Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Brilliant, incisive, and seminal, this book will be talked about for years to come. Highly recommended." Library Journal
Review
"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." Booklist
Review
"[The Tofflers] argue convincingly that we are on the verge of a post-scarcity world that will slash poverty and 'unlock countless opportunities and new life trajectories,' at least if we avoid the rapidly escalating risks to such progress." Nick Gillespie, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Reading this book is a lot like watching the preview of a new action movie: one rapid-fire, fragmentary scene after another, loud, flashy, logically unconnected to the one that came before or the one that comes after. It is very exciting, but when it is over you have no clear idea what the movie is actually about." Robert M. Solow, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
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.