Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26987 in Books
• Published on: 1984-05-01
• Released on: 1984-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 560 pages

Customer Reviews

I like Toffler but I like Xiaoping, published by 1stWorld better
I recommend all books by this author, but I prefer the works of Wang Xiaoping, published by 1stWorld much better.
I also love the fact that the publisher, 1stWorld Library (or 1stWolrd Publishing) has made the text slightly larger which is a blessing for my thirty-something eyes. Great job. I have dozens of books by this publisher.

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The Optimistic Jew
The second book of Toffler's trilogy covers much of the same ground as Fritjof Capra's "The Turning Point" but in a more journalistic and accessible style. Its greatest contribution to modern thought is the powerful metaphor of its title. The Third Wave concept was a metaphor that gave me insight into what had been troubling me about the Jewish condition in general and Zionism in particular. The Jews are a Third Wave people functioning within Second Wave political, ideological and organizational structures. This was the coherent organizing principle of my analysis of the Jewish people in my book "The Optimistic Jew".

Good book
Here are my notes

The government was the great accelerator. Because of its coercive power and tax revenues, it could do things that private enterprise could not afford to undertake. Government could hot up the industrialization process by stepping in to fill emerging gaps in the system - before it became possible or profitable for private companies to do so. Government could perform anticipatory integration. By setting up mass education systems, government helps to engineer youngsters for their future roles in the industrial work force (hence, in effect, subsidizing industry)

Without political integration, economic integration was impossible. Distributors wanting to sell goods over territory outside their own communities ran into different duties, taxes, labor regulations, and currencies. Distributors would have to consolidate with local economy and political consolidation as well

The unification/ integration of political system and economic system led to the division of world into distinct national units. As each government sought to extend its market and its political authority, it came up against outer limits - language differences, cultural, social, geographic, and strategic barriers. The available transport, communication, and energy supplies, the productivity of its technology, all set limits on how large an area could be effectively ruled by a single political structure. The sophistication of accounting procedures, budgetary controls, and management techniques also determined how far political integration could reach.
Within these limits, the integrational elites, corporate and government alike, fought for expansion. The broader the territory under their control and the bigger the economic market area, the greater their wealth and power became. As each nation stretched its economic and political frontiers to the utmost, it ran up not merely against these inherent limits but also against rival nations

Imperialism - negotiations between centre and peripheral was often totally lopsided. Often local rulers or entrepreneurs were simply bought off by the Westerners, offered bribes or personal gain in return for sweating the native labor force, putting down resistance, or rewriting local laws in favor of the outsiders. Once conquering a colony, the imperial power often set preferential raw-material prices for its own businessmen and erected stiff barriers to prevent the traders of rival nations from bidding prices up.
Many raw material needed by Westerners were virtually valueless to the local populations who had them.

Geography was embedded in our voting systems. Elected officials are representatives of the inhabitants of a particular piece of land; a geographical district. Political systems assume that people would remain in one locality all their lives. Hence the prevalence of residency requirements in voting regulations

Synchronization. Standardization. Linearization. They affected the root assumptions of the civilization and they brought massive changes in the way ordinary people handled time in their lives. But if time itself was transformed, space, too, had to be repackaged to fit into the new indust-reality.
Spatially extensive to spatially restrictive existence
Schedules - by synchronizes social interaction and coordinates social activity it sets limits to them

Today's corporate critics attack the artificial divorce of economics from politics, morality and the other dimensions of life. They hold the corporation increasingly responsible for, not merely for its economic performance but for its side effects - environmental, social, informational, political, and moral. Corporate executives are now required to pay attention to multiple bottom lines. A corporation is no longer simply responsible for making profit or producing goods but for simultaneously contributing to the solution of extremely complex ecological, moral, political, racial, sexual, and social problems. In this finely strung socio-sphere, corporate decisions are closely scrutinized. Social pollution produced by the corporation in the form of unemployment, community disruption, forced mobility, and the like is instantly spotted, and pressures are placed on the corporation to assure far greater responsibility than ever before for its social, as well as economic, products.
The new importance of information leads to conflict over the control of corporate data - battles over disclosure of more information to the public, demands for open accounting, more pressure for truth in advertising, or truth in lendings.

Rise of the do it yourself industry reasons. Inflation. The difficulty of getting a carpenter or plumber. Shoddy work. Expanded leisure. All these play a part. A more potent reason is what might be called the Law of Relative Inefficiency. This holds that the more we automate the production of goods and lower their per unit cost, the more we increase the relative cost of handcrafts and nonautomated services. For such reasons, we must expect the price of many services to continue their skyrocketing climb in the years ahead. And as these prices soar, we can expect people to do more and more for themselves. In short, even without inflation, the Law of Relative Inefficiency would make it increasingly profitable for people to produce for their own consumption.

With the emergence of multinational corporations, the organization of independent sovereign states is now being overlaid by a network of economic institutions. With their ability to shunt billions back and forth instantly across national boundaries, their power to deploy technology and to move relatively quickly, they have often outflanked and outrun national governments.

For industrialization to operate successfully in third world nations traditional family and marriage customs, religion, and role structure would all have to be crushed, the entire culture ripped up by its roots

Configuration - The relatively concentration mass media. Individuals were continually encouraged to compare themselves to a relatively small number of role models, and to evaluate their life styles against a few preferred possibilities. In consequence, the range of socially approved personality styles was relatively narrow. The demassification of media presents a dazzling diversity of role models and life style for one to measure oneself against. Moreover, the new media do not feed us fully formed chunks, but broken chips and blips of imagery. Instead of being handed a selection of coherent identities to choose among, we are required to piece one together: a configurative or modular me. This is far more difficult, and it explains why so many millions are desperately searching for identity.