By John Dunn
 Wide World Photo |
Wide World Photo |
uturist Alvin Toffler doesn’t give a fuzzy forecast about the world’s economic future: “civilization-shaking” change is coming.
“It ain’t gonna happen smoothly,” says Toffler, perhaps the most renowned futurist of the 20th century, author of Future Shock, The Third Wave and Powershift.
Although his unsettling observations are well-known, the projection was restated on Nov. 16, 1999, when Toffler spoke at the “Leadership Forum” at the Carter Center in a program co-sponsored by the DuPree College of Management and The Leadership Center.
Two weeks later, in the waning days of 1999, one of the nation’s worst urban riots erupted in Seattle, where tens of thousands of protesters—some hurling stones, firebombs and firecrackers—clashed with police. The cause: angry opposition to the economic policies of the World Trade Organization.
In a national drama that fit the kind of scenario Toffler foretells, a state of emergency was declared by Seattle’s mayor and hundreds of unarmed National Guard troops were ordered into the city. On the second day of a four-day meeting, the city reeled as if under siege while President Bill Clinton spoke to the WTO.
Critics of the World Trade Organization, an international tribunal that sets and enforces the rules of the global marketplace, bemoan its broad enforcement powers that enable it to supersede national laws, raising issues of sovereignty and control of a nation’s economy.
 Alan David |
“What we’re doing here in Seattle is the beginning—the beginning of a fight we must carry to every level of government in every country in the world,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney vowed to a crowd of 35,000 at a labor rally in Seattle. “You are helping us change the face of the global economy.”
That’s the volatile kind of economics preached by Toffler, who speaks of waves of social change. And if he’s right, grab tight onto your surfboard, we’re riding a new, and dangerous, economic wave.
First was the agricultural wave, a historical turning point that occurred about 10,000 years ago. The second revolutionary economic wave, the industrial age, came between 1650 and 1750. A new third wave began to swell in the mid-1950s, when white-collar and service workers outnumbered blue-collar workers for the first time.
The world is still trying to operate on a second-wave industrial age economy, Toffler says, and the shift from a second-wave to a third-wave economy will be “civilization-shaking.”
Just as the agricultural era with its feudal system could not function in the industrial age, Toffler says the present society operating under the industrial age system will be unable to function in the new technological era.
Historic change cannot be made on a vast scale without disturbing world order, Toffler says. “You do not get these kinds of changes without conflict, without social upset. It’s part of the package.”
Everyone is curious about the future of the economy, he adds. “I would suggest we pay less attention to the future of the economy and more attention to the economy of the future,” he says, wryly twisting the phrase. “The reason I make that distinction is that when you say the future of the economy, it presupposes that this economy has a future.” On the other hand, “the economy of the future” anticipates preparing for whatever economy the future may hold.
Media coverage is “full of international power struggles,” Toffler observes. “However, shifts of power are also taking place in the intimate, everyday world in which we live—the world of supermarkets, hospitals, banks, offices, television and telephones. These power shifts—largely unnoticed, but equally significant—are creating a radically different society.”
In today’s market economy, products are being created, sold and dropped at “turbo-charged speed,” Toffler says. It’s not just the speed at which products reach the market that is dizzying, it’s also the kinds of salable commodities.
“We are seeing things [sold] we never saw before, including human organs and genes,” Toffler says. The future must resolve major ethical issues, calling for answers that will be controversial and potentially explosive.
America is suffering simultaneous crises in education, health care, families, justice, politics and many other areas,” Toffler says. “These systems were designed to work in a mass industrial society. America is leaving those systems behind and is moving into a radically different world.”
Information technology and the pervasive influences of the World Wide Web and the Internet are changing every aspect of economics and business, stimulating an innovation of online trading, the vast expansion of production management, mergers of banks, an explosion of new products, risk management, and an arena of constantly changing world politics and trade that grow in complexity.
“We’re going to see fundamental change in the very institutions that govern the global financial system,” Toffler says. It is a future that could see central banks replaced with a global electronic system that operates instantaneously in real time.
| A CENTURY OF PROGRESS, PART III |
 Graham Anthony |
“If even central banks are threatened by today’s technological advances, how long do you think other key institutions can survive?” he wonders.
“What’s going to happen, not just to capital, but to money?” he asks. Instead of hard currency, the future may offer special purpose money.
“We don’t need actual money,” Toffler says. He foresees the use of financial cards that could be spent only for specific purposes. For example, a student may have a card that can be spent to buy lunch, school supplies or for transportation, but will not purchase tobacco or alcohol.
People are again becoming what Toffler calls “prosumers.” In the agricultural age, people produced their own crops, sewed their own clothes, built their own homes. They produced for their own consumption. The industrial age created an era of consumers. Products were mass produced at economies of scale for public consumption.
