Revolutionary Wealth

How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives

By: Alvin Toffler, Heidi Toffler

Narrated by: Kevin Gray, Laura Dean

Starting with the publication of their seminal bestseller, Future Shock, Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given millions of listeners 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 listeners with powerful new tools for thinking about—and preparing for—their future.

©2006 Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler (P)2006 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

"In Future Shock, the Tofflers warned that many people 'will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon.' These days, from Baghdad to Bangalore to Boston, it seems more likely that people worry that the future will arrive too late. That's no small change, and it's one on which the Tofflers have been shining a light for years." --The New York Times Book Review

"Alvin and Heidi Toffler... show no signs of losing touch with the bleeding edge or slowing down. Their book is loaded with bits of intelligence..." --USA Today

"Revolutionary Wealth... will act as a valuable guideline for the future of our world. The success of Korea as an IT powerhouse and leader in the new age of knowledge-based economy can be attributed to the lessons I learned through... books such as The Third Wave and Future Shock." --Kim Dae-jung, former president of South Korea

Somewhat of a disappointment

Some concepts were interesting, the time and the space in the future. However Toffler is bored me to death explaining very basic concepts such as what is GPS, how it works and who uses it in large, advantages and disadvantages. The how people go to Home Depot to repair their own houses, how FedEx is saving money by reducing the number of operators, because now, get this: you can get tracking info on the net.
He somewhat acts like he’ll enlighten you with this “deep thoughts” but if you have not been in a coma for the last 10 years you will need a lot of patience. Lots of numbers and statistics that mainly beat around the bush of evident facts.
The big punch line is that even the non-paid activities are part of the economy and no one thinks about them. Not impressed.
I told my wife that I am reading a great futurologist. She asked if his past predictions came true. Thinking of the “Third Wave” , no, not really. She asked how come he’s still a great futurologist? Go figure…