This 25 minute interview with Alvin Toffler is from 2007, and he goes into several of the many themes of his 2006 book, Revolutionary Wealth.* The book was published in 2006, and Toffler died in 2016. Yet the book is still mind blowing for how deeply it dives into how different the emerging Information Age is from the Industrial Age we are still moving out of. Seventeen years after being published and still very few people are talking about the changes to society that Toffler was exploring in the book nearly 20 years ago.
It's the middle of May in 2023 as I write this. At this point it's hard for any of us to remember the "before times," way back in 2019. Life in the 21st century was cruising along, not ideal by any means, there was always some new phone model or software update to learn. But we were doing alright, it seems. OK, we had the Retail Apocalypse happening,lots of name brands stores closing down. We also somehow managed to elect a whacko for president in 2016. His autoritarian leanings scared any patriotic American who actually likes free speech and civil liberties, and that Constitution thing. But even so, we were managing.
Then we rang in a new decade, New Year's Eve 2019, rolled into 2020, the third decade of this millenium began, and things still seemed pretty normal. And then the crazy virus from China hit U.S. shores on a couple of cruise ships from Japan, and the world went fucking nuts. A 100 year pandemic that led to mandatory shutdowns of businesses all over, for most of you. I was one of the homeless people who got left outside to die when everything closed down. Turned out the virus liked it better in doors, but we didn't realize that for a while. Either way, everyone's lifestyle was seriously impaced. Over 40 million people lost their jobs for a while, some permanently, and the economy tanked, technically it was a short depression, because GDP dropped more than 10%, it dropped 32% in under three months.
"This will only be for a couple of weeks" we were told at first when mandatory face masks and shutdowns began. Reember that? Then "a couple more weeks," then another month. The restrictions dragged on, and ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But it kept going. Work from home, Zoom calls, and whole families watching and making TikTok dance videos. School was on a computer screen. Then it kept dragging on, and on. And that's for all of us who lived, over a million Americans, and millions more around the world died from Covid-19 complications. We all know that stuff, as much as we're trying to forget.
Then came stimulus money, "helicopter money" as the business press often called it. Suddenly people were locked down but buying cars and stocks and homes they couldn't afford when things began to open up partially. The pandemic became a political issue, along with a health and economic issue. Just about every single person's day to day life changed dramatically. Then the stimulus money blew up the stock market, the crypto markets, the real estate market, and the car and truck market, even collectibles like vintage comic books and baseball card prices soared. All that money eventually coagulated into serious inflation, which eventually led to The Fed raising interest rates to fight the inflation they caused. The fastest interest rates rise in U.S. history in turn began to kill crypto, stocks, real estate, and now the auto market is feeling it. Ridiculous prices on assets began to drop back down some. But not before thousands of Millennials bought homes at above market prices at the peak of the market. They've got a big lesson in basic economics coming soon. Now we are heading into another recession.
How did all this happen? Why are so many things so crazy now? Did anyone see this craziness coming? Did anyone try to warn us about the long list of issues we've all been dealing with?
Yes, as a matter of fact, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in a series of books that Alvin wrote, did forecast many of the things we have dealt with, not just since 2020, but since Alvin's first major book, Future Shock, was published way back in 1970. His next book took a decade, and tons of research. The Third Wave was published in 1980, and those two became the books he is best known for.
The main theme was that we were leaving an "industrial-based society," and moving into an "information-based society," as he referred to them. Now, 43 years later, it's easy to say, "Duh!," to the idea that we were (and still are) leaving the Industrial Age, and moving into the Information Age. We are all familiar with that basic idea now. Alvin Toffler wrote several more books, building on The Third Wave theme, the last one being Revolutionary Wealth, published in 2006. Alvin Toffler died a decade later in 2016. But the incredible research, thinking, and insights in Revolutionary Wealth are still mind blowing, even today, 17 years after it was published. Being a huge fan of the Tofflers, and having written about what I now call The Big Transition, the continuation of the Tofflers' Third Wave changes still happening in society, I just re-read Revolutionary Wealth.
