The whole book in summary: Things are rapidly changing, and all change is good. It's an exciting time to be alive. The future is going to be better and more impressive than anything we've ever seen.

The book did a good job assembling its facts but does a poor job remaining objective. It is very clear in its opinion that people who choose to farm for a living are "backward."

This book seems the complete opposite of the book I read right before it (Too Much Magic). This book is very optimistic about the future and praises all the scientific advancements of today and tomorrow. I found the optimism to be depressing because I don't think all this new technology is a good thing. Why are scientists wasting their time, energy, and money on things like exploring the inner workings of a grain of rice when there are much more important problems to solve in our society that don't require expensive technology? We have poverty, shootings, wars, corruption, poor education, drugs, teen pregnancy, pollution, an increasingly chronically sick population, extreme income inequality, fossil fuels running out, a Texas-sized garbage patch in the middle of the ocean, epidemics of obesity, autism, diabetes, etc. Instead of inventing fancy new unnecessary junk, we should be trying to solve the problems of our world that should be even easier to solve.

The book also acts like the wonderful "third wave" of wealth (service economy, developed countries, computerized) is the fate of every country as each country continues to develop and become more westernized. Farming was the first wave, and industrialism was the second wave. But the "developed countries" cannot survive without some other country farming their food and manufacturing their products. In order to keep our selfish third wave way of life, other countries have to remain undeveloped (and poor) to feed our endless consumerism.

Example of this biased optimism about the future: A family eating together used to be the norm. That was so rigid and prisonlike. Nowadays "schedules are so individualized." Cleveland, Ohio used to be a great center for industry. Now it's a pile of urban blight. But let's get excited about all the manufacturing happening in China! Let's not think about the probable possibility that it could meet the same fate as Cleveland! China used to be filled with "extreme peasant misery"! Now it's so much better! Now it's filled with factory worker misery!

At least the peasants could eat what they grew. Whether on a farm or in a factory, they're still poor. Factory work is worse because you don't own the fruit of your labor. You're working for someone else on someone else's terms, and you don't even get to keep what you make. Factory work may pay more, but that doesn't make it better.

China is guilty of many humans rights abuses, and still we trade with them. Why? FOR CHEAP LABOR AND EASY PROFIT!

The book criticizes people who glorify pre-industrial villages--"conveniently forgetting the lack of privacy, the sexism, and the narrow-minded local tyrants and bigots so often found in real villages." Modern American society is STILL filled with sexism, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness! Many say our president is a tyrant. And is privacy really so much better here? There are cameras everywhere, and the Internet makes people's private lives public for the whole world to see! How about leaving distant villages alone and let them manage their own affairs? The only reason developed nations like ours want to "globalize" is to exploit more cheap labor and natural resources from their land. It is NEVER about improving their lives.

The book calls the economy we're in now a "knowledge" economy, I suppose just because of the Internet. Seems to ignore the fact that the Internet is usually not used for gathering information, but for stupid stuff like sharing personal photos and looking at porn and exchanging pointless text messages. The book says 56% of the work force in America now performs work that is "managerial, financial, sales-related, clerical or professional." That's a pretty broad category. The authors want us to think this is a great thing, but it's really not. I'm willing to bet that the largest chunk of that 56% are sales-related, meaning restaurant waiters and store cashiers. And those kind of jobs require sooo much more knowledge than factory work or farming? NOPE! The majority of workers are in low paid jobs that don't require much knowledge at all. IQ is dropping.

The book seems to also think it's a good thing if some gadget can store all information and memories for a person so that "pupils will need to memorize nothing," because that could be great for Alzheimer's patients. Yeah, but what about all the younger people who are supposed to go to school to learn things?! It is NOT progress to encourage humans to get DUMBER just because one genius invented some machine to think for them!

The book discounts philosophical wisdom from Aristotle and Plato, just because they believed in unrelated incorrect "facts" of their day. Just because a person was incorrect about something doesn't mean that everything that person ever said or thought was wrong and worthless.

