In the 21st Century, the concept of wealth isn't the same as it was in the industrial age.

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Product Description

Starting with the publication of their seminal bestseller, Future Shock, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given millions of readers new ways to think about personal life in today’s high-speed world with its constantly changing, seemingly random impacts on our businesses, governments, families and daily lives. Now, writing with the same rare grasp and clarity that made their earlier books classics, the Tofflers turn their attention to the revolution in wealth now sweeping the planet. And once again, they provide a penetrating, coherent way to make sense of the seemingly senseless.

Revolutionary Wealth is about how tomorrow’s wealth will be created, and who will get it and how. But twenty-first-century wealth, according to the Tofflers, is not just about money, and cannot be understood in terms of industrial-age economics. Thus they write here about everything from education and child rearing to Hollywood and China, from everyday truth and misconceptions to what they call our “third job”—the unnoticed work we do without pay for some of the biggest corporations in our country.

They show the hidden connections between extreme sports, chocolate chip cookies, Linux software and the “surplus complexity” in our lives as society wobbles back and forth between depressing decadence and a hopeful post-decadence.

In their earlier work, the Tofflers coined the word “prosumer” for people who consume what they themselves produce. In Revolutionary Wealth they expand the concept to reveal how many of our activities—whether parenting or volunteering, blogging, painting our house, improving our diet, organizing a neighborhood council or even “mashing” music—pump “free lunch” from the “hidden” non-money economy into the money economy that economists track. Prosuming, they forecast, is about to explode and compel radical changes in the way we measure, make and manipulate wealth.

Blazing with fresh ideas, Revolutionary Wealth provides readers with powerful new tools for thinking about—and preparing for—their future.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51896 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-25
• Released on: 2006-04-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 512 pages

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.

From Booklist
Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock was a warning shot across the bow, predicting how our adjustment to the rapid acceleration of technological change in the new "super-industrial society" would cause disorientation and dysfunction in the general population. Although facets of the mass disintegration Toffler predicted have come to pass, much of society has come to embrace technology in ways Toffler couldn't have imagined 36 years ago. In the interim, Toffler has continued his futurist prognostications, most notably with The Third Wave (1984) and Power Shift (1991). With his wife Heidi, Toffler continues his series of scholarly commentary on social and economic change with a look at the revolutionary ways that wealth will be created in the future. The Tofflers' main theme is prosumerism, a trend whereby the division between the creator and consumer of goods and services blurs. Companies are quietly shunting much of their labor costs off onto the consumer: using ATMs or going online instead of seeing a bank teller and using self-checkout at the grocery store. The computer has opened up avenues of wealth creation that shatter the concept of the "job" as a relationship between employer and employee. Toffler's pessimism has certainly tempered in the years since Future Shock; this time the authors take a historical perspective and wax philosophical on this little slice in time we call the twenty-first century. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Customer Reviews

TIME as translated into wealth, fouir-part anti-poverty plan
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

AN EXCELLENT BOOK, DESPITE OVERHYPE BY PUBLISHER

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.

A Disappointment
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.