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[Reviewed in THE FUTURIST, November-December 2006]
Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. Knopf. 2006. 492 pages. Buy book.
Tofflerama, New and (Mostly) Old
In their unique style, Alvin and Heidi Toffler rework previous notions about societal waves of change and the wealth it creates. But have they missed the emerging Fourth Wave?
For more than 35 years, Alvin Toffler has been a "big deal." Due to his 1970 best seller, Future Shock, and a follow-up 1980 best seller, The Third Wave, he is widely seen in the United States, for better or worse, as the leading practitioner of "futurology" (a word frequently used by ignorant nonfuturist reviewers, usually with the hint of a snicker). Now Toffler writes with his wife Heidi's name added—she has worked with him from the start—in offering Revolutionary Wealth, another wannabe blockbuster.
Before getting into what the revolution is all about, a word of stylistic caution. As with all of their other books, this new one is amply larded with grandiose statements ("an upheaval similar to but even more sweeping than the industrial revolution"), intensifying adjectives (exploding, smashing, leaping, spearheading), neologisms (obsoledge, prosuming, complexorama), and ever-so-cutesy chapter and subchapter titles ("Giggle News," "Supper without Sushi," "Flash-Markets," "From Picos to Yoctos"), often only superficially explained. This journalism-run-amok may or may not make the reading experience more interesting and informative to the general reader, but for academic readers, it is a virtually guaranteed turnoff. This is a shame, because there are a lot of interesting ideas here, large and small, good and not-so-good, backed up with 62 pages of footnotes and a bibliography of nearly 300 items.
The Tofflers' main theme is that "revolutionary wealth" will result from the transition to brain-driven knowledge economies.
"The importance of knowledge in wealth creation has steadily grown and is now about to leap to a much higher level and cross additional borders," they write, "as more and more parts of the world plug in to an ever growing, ever changing, ever more accessible planetary brain bank. As a result, we will all, rich or poor, be living and working with revolutionary wealth or its consequences." This will come together to form "a new economic system," accompanied by "a new way of life" and "a new civilization." And it's all happening "at unprecedented speed."
It sounds like hot stuff, but what's really new? In one sense, it's just another version—admittedly one on steroids—of the transition from industrial to postindustrial, service, and (now) knowledge societies. It is the mainstream vision of evolutionary progress articulated by many social scientists, notably Daniel Bell. The concept is not even especially new for the Tofflers, who are reworking notions of accelerating change from Future Shock (1970); the new economy of "prosumers" and demassification from The Third Wave (1980); the shift to a "super-symbolic economy," a new system for creating wealth, and the "flex-firm" from Power Shift (1990); and the conflict between Second Wave and Third Wave groups as the central political tension today and the "superstruggle" for tomorrow from Creating a New Civilization (1995).
In Revolutionary Wealth, the Tofflers do offer some new ideas and new twists on the old, such as rearrangements of time and space in the new economy, attributes of knowledge, the future of jobs, decadence (due to "a systemic breakdown" of the vital institutional infrastructure in the United States and elsewhere), the future of capitalism, the "new tectonics" of "wave warfare," and the trap of "obsoledge" (an awful neologism for obsolete knowledge, which accumulates as change accelerates).
There is nothing necessarily wrong in using one's earlier ideas or bringing them up to date. Still, the Tofflers have been writing about the "super-struggle" of Second Wave vs. Third Wave for more than 25 years. One should note their premature forecast in 1980: "It is likely that the Third Wave will sweep across history and complete itself in a few decades." Not quite. Now, in 2006, we are told that "the past half century has merely been prologue." Indeed, the shift may still be coming, but one might ask whether the Tofflers (to hoist them on their own petard) have fallen into the "obsoledge" trap themselves.
A major clue is their emphasis on "prosuming," the off-the-books informal economy of unmeasured and unpaid economic activity. The authors devote eight of their 50 chapters to explaining "the prosumer economy" as the "hidden half" of all economic activity, and how new tools and materials ("biology, nanotools, desktop factories, fantastic new materials") will "permit all of us," as prosumers who both produce and consume our own output, "to do things for ourselves that we could never have imagined." This is all well and good, of course (although some will benefit more than others), and ample justification for the Tofflers' criticism of GDP as "Grossly Distorted Product" because it understates our wealth. But even as we build unmeasured human capital (by self-care for better health, self-learning, etc.), the GDP is grossly distorted in the other direction by omitting natural capital—a huge area of unmeasured wealth. As Al Gore, Lester Brown, and many earth scientists and environmentalists try to tell us, we're endangering our natural wealth at an accelerating pace. This is totally ignored by the Tofflers. Rather, one of the very few references they make to the environment and environmentalism is to complain that "the environmental movement . . . is increasingly taking on a religious character," which may or may not be true to some degree but misses a much larger point. Indeed, the Tofflers may be missing the next wave.
We must think closely about key paradigms appropriate to 2006 and beyond. Rather than "Second Wave" industrialism vs. "Third Wave" knowledge societies, identified in 1980, a Fourth Wave "super-struggle" of the early twenty-first century can now be increasingly seen—one between those concerned with climate warming, ecological degradation, and building a sustainable society and those who downplay this argument, ignore it, belittle it, question it, or simply don't get it. The latter group is exemplified by the Tofflers and by many narrow-thinking technophiles. Proponents of new technology are not necessarily opposed to environmental sustainability, as exemplified by James Martin's splendid new book, The Meaning of the 21st Century, which expertly deals with both global threats and techno-opportunities). But "Greenie" vs. "Techie" is a powerful axis of differing worldviews, arguably the most important in determining our fate. And the Techies are not without their religious element, as seen among those who view "The Singularity" as a secular Second Coming.
Whether or not one likes the new Toffler book, it should be emphasized that it is in no way representative of "futurology," futures studies, or futures thinking, which is expressed in a wide variety of styles on a wide variety of topics. For better and worse, the Tofflers are thoroughly unique. However, if Revolutionary Wealth were submitted to me as a doctoral dissertation (minus the distracting and inflated verbiage, of course), I'd hand it back for extensive updating. It misses the big picture while claiming to see it, and does so in a most dangerous way.
About the Reviewer
Michael Marien (mmarien@twc.rr.com) is founder and editor of
Future Survey and has read all of the Toffler books.
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