The book is about revolutionary wealth--knowledge. The only kind of knowledge I see making people rich is the knowledge to manipulate others to believe lies. Such as: your government and corporations have your best interest at heart. When the reality is all they care about is money. Knowledge is worthless in today's world unless it generates money. Geniuses are not rewarded for their intelligence unless they invent some product to profit off of. No one cares about the knowledge of the inner workings of a grain of rice--unless that knowledge can get you thousands of dollars when you sell it. So this "revolutionary wealth" is no different than any wealth of the past. In the past, people sold their food, then they sold their factory created things. The people of the future will still be buying food and junk, so someone will still get getting rich off that, while poor people do all the hard work.

The authors imply that all science is good because it increases wealth. So let's forget if it results in tortured animals and poor health. Like it is so terrible for science to be "paralyzed." It is unwise to continue to seek knowledge for knowledge's sake. At what point will humanity ever be satisfied with our way of life? We should be trying to improve our existing lives with good health instead of seeking to prolong it with organ transplants and such. Science may one day find how to live forever, but the more important question is, should we? No, we shouldnt, when there are so many problems in society that can't be solved with technology. Technology is getting smarter, but people are getting dumber. We don't need science to solve income inequality; we just need common sense. Exploring a grain of rice is not helping society. GMO foods are not helping society.

Science is corrupt. It only gets funding if big profits are on the horizon. Data is manipulated. Unsafe things are put on the market without sufficient testing. People blindly trust science as if its the very same thing as an authority figure or consensus knowledge. Science has become a religion, a tool of the rich to persuade the public to buy what they're selling.

The authors think GMO food is going to solve poverty. Ha! As long as people have to BUY their food, there will always be poor people. There is no lack of food. There is lack of MONEY. GMO food has health risks. They are never tested in longterm studies. GMO food is invented so farmers can spray more poisons on the crops. Those poisons kill pollinators and harm humans as well. People would be better off being farmers. They may make no money but at least they would be fed by their produce! Not much use for money when you can live off the land. But oh no , the rich cats can't allow that. They want everyone to be a slave to the money, working for a boss, to enrich the ones at the top. Give a man a fish (food), and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish (grow food) and you feed him for a lifetime.

The book thinks its so great that scientists are going to put vitamins and vaccines into food to prevent things like vitamin a deficency and diarrehea. How about just improving sanitation and the cleanliness of wherever they get their water? Don't need fancy franken-foods to solve health issues. Just clean the area and make sure there's access to clean water and food. But I guess this solution is not considered because it doesn't make anyone any money!

The book is wrong about society becoming more individualized. As long as the majority of kids attend public school, most people will turn out the same. Not every kid may come from a nuclear family, but they will probably come from a liberal materialistic/consumerist family, or a republican Christian materialist/consumerist family. Doesn't matter if they're liberals or republicans, because they're all materialist/consumerist.

De-massification is a good idea, however it's not realistic for it to happen with our population being as high as it is and only continuing to increase, not decrease. The authors talk like there's going to be so much individualization in the future, which is pretty funny since it's just an illusion of choice. You basically have a choice between Coke or Pepsi. Just a few companies own everything.

The "revolutionary wealth" is the actions people take without pay (prosumption). The book says prosumption will somehow generate a bunch of real wealth (money). Like self-help products. While they can make someone money, they will never be encouraged by government, because the health care industry wants people to continue seeing regular doctors, who require insurance, so that doctors and insurance companies can keep making money. Self-sufficiency doesn't make people much money, so society will never encourage it. Sometimes people get lucky and their hobby can be sold for real money. But once it gets sold for real money, it is no longer prosumption but producing. And most people's hobbies do NOT result in money being made off them. Prosumption is not a new phenomenon. As long as humans have existed, they have created things or done things without pay. When societies began using money, people then started selling their prosumption and it became producing.

The authors say that capitalism is dying just because people share bought stuff for free. But this act is illegal because the capitalist society doesn't allow it. That doesn't mean capitalism is dying. The item still cost someone money. The authors seem to think that capitalism dying would be great because it's a change, and all change is good. But there is no wealth without capitalism. I doubt the authors would be happy if all the hard work they put into this long book got them no money in return. The authors later say, "the number and variety of buyable items available for purchase around the world is astronomical and growing every minute." That right there is proof that capitalism is not dying at all.

