Review
"In Future Shock, the Tofflers warned that many people 'will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon.' These days, from Baghdad to Bangalore to Boston, it seems more likely that people worry that the future will arrive too late. That's no small change, and it's one on which the Tofflers have been shining a light for years."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Alvin and Heidi Toffler... show no signs of losing touch with the bleeding edge or slowing down. Their book is loaded with bits of intelligence..." --USA Today
"Revolutionary Wealth... will act as a valuable guideline for the future of our world. The success of Korea as an IT powerhouse and leader in the new age of knowledge-based economy can be attributed to the lessons I learned through... books such as The Third Wave and Future Shock." --Kim Dae-jung, former president of South Korea
"Brilliant, incisive and seminal, this book will be talked about for years to come. Highly recommended."
--Library Journal
"Revolutionary Wealth brings an exciting new dimension to the Tofflers' body of work. As we struggle to navigate the complexities of the rapidly changing wealth system that confronts us all, it provides an invaluable roadmap to our financial future."
--Newt Gingrich
About the Author
Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s other books include The Third Wave, Powershift, The Culture Consumers, War and Anti-War and Creating a New Civilization. The authors are founders of Toffler Associates, advisers to companies and governments worldwide on advances in economics, technology and social change. In France, where the Tofflers’ work has won the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, Alvin Toffler has been named an Offcier de L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Heidi Toffler holds multiple honorary doctorates in law and letters and has been awarded the medal of the President of the Italian Republic for her contributions to social thought. Their monthly column appears in major newspapers around the world.
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.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
SPEARHEADING WEALTH
This book is about the future of wealth, visible and invisible--a revolutionary form of wealth that will redesign our lives, our companies and the world in the years now speeding toward us.
To explain what that means, the pages ahead will deal with everything from family life and jobs to time pressures and the mounting complexity of everyday life. They will grapple with truth, lies, markets and money. They will cast surprising light on the collision of change and anti-change in the world around us--and inside ourselves.
Today's wealth revolution will unlock countless opportunities and new life trajectories, not only for creative business entrepreneurs but for social, cultural and educational entrepreneurs as well. It will open fresh possibilities for slashing poverty both at home and around the globe. But it will accompany this invitation to a glowing future with a warning: Risks are not merely multiplying but escalating. The future is not for the fainthearted.
Today e-mails and blogs bombard us. EBay makes marketers of us all. Corporate megascandals burst into the headlines. Drugs are launched to help cure breast cancer, multiple sclerosis and dozens of different diseases. Other drugs are belatedly pronounced too dangerous and yanked off the market. Robots go to Mars and land with exquisite precision. But computers, software, cell phones and networks constantly fail. Warming warms. Fuel cells beckon. Genes and stem cells trigger bitter controversy. Nano is the new techno-grail.
Simultaneously, criminal street gangs from Los Angeles roam across Central America and build a quasi-army, and thirteen-year-old aspiring terrorists depart France for the Middle East. In London, Prince Harry dresses as a Nazi even as anti-Semitism re-rears its disgusting head. AIDS wipes out a generation in Africa, while strange new diseases in Asia threaten to sweep across the world.
To escape--or at least forget--what appears like chaos, millions turn to television, where "reality TV" fakes reality. Thousands form "flash mobs" and gather to beat one another with pillows. Elsewhere, players of online games pay thousands of dollars in real money for virtual swords that their virtual selves can use to win virtual castles or maidens. Irreality spreads.
More important, institutions that once lent coherence, order and stability to society--schools, hospitals, families, courts, regulatory agencies, trade unions--flail about in crisis.
And it is against this background that America's trade deficit soars to unprecedented levels. The national budget staggers drunkenly. The world's finance ministers wonder out loud if they should risk triggering a global depression by recalling the billions they have lent to Washington. Europe celebrates itself for expanding the European Union--but German unemployment hits a fifty-year high and the French and Dutch overwhelmingly reject the proposed E.U. constitution. Meanwhile, China, we're told--again and again--is certain to become the next superpower.
The combination of economic high-wire acts and institutional failures leaves individuals back home face-to-face with potentially devastating personal problems. They question if they will ever receive the pensions for which they have worked, or whether they can afford the rocketing costs of gasoline and health care. They agonize about appalling schools. They worry about whether crime, drugs and an anything-goes morality will destroy civil life. How, everyone wants to know, will this seeming chaos affect our wallets? Will we even have a wallet?
