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 thehidden 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
Since the mid-1960s, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have predicted the far-reaching impact of emerging technological, economic, and social developments on our businesses, governments, families, and daily lives. In REVOLUTIONARY WEALTH, they once again demonstrate their unparalleled ability to illuminate current trends and anticipate what they mean for the future.
REVOLUTIONARY WEALTH focuses on how wealth will be created—and who will get it—in the twenty-first century. As the knowledge-based economy (a reality the Tofflers predicted forty years ago) continues to replace the industrial-based economy, they argue, money is no longer the sole determinate of wealth. The Tofflers explain that we are becoming a nation of “prosumers,” consuming what we ourselves produce, and argue that we have all taken on “third jobs”—work we unwittingly do without pay for some of the biggest corporations in the country. Using fascinating examples from our daily lives, they illustrate how our everyday activities—from parenting and volunteering to blogging, painting our houses, and improving our diets—contribute to a non-monetary economy that is largely hidden from economists. Writing with the same insight and clarity that made their earlier books bestsellers, the Tofflers present fresh, groundbreaking new ways of thinking about wealth.
About the Author
ALVIN TOFFLER and HEIDI TOFFLER advise companies and governments worldwide on advances in economics, technology, and social change. They are the authors of such classics as Future Shock, The Third Wave, Powershift, and War and Anti-War. They write and lecture widely and their monthly column appears in major newspapers around the world. They live in Los Angeles, California.