Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives | 
| Authors: Alvin Toffler, Heidi Toffler
Publisher: Doubleday Business
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 21073
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 512
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.2
ISBN: 038552207X
Dewey Decimal Number: 339
EAN: 9780385522076
ASIN: 038552207X
Publication Date: June 12, 2007
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 On the Edge of an Amazing Future! May 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
We are on the edge of an amazing future. What changes lay ahead? What skills will you need to be successful and happy? Will you be ready?
Alvin and Heidi Toffler are futurists. They have studied and written predictions of the future for decades.
Their first book, Future Shock was released back in 1970. It was thoroughly researched and critically thought through. Many of their predictions came true.
Revolutionary Wealth also makes predictions about the future. Since their past books were proven to be accurate on many topics, it's fair to assume that their latest book will provide many insightful thoughts about the future.
Here are just a few of the topics: Waves of wealth, the edge of knowledge, the gospel of change, implosion, capitalism's end game, running tomorrow's money and much more.
The book is a page turner and provides a peek into what can and probably will happen depending on the paths that we as society take.
Here are some key excerpts from their work.
The Wealth System
"If the First Wave wealth system was chiefly based on growing things, and the Second Wave on making things, the Third Wave wealth system is increasingly based on serving, thinking, knowing and experiencing...The new wealth system demands a complete shake-up in the way increasingly temporary skill sets are organized for increasingly temporary purposes throughout the economy. Nothing is more deeply fundamental to the creation of wealth."
Knowledge
"In each of us there is a crowded, invisible warehouse full of knowledge and its precursor data and information. But unlike a warehouse, it is also a workshop in which we--or, more accurately, the electrochemicals in our brains--continually shift, add, subtract, combine and rearrange numbers, symbols, words, images, and memories, combining them with emotions to form new thoughts."
Cross Disciplinary Knowledge Required
"More and more jobs require cross-disciplinary knowledge, so that we find increasing need for hyphenated backgrounds--"Astro-biologist," "bio-physicist," "environmental-engineer," "forensic-accountant.""
A New Dawn
"Living at the dawn of this century, we are direct or indirect participants in the design of a new civilization with a revolutionary wealth system at its core. Will this process complete itself--or will the still incomplete wealth revolution come to a crashing halt?" 1
The message is clear. Those who will succeed and prosper in the coming years will have the following skills and backgrounds:
*Decision making
*Knowledge
*Schooling
*Experience
*Reasoning
*Intuition
*Common sense
*Confidence
These skills and background can be boiled down to three words: Critical Thinking Skills. With these skills you will be prepared for whatever challenges the future presents.
As with his book Future Shock and other books he has written, Toffler has an amazing ability to look at the very beginning of trends and then extrapolate a future out of those trends. His predications come from interviews with many world experts. Toffler then uses his critical thinking skills to integrating everything he has learned. From this knowledge he constructs a vision of the future. Not only that, he provides options we should consider to create a positive future for ourselves.
Knowledge is power:
This is a must read book to gain a glance into what tomorrow brings! It can be positive if we take the right steps...there is hope!
The Re-Discovery of Common Sense: A Guide to: The Lost Art of Critical Thinking
Brilliant! March 25, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Alvin and Heidi Toffler have added their best book yet to their impressive repertoire of futuristic books. This book is a must read for anyone interested in thriving in the 21st century. It is not about getting rich. It is about understanding the mega changes that are happening in the world and about to happen. Very informative!
 Brilliant Book December 17, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
For readers who are not familiar with Alvin Toffler, this is not another one of those "how to get rich" titles. Alvin Toffler is known for writing about social and economic trends. In one sentence, this book tells us what is happening in the world, what the future will bring and what won't work anymore.
In this ambitious book, the Tofflers provide numerous examples of how institutions like governments, regulatory bodies, trade unions, schools and courts fail to handle disasters and social, economic changes because they have not evolved fast enough to catch up with the little revolutions that have been going on.
The concept of "prosumer is revisited and expanded. Apparently, recently developments have provided more support for their concept of consumers producing what they and other potential consumers consume - often without pay. An interesting concept.
Though there is plenty of competition in every industry, the authors seem to believe that in a knowledge-based economy, opportunities to attain wealth are limitless as one person who uses his knowledge to derive wealth does not deprive another person of the ability to use his knowledge to obtain wealth.
That seems to be the basic theme of the book, but the Tofflers didn't stop there. There are 50 chapters full of examples of institutions that screwed up, unlikely success stories, experts who were wrong and so on. It's a brilliant book, but Revolutionary Wealth is a little complicated and certainly not something you can read for relaxation.
The Masters, Parents to us All, Confirm Hope from Knowledge November 23, 2007
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
Amazon appears to have eaten a review I created when this book first came out. I have been a fan of the Tofflers since I was first introduced to their work in the 1970's.
Although they were ahead of everyone else with their book Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century, which I described at the time as one of the top five books on the future of knowledge, ever; with this book they are dotting the i's and crossing the t's, connecting disparate dots such as I list below, and confirming that we are indeed at the beginning of a completely new era, at the very beginning of massive innovation that will make the early Silocon Valley days look like the Stone Age.
I'll take a look at my notes and see about expanding this review later, but for now the best value I can render is to list other books that reinforce what the Tofflers, intellectual parents to us all, are affirming.
I strongly recommend that you not limit yourself to this book, but go back and get PowerShift as well as the books listed below, which are but the top of the pyramid. We the People are coming back into power, and our first priority must be to help the five billion poor create infinite stabilizing wealth so that we might fulfill Buckminster Fuller's vision of being able to use existing resources and existing technology to create a good life for all--what his partner, Medard Gabel, in a forthcoming book, calls "seven billion billionaries."
See also:
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
The Knowledge Executive
Information Payoff
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Five Minds for the Future
Very rarely do I recommend my own books, but in this instance, since they wrote about me, I want to highlight just one of my books:
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
Amazing as always October 6, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
You may find my review biased as I have been a BIG fan of Alvin Toffler since his first book.
As with all of his/their books before, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have surpassed themselves again with the new concept of revolutionary wealth. The book has been written over a period of time, which is evident once you read through the book. Many events described as 'recent' have occured at least 2-3 years ago. But this is no way reduces the importance of the book.
Tofflers talk about knowledge as a form of wealth and how this new economy wealth defies all the established economic thoughts and how the society - nay world - is trying to grapple with the new concept.
A MUST READ for anyone who wants to understand the changes happing around them. Extremely thought provoking and immensly un-put-able book.
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