Alvin Toffler
Pre-reading
Alvin Toffler (1928-2016) is an American writer and futurist. Born in New York City and educated at New York University, Alvin Toffler is one of the most influential contemporary social thinkers.
Starting with their ground-breaking global bestselling classics Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980), Alvin and his wife Heidi Toffler have helped multi-millions of readers around the world anticipate the overwhelming sweeping changes of tomorrow.
In these and other books, the Tofflers decades ago anticipated cloning, virtual reality, niche markets, information overload, work-at-home, product customization, the “de-massification”of the mass media, the threat of terrorism and many other features of contemporary life. But in the Tofflers’ works, these disparate forecasts are all mere details of a far larger canvas. Some of them have missed the mark — we are still waiting for the “paperless office”. But few today challenge the central, sweeping thesis of their work since the mid-1960s — that a knowledge-based new economy was arising to replace the industrial age. This concept is now accepted currency among governments, economists and thinkers around the world. Toffler’s latest work, Revolutionary Wealth (2006), is a book on the dynamic new economy of tomorrow —how we work, run companies, raise families, invest and think about both money and nonmoney. It attacks key features of conventional economics as it paints the emerging global“wealth system” of the decades ahead. Each of their books has been hailed for originality, clarity and unusual insight into the dangers and promises as well as challenges and opportunities racing toward us.
Alvin and Heidi Toffler are known around the world for their work that has influenced presidents and prime ministers, top leaders in fields ranging from business to non-profit organizations, as well as educators, psychologists and social scientists. As Time magazine puts it, they “set the standard by which all subsequent would-be futurists have been measured.”