Revolutionary Wealth (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Heidi Toffler (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This latest futurist forecast by the Tofflers, the husband-and-wife authors of Future Shock, anxiously surveys hundreds of technological, economic and social developments, including globalization, the rise of China, the decay of Europe, the decline of nuclear families, kids today, satellites, genetic engineering, alternative energy sources, frequent-flyer miles, the Internet and the rise of a new economic group, "prosumers" (those who create goods and services "for [their] own use or satisfaction, rather than for sale or exchange"). Above all, the authors note the ever-accelerating speed and transience of all things such that nanoseconds are now too slow and will be replaced by even zippier "zeptoseconds." The Tofflers try, none too incisively, to order the chaos by invoking the "deep fundamentals" of time, space and the cutting-edge "knowledge economy" that is fast outdistancing obsolete industrial-era government institutions. The Tofflers' mantra of "revolutionary wealth" implies that there's money to be made from the maelstrom, but their specific prognostications—the "explosion" of a nonmonetary "prosumer" economy of family care, hobbies and volunteerism; embedded "pinky chips" combining ID and credit cards; the comeback of barter—seem underwhelming or unlikely. 200,000 first printing(May 2)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

If we were living through a great economic revolution, would we know it? It's easy to get carried away, after all. Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener of the Hudson Institute predicted in 1967 -- in a carefully researched publication -- that by 2000 we would have undersea colonies, personal flying platforms and cities lit by artificial moons.

Futurology has its perils, but it holds no terrors for Alvin and Heidi Toffler, perhaps the world's most famous prognosticators. Their latest book, Revolutionary Wealth, foretells the next great economic revolution. In fact, since the preferred Toffler style -- in such blockbusters as Alvin's Future Shock and The Third Wave -- is to highlight recent events as a taste of things to come, we are led to believe that the revolution is here already.

But what is this economic revolution that they herald? That is not quite clear. It will be big and fast, certainly, and government institutions are likely to be left behind. Moreover, the Tofflers think we are going to get dramatically richer.

There has to be some truth in this, at least from an economic perspective. As the Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong has noted, global income per person grew nearly tenfold during the 20th century. In the 19th century, it merely trebled -- which was more than enough to astonish Karl Marx. No other century comes close. So economic growth itself is a relatively recent story.

Those statistics seem a fair reflection of the speed with which the world has been changing for the last 200 years, even if they tell only part of the story of economic and social change. We live in revolutionary times, but so did our parents, and their parents -- indeed, the last 10 generations. It isn't quite clear, then, whether the revolution the Tofflers have in mind is business as usual or an even more astounding process of economic change. One presumes the latter, although, beyond the occasional nugget, Revolutionary Wealth eschews a historical perspective.

The Tofflers do well when throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks: a dieters' credit card that won't work at Taco Bell, urine analysis every time you use your own bathroom or a hepatitis vaccine administered through genetically engineered bananas. Some of the forecasts are provocative -- notably the rise of a Chinese leader, a Mao II, who sweeps away the communists with a strange, savage Christian fundamentalism. Many will scoff, but this unlikely event is the sort of imaginative thinking that a decent futurologist needs to produce. Still, the Tofflers do not spend enough time making the case for Mao II. Nor do we get much elaboration of the observation that the end of the age of oil will disrupt political and religious structures in the Middle East. A good point, but can we hear more?

Moreover, too much of the book is wasted on the familiar. We are told that people today watch a lot of hospital dramas and have access to medical information on the Internet, and so they arrive at their doctors' offices armed with preconceptions about their treatment. Instead of extrapolation or further investigation of what this means, the Tofflers offer bluster: "Here, changes in relationships to the deep fundamentals of time and knowledge have radically altered medical reality."

It is a shame that the Tofflers did not dip further into the growing literature on earlier economic revolutions. Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University has skeptically contrasted the Internet to five truly revolutionary technologies: electricity, the internal-combustion engine, bulk chemical processing, information technologies such as the telephone and the telegraph, and (funny but true) indoor plumbing. These astonishing clusters of innovation set a high benchmark for anyone claiming that change is about to accelerate today.

History also tells us that new technologies often outpace social and organizational change but have little effect until society catches up. Paul A. David, an economic historian at Stanford, has shown how much had to bend or break before electrification became economically significant: a huge shock to the labor market as borders were closed in 1914, and in the 30 years following Edison's illumination of the streets of New York, a reorganization of American factories encompassing everything from the architecture to the employment contracts. It would have been fascinating to see the Tofflers discuss these remarkable stories and draw lessons for today's communications technologies.

Unfortunately, the Tofflers have little time for history and less still for economists, whom they dismiss as "inerrantist" and overfond of jargon. But Revolutionary Wealth contains more jargon than a dozen economics papers, including such gems as "obsoledge," "complexorama" and "producivity."

This is not mere quibbling. Good futurology is the art of telling a good story. The story must be new, and it must be persuasive; the scenarios need to be plausible as well as provocative. Revolutionary Wealth is breathlessly enthusiastic, but that is not the same thing. This will be a useful scrapbook for the apparently limitless army of professional soothsayers, but most readers will prefer a simpler, stronger tale. Or so I predict.

Reviewed by Tim Harford
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (April 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375401741
• ISBN-13: 978-0375401749
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #127,183 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

156 of 167 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

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

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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

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars AN EXCELLENT BOOK, DESPITE OVERHYPE BY PUBLISHER, May 25, 2006

By	Sandeep "Sandeep" (NYC) - See all my reviews

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars "Powershift Redux", July 20, 2006

By	D. Harnick - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.....