the society - nay world - is trying to grapple with the new concept.

A MUST READ for anyone who wants to understand the changes happing around them. Extremely thought provoking and immensly un-put-able book.

For readers who are not familiar with Alvin Toffler, this is not another one of those "how to get rich" titles. Alvin Toffler is known for writing about social and economic trends. In one sentence, this book tells us what is happening in the world, what the future will bring and what won't work anymore.

In this ambitious book, the Tofflers provide numerous examples of how institutions like governments, regulatory bodies, trade unions, schools and courts fail to handle disasters and social, economic changes because they have not evolved fast enough to catch up with the little revolutions that have been going on.

The concept of "prosumer is revisited and expanded. Apparently, recently developments have provided more support for their concept of consumers producing what they and other potential consumers consume - often without pay. An interesting concept.

Though there is plenty of competition in every industry, the authors seem to believe that in a knowledge-based economy, opportunities to attain wealth are limitless as one person who uses his knowledge to derive wealth does not deprive another person of the ability to use his knowledge to obtain wealth.

That seems to be the basic theme of the book, but the Tofflers didn't stop there. There are 50 chapters full of examples of institutions that screwed up, unlikely success stories, experts who were wrong and so on. It's a brilliant book, but Revolutionary Wealth is a little complicated and certainly not something you can read for relaxation.