The book says that outsourcing has a positive effect because the foreign "well-paid" workers use their wages to buy American brand stuff. That helps U.S. COMPANIES, not U.S. Workers. So outsourcing is only good for the companies, not American workers. This book seems to assume that its readers are CEOs. No wonder it has such a positive outlook. The future only looks bright for those who are already rich.

Interesting collection of ideas. Development of a central theme was so-so since so many topics were covered.

The book does a good job of cataloguing the various forces, trends and issues driving changes in the world today. But the information is presented in a rambling fashion without much focus - this may have to do with the fact that it was written over several years. In a sense, the book is a collection of news articles and new developments.

I remember being blown away as an undergraduate in the 1970s by popular sociological and futurist books on socio-technological challenges about the future such as Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave, (1980), David Riesmann (The Lonely Crowd, 1950), Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957), The Status Seekers(19 59) and The Waste Makers(1960), Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Marshall MacLuhan (The Medium is the Massage, 1967), the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth (1972), Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener's The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. Dizzy and heady stuff indeed!

Years later I read the Toffler's Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Centur (1990) and War and AntiWar (1993). For me, the spell spun by Future Shock still persisted into the first book but fizzled out for me in the second book. I was quite disappointed by Revolutionary Wealth(2006), when I read it in 2022 -perhaps the problem was reading it so long after it had been published. It strikes me as a book written at breakneck speed, firing off scattershot tidbits of striking, under-researched news, uneven, shallow and embarassingly market and. Techno-optimist. Very little analysis or view of the forest, occluded by unevenly and unsteadily planted treelets and hype:

A new way of life based on revolutionary wealth is still taking form in America -plug-in/plug-out jobs, glitter and hype, speed, commercialism, 24/7 entertainment, speed, cleaner air, dirtier television, rotten schools, speed, a broken health service and longer life, speed again, perfect landings on Mars, information overload, surplus complexity, reduced racism [sic], hyper-diets and hyper-kids[...]

It might help to think about America not simply as the world's most powerful nation-state, which is it currently is, but as the world's greatest social and economic laboratory [...] It is the main place where new ideas and new ways o life are eagerly tried -and sometimes pushed to stupid, even cruel extremes- before they are rejected, Experiment are under way in this lab not merely with technologies but with culture and the arts, sexual patterns, family structure, fashion, diets and sports, strat-up religions and brand-new business models.

One might be forgiven for acerbically thinking that it is a mad inventor's lab, the experiments aren't thought about, planned, created or reviewed, they are simply tried out ...and to be brutally honest, some of “stupid, even cruel extremes” have not been rejected.

Logic is not always a strong point of the book and it is frequently lost in the froth of excitement about the new and wonderful opportunities that the authors feel could come about. For example, the Tofflers are scathing about present-day education in the US, and are over-optimistically excited about new media's educational potential:

Young people have always educated -and miseducated themselves. Today, however they do with the dubious help of the new media. Games and cell phones are hidden behind open textbooks. Text messages fly back and forth even as the teacher drones on.

It is as though while teachers incacerate kind in classrooms, their ears, eyes and minds escape to rove the cyberuniverse. From a very young age, they are aware that no teacher and no school can make available even the tiniest fraction of the data, information, knowledge -and fun- available online. They know that in one universe they are prisoners. In the other, free.

Note how the final sentence undermines the second sentence's “dubious help pf the new media”assertion. So, are children to be left free to rove the contradctory thickets of news, games, sound-bytes, fake news and predators of the cyberuniverse? Is that the Tofflers solution to the education problem? Or consider the following concluding, supposedly cheerful, remark:

Having generated more new data, information and knowledge than all our ancestors combined, we have organized it differently, distributed it differently and combined and recombined it in new and more transient patterns. We have also created new cyberworlds in which ideas, magnificent and terrifying alike, bounce off one another like trillions of intelligent Ping-Pong balls.

What does this metaphor of ideas as trillions “Ping-Pong”balls bouncing against each other, supposed to mean?

Some of the Tofflers throw-away comments are startling spot on, others are downright silly, or wrong on so many levels:

As sex ratios change in many countries, with male babies outnumbering baby girls -120:100 in China, for example- the shortage of women is likely to promote male homosexuality, leading writer Mark Steyn ask, tongue in cheek, whether China is “planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta”.