Here are just a few of the ideas in the book that should be everyday knowledge, but aren't, much to our detriment. If you want to understand why the 2020's seem so crazy, Revolutionary Wealth is the single best book I know of, to help figure out what's happening today.
We all know there are the things we focus on in everyday life. For most people, everyday life revolves around their family, their job, their house, doing laundry, getting oil changes in the car, getting the kids to their after school activities, fixing dinner, and everything else people do day after day. Then there are fundamentals in life, things like going to school, getting an education, finding a job, paying bills, the basics of life in today's world.
Early on in Revolutionary Wealth, Alvin Toffler goes even deeper, into what he calls "Deep Fundamentals." These are apsects of human life and human society that go on at a level that few of us, even geeky futurist thinker dweebs like me, rarely ponder. Three of the major deep fundamentals he explores are the changes in how we relate to time, space (location in the country), and work.
For example, when the Industrial Age was building, huge numbers of former farmers became assembly line workers in factories, and precise time became much more important. Factory workers needed to be trained to get to work on time, to do repetitive jobs, and to do things at specific times. That era, in the late 1800's, is when people started carrying pocket watches or wristwatches, and began to put clocks everywhere, at home, in the office, and in the factory. Another part of that is that is when our current school system was invented, to "teach industrial discipline," that's actual wording from those days. It's also a huge reason why our education system sucks in so many ways. It's not the teachers, my sister's a teachers, and Alvin Toffler's sister was to, there are plenty of great teachers out there that want to make our education system better, in 1,000 different ways. But we are stuck, for now, with an education system that was invented about 140 or 150 years ago, to turn farm kids into assembly line workers. The system itself is outdated, and needs to be completely reinvented. That's just one big issue affecting not only how "revolutionary wealth" is created in today's world, but it drastically affects how society evolves or devolves going forward.
Back to the Deep Fundamental of time, few people actually work on assembly lines anymore in the U.S., how we interact with time has changed, and continues to change dramtically. The same is true of the deep fundamentals of space, or location. There was a time when a city needed to be near a deep water port, major railroad lines, or natural resources, like timber or minerals, to thrive. That has changed to a huge degree in a world where wealth is often created primarily with ideas. Austin, Texas is a major tech hub these days, not because it's on an ocean port or major navigable river like the Mississippi or the Ohio. Austin is a tech hub largely because of a culture with lots of weird creative people, artists, musicians, filmakers, and tech entrepreneurs. It's not dependent on nearby coal or potash mines. Different things are important now, and we are in a long period of chaotic change between the fading Industrial Age society, and the emerging Information Age society. Alvin Toffler explores these deep fundamentals and really digs into how these nuances make a big difference at a level almost no one is looking at or thinking about.
As with all of his books since The Third Wave in 1980, Toffler goes over the concept that we are still moving into the Third Wave of human society. He also explains this in the video above. To clarify this idea, here are the three waves he defined in The Third Wave. Originally, humans lived in small tribal bands that we generally refer to as hunter/gatherers in sociology today. The First Wave was the change from hunter/gatherers into an Agricultural Age, a world of farmers. This started somewhere around 9,000 years ago, probably in or near Turkey, according to Toffler. Agriculture moved very slowly, and took thousands of years to become the dominant lifetstyle in the world. But when people stayed in one place and became farmers, the lifestyle of every single person changed dramatically from the earlier tribal societies. Villages and small towns and cities began to form.
The Second Wave was the change from the Agricultural Age into the Industrial Age. The Toffler's put this age's start about 350 years ago, and it took a couple of hundred years to become the dominant lifestyle in the world. That transition happend much faster than the Agricultural revolution, and again every single person's lifestyle changed. Small villages became towns, and some towns grew into large, and even huge cities as the Industrial Age progressed.
