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.

Very thought provoking about the rate of change around the world and how we have to reframe our thinking.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler have gone through enormous lengths to write this book which incorporates concepts they have previously written about in "Future Shock", "Third Wave", and others.

"Revolutionary Wealth" is a book that should be read by economists, historians, scientists, political leaders, parents, ... (The list can go on, but generally is for anyone concerned about the future). The authors have incredible credibility with their predictions on the rise of information technology, the internet, new forms of war, the prosumer, and other vitally important concepts of our 21 century reality.

These predictions were made decades ago, and in 2006 a new book has arrived from the Futurists who actually got most of their predictions right. In "Revolutionary Wealth" the authors expand on the concept of the Prosumer to explain how modern economic theories are deeply flawed. Their analysis of "deep fundamentals" is something quite different than that which most in formal education are introduced to. Time and Space are undergoing radical changes as is the world market and international relations.

The central concept behind this work is that of change and our need to be flexible with the change that is happening all around the world. The authors argue that with the Third Wave revolution in knowledge intensive technology the world will forever be in a new state of growth, in that state the wealth generated to run our lives and the globe will be charting a revolutionary path.

The book is thick, dense, and difficult to finish as much of the reading needs time for interpretation and discussion to flesh out the theories and realities presented in the book. Regardless, the future laid out in it's pages will literally and figuratively shock the reader.

I did not agree 100 percent with everything the authors have presented by any means, however they do not set out to convince the reader of their correctness, rather they set out to explain the organized evidence that they so meticulously have gathered from around the world's most highly credible sources.

This book deals with the realities and problems in our 21st century, and surprisingly, bringing inspirational ideas and examples of how our imagination and innovation can still triumph over the tallest obstacles.

If possible it would deserve 6/5 stars for its exceptional contribution to the world's academia.

I am reading this book now. I can see how the current crisis has come about....I knew from his previous books it would happen because the laws, regs and govt were not keeping up with the changes to technology, which created changes to communication all of which require new ways of thinking about education.

This is a very very interesting book as are all of his books along this line....it is even more imperative that children learn the skills of critical thinking and creative thinking. The existing school system is not designed for that--that is what he cxplores in this book and the previous one. IN business it was very very clear that our schools are struggling to produce good thinkers.

A tofflers yet another wonderful book in the context of net connected world, discussing prosumers and such newly coined concepts of business in goods, services.....producing and consuming behavior and so on so forth...

A bit outdated (just a bit, in my opinion) after 8 years, but as any Toffler book is an interesting read that offers a consistent vision of the future with the panorama of the events happening at the time and development of history. On this one the Tofflers expose the value of wealth based on knowledge, and how it not only shakes the foundations of current systems in place but also seems to have no limits and how embracing it early might impact our present.

The major flaw this book has is without a doubt how it seems to jump from fact to fact in order to expose a point. It's clearly well documented but it didn't found its mean point, the redaction being too.. pragmatic I think, focusing on event after event which makes you feel like there's little or no effort to explore the underlying causes of the events. Nonetheless the Tofflers dare to throw some ideas here and there and develops some interesting concepts while exciting us about the vast array of opportunities the future might hold.

A pretty good read overall, just wished they delved some more into a few aspects (how to adapt the value of prosume or the needed change for institutions, for instance) but they clearly aimed to be as broad as they could with this one.

As usual, Toffler provides an amazingly insightful vision of the forces shaping both modern society and the near future.

In this book, he claims that the new information age creates a focus on knowledge (as opposed to the agricultural age's focus on land and the industrial age's focus on money), and plots some of the consequences of that focus.

Extremely useful and downright prescient.

knowledge is power, money , money of knowledge , power of knowledge .... .

This book is full of historical anecdotes, statistics and economic facts, thats the way the authors explain the main concept of the book. Although it can get a little boring at times it gave me great insight of how the world economy may be in the future. Will we still use money in a knowledge based economy? That question is still buzzing in my head.

It's one of my least favourite books of this author, nonetheless a good read.

A book that explains why we're in trouble as a small group of corporate feudal lords control almost all the world's money and work to rule us as peasants.

All I can say it read it. Knowledge is wealth.

Note to self: I'm on page 131
Planning to return to this one. I've always found the Toeffler's insights on culture to be stimulating.