The Third Wave

If you are looking for descriptions of large-scale shifts in world economies and cultures, this book has it. Toffler was so far ahead in his thinking and in his grasp of the changing world order that it's staggering. Thirty years later and many of the concepts he outlined are just now taking shape. There is a "quotable" in every single paragraph. Read it.

Here are my notes The government was the great accelerator. Because of its coercive power and tax revenues, it could do things that private enterprise could not afford to undertake. Government could hot up the industrialization process by stepping in to fill emerging gaps in the system - before it became possible or profitable for private companies to do so. Government could perform anticipatory integration. By setting up mass education systems, government helps to engineer youngsters for their future roles in the industrial work force (hence, in effect, subsidizing industry) Without political integration, economic integration was impossible. Distributors wanting to sell goods over territory outside their own communities ran into different duties, taxes, labor regulations, and currencies. Distributors would have to consolidate with local economy and political consolidation as well The unification/ integration of political system and economic system led to the division of world into distinct national units. As each government sought to extend its market and its political authority, it came up against outer limits - language differences, cultural, social, geographic, and strategic barriers. The available transport, communication, and energy supplies, the productivity of its technology, all set limits on how large an area could be effectively ruled by a single political structure. The sophistication of accounting procedures, budgetary controls, and management techniques also determined how far political integration could reach. Within these limits, the integrational elites, corporate and government alike, fought for expansion. The broader the territory under their control and the bigger the economic market area, the greater their wealth and power became. As each nation stretched its economic and political frontiers to the utmost, it ran up not merely against these inherent limits but also against rival nations Imperialism - negotiations between centre and peripheral was often totally lopsided. Often local rulers or entrepreneurs were simply bought off by the Westerners, offered bribes or personal gain in return for sweating the native labor force, putting down resistance, or rewriting local laws in favor of the outsiders. Once conquering a colony, the imperial power often set preferential raw-material prices for its own businessmen and erected stiff barriers to prevent the traders of rival nations from bidding prices up. Many raw material needed by Westerners were virtually valueless to the local populations who had them. Geography was embedded in our voting systems. Elected officials are representatives of the inhabitants of a particular piece of land; a geographical district. Political systems assume that people would remain in one locality all their lives. Hence the prevalence of residency requirements in voting regulations Synchronization. Standardization. Linearization. They affected the root assumptions of the civilization and they b

When I started this book, I could not put it down before I finished it. For a month after that, I could not think of anything else but what I have read, and for the next twenty years I had countless occasions to see that the book was profoundly right. The book was written for a lay reader, simple and fun to read, and yet, I am sure that it will be seen as one of the most influential science books of the 20th century. History and sociology have two periods: before and after The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler.

Perhaps the reason that Alvin Toffler's classic book feels so relevant some 25 years after its initial publication is the fact that he wrote it in a time which, in retrospect, was not so different from our own: The world was trembling before the threat of terrorism embodied, in Toffler's age, by Iranian terrorists, and radical new technologies, in the form of powerful and increasingly affordable computers, were drastically altering business and society. But probably, the book resonates simply because he was right about almost everything. For that reason, we from getAbstract recommend this book as a basic requirement for any professional.

This book attempts to explain the both the nature and the process of the technological revolution that has transformed the world's social and economic systems. To quote Newt Gingrich, US Speaker of the House of Representatives, "Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given us the key to viewing current disarray within the positive framework of a dynamic, exciting future... The Tofflers correctly understand the development and distribution of information that has become the central productivity and power activity of the human race.... In the Third Wave, the Tofflers moved from observation (found in earlier works such as Future Shock) to creating a predictive framework They placed the information revolution (from circa 1990) in an historical perspective, comparing it with the other two great transformations, the agricultural revolution (beginning 8000 B.C thru around 1700) the industrial revolution (beginning around 1700 and still spreading across world society in an ever slower movement) . According to the Tofflers, we are feeling the impact of the third great wave of change in history, and we are, as a result, in the process of creating a new civilization." (Preface to Toffler's Creating a New Civilization) It is the collision of these concentric waves, and the turbulence created by the interaction of these waves, ie the resistance of industrial-based organizations to information-based systems, that accounts, in their view, for much of the seeming social, political and economic disorder. In short, this book seeks to postulate a paradigm that explains the entire scope of the Information Revolution. It succeeds in this goal as perhaps no other book written to date. For this reviewer, The Third Wave is as thought- provoking as we approach the year 2000 as the book The Greening of America was in the 1970s.