The Third Wave began in 1956, when the number of "white collar" office workers first outnumbered the number of "blue collar" factory workers in the U.S.. The Information Age began slowly growing from that point. The transition between the two was still continuing, when Alvin offler published Revolutionary Wealth in 2006, and I argue this transition is still going on today.
In today's world, in many developing countries, there still are First Wave people living off subsistence agriculture, and in "developed" countries, we still have many Second Wave Industrial Age people and businesses, still working from that mentality of building physical objects as the main source of wealth.
We also have the Third Wave, Information Age people, creating "products" and services that in many cases, don't physically exist, like websites and internet content, streaming video, financial services, and the huge video gaming industry. Huge amounts of wealth are now created in these revolutionary ways, built in a digital world and a physical world, yet in new ways.
We also have a lot of battles between the people and interests in each of these waves. Toffler refers to this as "wave warfare," where, for example, old school Industrial businesses lobby politicians for one sort of result, and Information Age tech businesses will lobby politicians for a completely different set of results and outcomes. These different special interests are battling each other, though few people think of it this way. This is yet another cause of drama and chaos in today's society.
Another issue Toffler dives into is the economic conundrum of "information-based" products and wealth. One traditional definition of "economics" was "the allocation of scarce resources." But knowlege is not a scarce resource, like coal or steel. Another issue is that many different people can use the same "knowledge," but only one person can use a machine or a piece of steel at one time. The point is that the whole world of "economics" doesn't even have models to even to begin and try and figure out how to quantify and analyze information-based products and services. Economics is using obsolete Industrial Age concepts to try and analyze an Information Age world economy. They simply don't have the basic tools to analyze business and finance in the Information Age world. It will be decades before economists come up with, and agree on, even basic models to anaylze an information-based economy.
This brings me to another idea Toffler shares in this book. The idea is that much of the knowledge each of us has in our head is outdated and obsolete. It just isn't true anymore. The Toffler's call this "Obsoledge," for "obsolete knowledge." We are all operating with some knowledge about particular subjects that is simply outdated, because that specific area has evolved, changed, and our thinking hasn't.
Another huge issue Toffler digs deep into in Revolutionary Wealth is the idea of "Prosuming," another word they made up, in a previous book. Prosuming is creating a good or service for personal consumption. Prosuming is work that is done by someone, but no money changes hands, so it doesn't get counted in the money economy. For example, when you cook your own food and make dinner for your family, that was work that you did for your family's consumption. But other than buying the food, no money changed hands for the actual work of cooking, serving the food, and doing the dishes afterwards. If your whole family had gone to a restaurant, you would have to pay quite a bit for someone else to perform those services.
Prosuming is its own non-money, which is much larger than the actual money economy. All of this work that's done for free, all across the U.S., and around the world, that has huge effects on the money economy. But the contributions of pro-suming are never really acknowledged by economists and others in academia. Linux software was created for free, and has had major effects on the world. Wikipedia is a huge, crowd-source, pro-suming project, another big example of pro-suming in today's technological world. Wikipedia largely put encyclopedias out of business, but doing the job better, more up-to-date, with mostly amateurs, that correct each other's contributions. The end result is an evolving "encyclopedia" that's doesn't physically exist, yet is available as a free resource to billions of people around the world. Another great example of highly productive prosuming are all those thousands of how-to videos on YouTube, to help us all learn to use new devices, software, and other things. YouTube was a year old, and still often laughed at, when Toffler published Revolutionary Wealth. Now half of all TV watching, on big screens, is YouTube content, most of it creator-made content, not scripted shows produced by major studios.
The most influential pro-suming, as any mom knows, is all the work moms and dadsand other family members do raising kids, that never gets counted as paid work. Employers looking for new people to fill jobs don't have to worry about their recruits being potty trained, knowing how to speak English (or whatever their native language in their country), and most basic social skills. Parents do those things, and many more, to prepare kids to be adults. Sure, some do better jobs than others. But imagine how much money would have to be spent to hire a crew to raise and train a single baby until they were old enough to get their first job. The cost would be enormous. All that work of getting kids to adulthood is done by moms, dads, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and some friends. That is an huge benefit to society that never gets any economic value attached to it. That is just one part of pro-suming in today's world.
