Books — Alvin Toffler
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Revolutionary WealthHow it will be created and how it will change our livesby Alvin and Heidi TofflerStarting with the publication of their seminal bestseller, Future Shock, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given millions of readers new ways to think about personal life in today’s high-speed world with its constantly changing, seemingly random impacts on our businesses, governments, families and daily lives. Now, writing with the same rare grasp and clarity that made their earlier books classics, the Tofflers turn their attention to the revolution in wealth now sweeping the planet. And once again, they provide a penetrating, coherent way to make sense of the seemingly senseless.Revolutionary Wealth is about how tomorrow’s wealth will be created, and who will get it and how. But twenty-first-century wealth, according to the Tofflers, is not just about money, and cannot be understood in terms of industrial-age economics. Thus they write here about everything from education and child rearing to Hollywood and China, from everyday truth and misconceptions to what they call our "third job"—the unnoticed work we do without pay for some of the biggest corporations in our country. They show the hidden connections between extreme sports, chocolate chip cookies, Linux software and the "surplus complexity" in our lives as society wobbles back and forth between depressing decadence and a hopeful post-decadence. In their earlier work, the Tofflers coined the word "prosumer" for people who consume what they themselves produce. In Revolutionary Wealth they expand the concept to reveal how many of our activities—whether parenting or volunteering, blogging, painting our house, improving our diet, organizing a neighborhood council or even "mashing" music—pump "free lunch" from the "hidden" non-money economy into the money economy that economists track. Prosuming, they forecast, is about to explode and compel radical changes in the way we measure, make and manipulate wealth. Blazing with fresh ideas, Revolutionary Wealth provides readers with powerful new tools for thinking about—and preparing for—their future. Knopf (April 25, 2006) |
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War and AntiWarMaking Sense of Today's Global Chaosby Alvin and Heidi TofflerIn this highly original book, Alvin and Heidi Toffler train their sights on a subject that has haunted humanity since history began: war and peace. Their premise is that the way we make wealth is the way we make war—that today's revolutionary changes in business are being mirrored in the world's armies and the future of war itself. What is needed, they say, is a parallel revolution in the way we make peace.Tomorrow, as information and knowledge become the core of advanced economies, they say, we will see the triumph of "software over steel." Just as the theories of military strategist Carl von Clausewitz foreshadowed the industrialized war of the past two centuries—the bloodiest form of war ever—this book lays the basis for the "knowledge strategies" that will increasingly dominate military thinking from now on. Our politicians, military leaders, and peacemakers, the Tofflers warn, are no more prepared for changes like these than feudal swordsmen were for the arrival of the machine gun, the tank, and the airplane. In War and Antiwar the Tofflers unveil a new world map and introduce such striking concepts as the "revolt of the rich" and the new division of world power among three great civilizations—those of the past, present, and future. |
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Power Shiftby Alvin TofflerIn Powershift, Alvin Toffler brings to a climax the ideas set forth in his previous works to offer a stunning vision of the future that will change your life. In Powershift, Toffler argues that while headlines focus on shifts of power at the global level, equally significant shifts are taking place in the everyday world we all inhabit - the world of supermarkets and hospitals, banks and business offices, television and telephones, politics and personal life. The very nature of power is changing under your eyes. |