EXCERPT
CHAPTER ONE
SPEARHEADING WEALTH
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 deal 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 at a global level. 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 faint-hearted.
Today emails and blogs bombard us. EBay makes marketers of us all. Corporate mega-scandals 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 13-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. In Africa, AIDS wipes out a generation 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 TV, where "reality television" fakes reality. Thousands form "flash mobs" and gather to beat each other 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, law courts, regulatory agencies, trade unions -- flail about in crisis.
And it is against this background that America's trade deficit soars to unprecedented levels. Its 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 50-year high and the French and Dutch overwhelmingly reject the proposed EU constitution. Meanwhile, China, we're told -- again and again -- is certain to become the next world 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 all this seeming chaos affect our wallets? Will we even have a wallet?
Excerpted from Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. 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.
| iReader |  |
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий