Starting 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.

Chapter 1

This book is about the future of wealth, visible and invisible — a revolutionary form of wealth that will redesign our lives, our companies and the world in the years now speeding toward us.

To explain what that means, the pages ahead will deal with everything from family life and jobs to time pressures and the mounting complexity of everyday life. They will grapple with truth, lies, markets and money. They will cast surprising light on the collision of change and anti-change in the world around us — and inside ourselves.

Today's wealth revolution will unlock countless opportunities and new life trajectories, not only for creative business entrepreneurs but for social, cultural and educational entrepreneurs as well. It will open fresh possibilities for slashing poverty both at home and around the globe. But it will accompany this invitation to a glowing future with a warning: Risks are not merely multiplying but escalating. The future is not for the fainthearted.

Today e-mails and blogs bombard us. EBay makes marketers of us all. Corporate megascandals burst into the headlines. Drugs are launched to help cure breast cancer, multiple sclerosis and dozens of different diseases. Other drugs are belatedly pronounced too dangerous and yanked off the market. Robots go to Mars and land with exquisite precision. But computers, software, cell phones and networks constantly fail. Warming warms. Fuel cells beckon. Genes and stem cells trigger bitter controversy. Nano is the new techno-grail.

Simultaneously, criminal street gangs from Los Angeles roam across Central America and build a quasi-army, and thirteen-year-old aspiring terrorists depart France for the Middle East. In London, Prince Harry dresses as a Nazi even as anti-Semitism re-rears its disgusting head. AIDS wipes out a generation in Africa, while strange new diseases in Asia threaten to sweep across the world.

To escape — or at least forget — what appears like chaos, millions turn to television, where "reality TV" fakes reality. Thousands form "flash mobs" and gather to beat one another with pillows. Elsewhere, players of online games pay thousands of dollars in real money for virtual swords that their virtual selves can use to win virtual castles or maidens. Irreality spreads.

More important, institutions that once lent coherence, order and stability to society — schools, hospitals, families, courts, regulatory agencies, trade unions — flail about in crisis.

And it is against this background that America's trade deficit soars to unprecedented levels. The national budget staggers drunkenly. The world's finance ministers wonder out loud if they should risk triggering a global depression by recalling the billions they have lent to Washington. Europe celebrates itself for expanding the European Union — but German unemployment hits a fifty-year high and the French and Dutch overwhelmingly reject the proposed E.U. constitution. Meanwhile, China, we're told — again and again — is certain to become the next superpower.

The combination of economic high-wire acts and institutional failures leaves individuals back home face-to-face with potentially devastating personal problems. They question if they will ever receive the pensions for which they have worked, or whether they can afford the rocketing costs of gasoline and health care. They agonize about appalling schools. They worry about whether crime, drugs and an anything-goes morality will destroy civil life. How, everyone wants to know, will this seeming chaos affect our wallets? Will we even have a wallet?

Fad of the Month

Not only do ordinary mortals find it hard to answer these questions, so do the experts. Corporate CEOs succeed one another like passengers pushing through a rush-hour turnstile: merging, divesting, kowtowing to the stock market; pursuing core competence one month, synergy the next, the latest management fad a month later. They study the most recent economic forecasts, but many economists themselves are befuddled as they wander around in a cemetery of dead ideas.

To decode this new world we need to cut through the chatter of rear-window economists and business pundits who prattle about "business fundamentals." We need to probe below the obsolete obvious. In these pages, therefore, we will focus on the unexplored "deep fundamentals" on which the so-called fundamentals themselves depend.

Once we do, things look different, less crazy, and previously unnoticed opportunities pop out of the shadows. Chaos, it turns out, is only part of the story. And chaos itself generates new ideas.

Tomorrow's economy, for example, will present significant business opportunities in fields like hyper-agriculture, neurostimulation, customized health care, nanoceuticals, bizarre new energy sources, streaming payment systems, smart transportation, flash markets, new forms of education, non-lethal weapons, desktop manufacturing, programmable money, risk management, privacy-invasion sensors that tell us when we're being observed — indeed, sensors of all kinds — plus a bewildering myriad of other goods, services and experiences.

We can't be sure when these will or will not turn profitable or how they will converge. But understanding the deep fundamentals will reveal the existence, even now, of new needs and previously unidentified industries and sectors — a huge "synchronization industry," for example, and a "loneliness industry."

To forecast the future of wealth, we also need to look not just at the work we do for money but at the unpaid work all of us also do as "prosumers." (We'll explain later, but it might shock most people to learn just how much unpaid output we all produce every day.) We'll look, as well, at the invisible "third job" that many of us hold without even knowing it.

Because prosuming is set to explode, the future of the money economy can no longer be understood, let alone forecast, apart from that of the prosumer economy. The two, in fact, are inseparable. Together they form a wealth system. And once we understand this — and the channels by which the two feed each other — we gain piercing insights into our private lives now and into the future.

Loosened Constraints

New wealth systems don't come often, and they don't travel alone. Each carries with it a new way of life, a civilization. Not just new business structures but new family formats; new kinds of music and art; new foods, fashions and standards of physical beauty; new values; and new attitudes toward religion and personal freedom — all of which interact with and shape the emerging new wealth system.

America today is spearheading just such a new civilization built around a revolutionary way of creating wealth. For better and worse, billions of lives around the world are already being changed by this revolution. Nations and whole regions of the globe are rising or declining as they feel its impact.

Today millions of people around the world dislike or even hate America. Some fanatics wish to incinerate the United States and everyone in it. The reasons they give range from its Middle East policies and its refusal to sign various international treaties to what they regard as its imperial ambitions.

Yet even if peace reigned in the Middle East, even if all the world's terrorists turned pacifist and democracies flowered like dandelions, the rest of the world would still view the United States with trepidation at best.

Copyright © 2006 by Alvin Toffler. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Career & Money

About the Author

Alvin Toffler is an Author, Futurist and Principal of the consulting company Toffler & Associates. He has written more than a dozen books, including the best sellers Future Shock and Third Wave. He has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a visiting professor at Cornell University, a faculty member at the New School for Social Research, a White House correspondent, an editor at Fortune magazine and a business consultant. He is the recipient of several prizes and appointments, including Fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Considered by many to be a master of future blueprints, Toffler wrote about the proliferation of computers, the advent of cable television, niche markets, the shift to work-at-home, corporate restructuring, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the shift to a global economy and dozens of other scenarios before they appeared in our nomenclature.

About the Author

Heidi Toffler is the co-author of such classic futurist works as Future Shock, the Third Wave, Powershift, War and Anti-War, and Creating a New Civilization. Teamed with her husband, Alvin Toffler, she has, in the words of Time Magazine "set the standard by which all subsequent would-be futurists have been measured."