Another issue that all these other changes have lead to in this period of transition is the great mismatches in different aspects of society. In the height of the Industrial Age, with most people working repetitive assembly line jobs, people were largely interchangable. When there were 1,000 job openings, average people could fill most of them. A lot of those jobs could easily mix and match employees. So when the government said we have million empty jobs, employers needed a million average people to fill the vast majority of them.
Now we have far more jobs that involve specialized knowedge, creativity, critical thinking, or skill sets that are much more rare. That's why, as I write this, we have (officially) 9.6 million jobs that need workers, and 6 million unemployed people. Because long term unemployed people are no longer counted, we actually have two or three othe runemployed people for each one that is officially counted. So we probably have around 18 million unemployed people of working age now. But those millions people can't, or won't fill those 9.6 million jobs open right now. So many jobs require specialized technical, or other skills and knowledge, that we have this huge mismatch. We have lots of jobs that need filled, and lots of people who need good jobs, but they don't fit each other. This mismatch is just one of many happening in society right now.
Another mismatch is the spatial/geographical mismatch. Tech jobs tend to cluster in a small number of tech hub cities, because tech companies cluster where the best tech workers are, generally. Since tech workers have some of the highest pay in today's work world, they are willing to pay more for housing, and other services. So tech hub citites and regions, like the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, L.A./SoCal, Boston, the Washinton D.C./Arlington area, Austin, Texas, have seen rent and home prices soar over the last 30 years or so. This makes it much harder for lower wage service workers to survive in those areas.
But at the same time, many former powerhouse cities of the Industrial Age, like Chicago, Illinois, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio, and many others, have struggled to survive and rebuild, after losing 100,000 factory jobs, and that many people, in some cases. Other big Industrial cities have practically collapsed after the loss of tens of thousands of factory jobs, like Detroit and Flint, Michigan, and one of the worst, Gary, Indiana. We have cities where high paying tech jobs can't find workers. And we have dozens of towns and cities that are a shadow of their former selves, struggling to find any jobs for all their residents.
This is another mismatch of the cities that worked economically 50 years ago, and the ones that work the best economically in the emerging Information Age. We have all kinds of cheap rental houses, and even thousands of abandoned ones, in places where there isn't near as much of an economy anymore. At the same time, we have people renting treehouses in Austin for $3,000 a week or so to go to SXSW, the music and tech festival. Alvin Toffler goes into other huge mismatches in society caused by the changes in how we interact with the deep fundamentals of time, space, and work.
Oh yeah, Toffler mentions a pandemic as one major thing we had to look out for in the future, a handful of times in the book, yes, way back in 2006. That was one of many issues he saw potentially arising and causing a lot of trouble.
Revolutionary Wealth is over 500 pages, and this was the third time I've read it, the first was back in 2010 or 2011, I think. I read dozens of books in that era. I read it again in about 2015-2016, I think. It's still mind blowing, although the world has changed quite a bit in 17 years. There is so much of what he wrote about back then that is not only still happening, but almost no one seems to be using many of the ideas he wrote about. If you ever get a chance to write a reading list for current world leaders, and city leaders everywhere, put this book on the list. There is still a whole lot to learn from the work of the late Alvin Toffler. We would be a lot better off today if most major leaders, at every level, had studied this book back when it came out. We would be a lot better off if Revolutionary Wealth was mandatory reading in colleges 10 or 15 or 17 years ago.
So there's a very brief look at an incredible book, now 17 years old, that still holds a ton of valuable information on why our world is so crazy today. That's the mark of a good futurist, when the book still has a lot to teach a decade or two later. Revolutionary Wealth is one of those books. Now you know. Maybe a few of you will read it, which is my hope.
* Not a paid link
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