The authors are also blinded by their ideas on the importance of “prosumers” to the point of stating:

Prosuming could even, ultimately, transform the ways in which we deal with problems such as unemployment [...} The reasonable [textbook] assumption was that if a million workers were out of jobs, the creation a million jobs woud solve the problem.

In the knowledge-intensive economy, however, that assumption is false. First, the United States and other countries no longer even know how many unemployed there are, or what that term means when so many people combine their “job”with self-employment and/or create unpaid value by prosuming [...] The problem of unemployment thus becomes qualitative rather than merely quatitative [...] The largely overlooked reality is that eveb the unemployed are employed. They are as busy as all of us are, creating unpaid value.

This is breathtaking, even offensive, blindness to the very real problems of unemployment, subemployment and the worst abuses of the gig economy, on the level of Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" supposed rejoinder to the starving crowds demand for bread during the French Revolution.

If you are willing to suspend disbelief and have factoids and snippets of snappy ideas flood over you, you will probebly love this book. If you hope to make more sense of what is going on, you can buckle down and start trying to reengineer the structure of this book, cross out the obsolete, incorrect ideas and the hype filter out the interesting and vauable insights. Be warned though, this salvage attempt will take (considerable) time and effort.

Thought provoking work that reads like a series of extended essays, the purpose being to show a true state of science, business and economics today and where it is headed. It does a great job of explaining how Japan rose to the top in electronics and computer field, and why China may very well be the next economic superpower. It also evaluates how the United States was able to stake a claim as the current economic superpower and why it may not hold on to that title for much longer. The book also evaluates how our education system and ways of thinking about business are outdated, conveniently modeled after the industrial age of our country while ignoring that we're no longer living in that age, but have evolved into a knowledge age. Our regimented schedules are becoming more flexible. Specialists are learning to customize alternatives. The assembly line factory consistency no longer thrives, and yet our schools are still training students for a past era. Very informative.

Toffler seems to have a lot of knowledge and insight about a broad ranges of topics covered in this book. I enjoyed the book, and each section seems to provide several topics for long discussion/research. My only complaint is that the book seemed to lack some focus. Many of the topics seemed to be discussed only at a shallow level, leaving me kind of wanting a more thorough analysis.

I tried an experiment to open the book to a random page and read a single chapter sub-section and then discuss this topic. Most of these little sections could probably be discussed at length.

Some specific topics I found interesting is the various discussions about "prosuming" which is the vast hidden economy of goods that are created and consumed directly without ever entering the commonly measured global economy. This includes things like digital photo creation and editing, self-checkout at the grocery, and in the future even creating our own physical products with 3D printers.

The deep fundamentals of time, space, and knowledge was also interesting.

I have liked Alvin Toffler's previous books, and this one is no exception. Very thought provoking and far-reaching in it's analysis. Looks toward the future and paints a picture of what could be coming.

Many of the same ideas from PowerShift, expanded towards wealth, poverty, and truth management

This is the latest offering by futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler. As always, their ideas about the future are exciting and innovative. The emerging information wealth revolution comes complete with "prosumer" class who create (those who create goods and services "for [their] own use or satisfaction, rather than for sale or exchange"). While there is no doubt that the Internet will change the world, there is some debate about what that change will mean for the future. Interesting and thought provoking as always but not one of my notable books this year.

An insight to what the future will hold and how wealth will be created. An in depth analysis of the past as well as the present and their argument towards why knowledge will be the capital of the future. So breathtakingly logical, so simple and yet something that blinds most of us as it sits right in front of our eyes today.

i like the deep fundamentals that the Tofflers talk about (1) space (2) time and (3) knowledge and how together they will change the way our economy functions

از آن دسته کتاب‌هایی بود که مدتی در قفسه منتظر ماند تا خوانده شد. اما تاسف خوردم که چرا زودتر آن را تمام نکرده بودم
شگفتی تحلیل دقیق تافلرها تا آخر کتاب متحیرم نگه داشته بود
اثری بسیار ارزشمند بود