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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #219903 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 AudioFile
The Tofflers' books are always fascinating, sweeping as they do across history and geography, throwing facts and insights this way and that, and preventing comfort with any particular worldview. They say wealth is created differently in the Digital Age and that society's institutions--families, businesses, banks, schools, the media-- adapt to wealth opportunities at vastly different speeds. Casual listeners might have to strain at first to hear the provocative central idea, but once they adjust to the density of the information, the powerhouse thinking and importance of this lesson will click into place. The readers are outstanding, with Kevin Gray sounding especially connected to the material. T.W. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

On the Edge of an Amazing Future!
We are on the edge of an amazing future. What changes lay ahead? What skills will you need to be successful and happy? Will you be ready?

Alvin and Heidi Toffler are futurists. They have studied and written predictions of the future for decades.

Their first book, Future Shock was released back in 1970. It was thoroughly researched and critically thought through. Many of their predictions came true.

Revolutionary Wealth also makes predictions about the future. Since their past books were proven to be accurate on many topics, it's fair to assume that their latest book will provide many insightful thoughts about the future.

Here are just a few of the topics: Waves of wealth, the edge of knowledge, the gospel of change, implosion, capitalism's end game, running tomorrow's money and much more.

The book is a page turner and provides a peek into what can and probably will happen depending on the paths that we as society take.

Here are some key excerpts from their work.

The Wealth System

"If the First Wave wealth system was chiefly based on growing things, and the Second Wave on making things, the Third Wave wealth system is increasingly based on serving, thinking, knowing and experiencing...The new wealth system demands a complete shake-up in the way increasingly temporary skill sets are organized for increasingly temporary purposes throughout the economy. Nothing is more deeply fundamental to the creation of wealth."

Knowledge

"In each of us there is a crowded, invisible warehouse full of knowledge and its precursor data and information. But unlike a warehouse, it is also a workshop in which we--or, more accurately, the electrochemicals in our brains--continually shift, add, subtract, combine and rearrange numbers, symbols, words, images, and memories, combining them with emotions to form new thoughts."

Cross Disciplinary Knowledge Required

"More and more jobs require cross-disciplinary knowledge, so that we find increasing need for hyphenated backgrounds--"Astro-biologist," "bio-physicist," "environmental-engineer," "forensic-accountant.""

A New Dawn

"Living at the dawn of this century, we are direct or indirect participants in the design of a new civilization with a revolutionary wealth system at its core. Will this process complete itself--or will the still incomplete wealth revolution come to a crashing halt?" 1

The message is clear. Those who will succeed and prosper in the coming years will have the following skills and backgrounds:

* Decision making
* Knowledge
* Schooling
* Experience
* Reasoning
* Intuition
* Common sense
* Confidence

These skills and background can be boiled down to three words: Critical Thinking Skills. With these skills you will be prepared for whatever challenges the future presents.

As with his book Future Shock and other books he has written, Toffler has an amazing ability to look at the very beginning of trends and then extrapolate a future out of those trends. His predications come from interviews with many world experts. Toffler then uses his critical thinking skills to integrating everything he has learned. From this knowledge he constructs a vision of the future. Not only that, he provides options we should consider to create a positive future for ourselves.

Knowledge is power:
This is a must read book to gain a glance into what tomorrow brings! It can be positive if we take the right steps...there is hope!


The Re-Discovery of Common Sense: A Guide to: The Lost Art of Critical Thinking

Micro-futurist
The authors stated that their task was to tell the missing story about how wealth was created in modern environment. They introduced the unconventional way of counting non-monetary wealth, the Prosumer.

The first half of the book was devoted to the explanation on how today systems are intertwined. The rapid movement of certain social sectors, thanks to the information age, caused the others to be left out of sync. The second half was then focused on how the Prosumer phenomenon will change the future world.

For a reader, the book's first half attempt to assemble the social jigsaw so that we understand where we are is good to know. But as one moves to the second half, it seems that the authors' focusing on the Prosumer theme to predict the future is a bit narrow.

As a avid fan of the Tofflers, I found the Revolutionary Wealth's in the future landscape painting less insightful as compared to their previous classics such as the Future Shock and the Third Wave. As I finished reading those two books more than a decade ago, I kind of aware of what was going to happen to me and the society on a broad level, i.e. how the information wave was going to affect the way that I lived my life. But not so for this book. If I want to make more money, maybe I should jump on this Prosumer bandwagon, but it I dont then this book is almost meaningless to me.

Toffler provides a profound perspective on the "knowledge economy"
I personally take issue with the fact that Alvin Toffler is criticized for trying to "predict" the future - he is a trend researcher, and Revolutionary Wealth is about the tech-driven trends that are colliding to create our very new reality. Economists have been struggling to wrap their old models around the knowledge economy for some time, and Toffler brings much of this discussion down to earth, and gives us a front-row seat on the economic future we're creating for ourselves, so we can choose how we'd like to engage it.

Toffler suggests that the some of the most reliable fundamental variables in economics (many of which are assumed to remain constant by neoclassical economists), time, knowledge, and distance are being changed by the Internet. Those of us who spend considerable time on the internet, and are trend observers ourselves can testify that Toffler is absolutely right on issue after issue.

In my opinion, the most crucial implications of Revolutionary Wealth lie in those institutions which have traditionally been quite slow to change and evolve, such as education, medicine, government, and the law. These will be under increasing pressure to expose their organizational models to the same "creative chaos" being experienced by almost every other sector of the economy. In education in particular, the impact of Toffler's "prosumer", a concept validated well by Web 2.0, will have a wildly unpredictable impact on our hierarchically accredited K-12 system.