FAD OF THE MONTH
Not only do ordinary mortals find it hard to answer these questions, so do the experts. Corporate CEOs succeed one another like passengers pushing through a rush-hour turnstile: merging, divesting, kowtowing to the stock market; pursuing core competence one month, synergy the next, the latest management fad a month later. They study the most recent economic forecasts, but many economists themselves are befuddled as they wander around in a cemetery of dead ideas.
To decode this new world we need to cut through the chatter of rear-window economists and business pundits who prattle about "business fundamentals." We need to probe below the obsolete obvious. In these pages, therefore, we will focus on the unexplored "deep fundamentals" on which the so-called fundamentals themselves depend.
Once we do, things look different, less crazy, and previously unnoticed opportunities pop out of the shadows. Chaos, it turns out, is only part of the story. And chaos itself generates new ideas.
Tomorrow's economy, for example, will present significant business opportunities in fields like hyper-agriculture, neurostimulation, customized health care, nanoceuticals, bizarre new energy sources, streaming payment systems, smart transportation, flash markets, new forms of education, non-lethal weapons, desktop manufacturing, programmable money, risk management, privacy-invasion sensors that tell us when we're being observed--indeed, sensors of all kinds--plus a bewildering myriad of other goods, services and experiences.
We can't be sure when these will or will not turn profitable or how they will converge. But understanding the deep fundamentals will reveal the existence, even now, of new needs and previously unidentified industries and sectors--a huge "synchronization industry," for example, and a "loneliness industry."
To forecast the future of wealth, we also need to look not just at the work we do for money but at the unpaid work all of us also do as "prosumers." (We'll explain later, but it might shock most people to learn just how much unpaid output we all produce every day.) We'll look, as well, at the invisible "third job" that many of us hold without even knowing it.
Because prosuming is set to explode, the future of the money economy can no longer be understood, let alone forecast, apart from that of the prosumer economy. The two, in fact, are inseparable. Together they form a wealth system. And once we understand this--and the channels by which the two feed each other--we gain piercing insights into our private lives now and into the future.
LOOSENED CONSTRAINTS
New wealth systems don't come often, and they don't travel alone. Each carries with it a new way of life, a civilization. Not just new business structures but new family formats; new kinds of music and art; new foods, fashions and standards of physical beauty; new values; and new attitudes toward religion and personal freedom--all of which interact with and shape the emerging new wealth system.
America today is spearheading just such a new civilization built around a revolutionary way of creating wealth. For better and worse, billions of lives around the world are already being changed by this revolution. Nations and whole regions of the globe are rising or declining as they feel its impact.
Today millions of people around the world dislike or even hate America. Some fanatics wish to incinerate the United States and everyone in it. The reasons they give range from its Middle East policies and its refusal to sign various international treaties to what they regard as its imperial ambitions.
Yet even if peace reigned in the Middle East, even if all the world's terrorists turned pacifist and democracies flowered like dandelions, the rest of the world would still view the United States with trepidation at best.
This is because the new wealth system the United States is developing, by its very nature, threatens old, embedded financial and political interests around the world. Moreover, in the United States the rise of the new wealth system has been accompanied by controversial changes in the roles of women, racial and ethnic minorities, gays and other groups.
Because America's emergent culture promotes greater individuality, it is seen as a threat to community. Worse yet, because it has loosened some of the traditional sexual, moral, political, religious and lifestyle constraints placed on the individual during earlier economic eras, it is seen as dangerously seducing the young into nihilism, license and decadence.
In short, the combination of revolutionary wealth and the social and cultural changes so far associated with it may have more to do with global anti-Americanism than the usual litany of reasons cited by the media.
The revolutionary wealth system, however, as we'll see, is no longer an American monopoly. Other nations are racing to catch up. And it is not clear how long the United States will retain its lead.
GUITARS AND ANTI-HEROES
The roots of revolutionary wealth can be traced to 1956--the year when, for the first time, white-collar and service workers outnumbered blue-collar workers in the United States. This sea change in the composition of the labor force was arguably the kickoff point for the transition from an industrial economy based on manual labor to one based on knowledge or mind work.
The knowledge-based wealth system is still called the "new economy"--and for convenience we will at times continue to call it that here--but the first computers, still huge and expensive, actually were migrating from government offices into the business world by the mid-1950s. And Princeton economist Fritz Machlup, as early as 1962, showed that in the 1950s knowledge production in the United States was already growing faster than the gross national product.
The 1950s are often pictured as a deadly dull decade. But on October 4, 1957, Russia launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth, trig...