In the new emerging economy, people are again becoming prosumers, Toffler says.
“How many have bought an airline ticket on the ‘Net?” Toffler asks. Hands are raised across the room. “We buy our own airline tickets; we track our own packages; we do our own financial research. Many functions that we used to pay somebody to do, we now do ourselves. We can do it ourselves because our technology makes its possible. The consumer has been turned again into the prosumer. We are producing our own services.”
In some cases, companies are eliminating employees and putting customers to work, he says. Companies, in effect, are transferring labor costs to the customers.
There are advantages to being able to go online at 3 a.m. to buy tickets or track a package anytime, anyplace, and customers may be willing to “make that trade.”
“It means that many of us, in addition to our jobs and in addition to our home responsibilities, which really amounts to a second job, are now doing additional work that others previously did for us,” Toffler says. “No wonder many of us feel stressed, harassed, hurried and future-shocked.”
Toffler wonders: If the work done by customers eliminates jobs, shouldn’t customers share in the return? The payback may come in the form of better quality, better service and lower prices.
But Toffler foresees a day of reckoning. “When customers wake up to what is happening, they’ll see the role in a different light,” he says. “I would not be surprised to see them organize and demand price cuts.”
A consumer can a purchase an item online—effectively becoming prosumer by participating in the production process. The specs of the order activate the production line, and simultaneously inform all parts of the supply chain.
Survival in the emerging economic era demands a business strategy, he says. “Some management gurus say that what is needed today is not strategy, but agility. That you can substitute agility for strategy. If a company is quick enough, adaptive enough, flexible enough, it won’t need a strategy.
“You certainly need to be agile. You certainly need to be able to adapt quickly to today’s accelerated economy, but agility is not a substitute for strategy. Agility without strategy is reaction. It merely subordinates your organization to someone else’s.”
In the fast-paced economy, any strategy must be agile and flexible, he says.
“The real key to success tomorrow is a business strategy that brings other programs, partners, competitors, cooperators, suppliers and customers into your orbit. So that their fate depends on your success.”
In a question and answer session, Toffler addressed the crises in education. “What is the model” school systems should follow?
“The easy thing is to say what not to do,” he answered. “We did that in Future Shock. We said that basically what we have is schools that operate like a factory. They take kids, measure them going in, subject them to routine processing. You ask the kids to go through rote and repetitive work, like they would do in a factory. And you measure them coming out and dump them into the economy. That made perfectly good sense during the industrial age. But now we’re preparing kids to be good factory workers in an economy that is not going to have any factory jobs.”
The school system simulated a future in which those students were going to participate. “We are, by continuing this system, simulating a future they will not have. We are preparing them to be good factory workers for an economy that is not going to have any factory jobs. We are cheating them. We’re spending a quarter-to-half-a-trillion dollars to do it.”
The root of the problem is that it cannot be solved in the classroom, Toffler says. “Kids do not learn in school alone. They learn from the street; they learn from television; they learn from other students; they learn from computers; they learn from all kinds of places, not just the classrooms.”
In Brazil, a television network had its stars and celebrities travel around the country, meeting students and encouraging them to study and learn. The purpose was to motivate students, Toffler says—“that’s terrific.”
Every community has knowledgeable, educated people representing every conceivable occupation, who can both motivate and teach, he says. But because they may not have a degree in education, “The teacher’s union doesn’t want them. We are going to have to overcome this and develop a system of adjunct teachers, with whom we can tap into the community’s available distributed knowledge.
"I’m not just talking about diversity ethnically, but diversity occupationally—every way. People say, ‘Are you in favor of vouchers?’ Well, I’m not a product of the public school system. I waited 30 years for the public system to diversify. It hasn’t. I’m in favor of anything that breaks up the uniformity.”
Toffler is concerned that vouchers could harden lines between income classes in schools, “so the vouchers have to be big enough to matter, not just a trivial amount.”
If someone makes a proposal to reform the school system, Toffler asks, will the reform “further the factory system or take it out? We have to be much more revolutionary in our thinking.
“As the economy of the future takes form, all of us face the wildest, fastest ride into the future of any generation in the past,” Toffler says. “We face countless new challenges and struggles as the new economy of the future, a new civilization arrives.”
| A CENTURY OF PROGRESS, PART IV |
 Graham Anthony |
| What does social futurist Alvin Toffler see, looking back at the past millennium? Would, for example, any one person qualify as the most outstanding “Individual of the Millennium?” |
 Alan David |
| Toffler makes a point with Dean Terry Blum (right). |
here’s a gang of them,” says the author of Powershift, Future Shock and The Third Wave. “The kinds of changes that we are witnessing now, and the kinds of changes that have taken place during the last thousand years that have been truly civilization-shaking, were not the products of one person anywhere,” Toffler said in an interview at the Carter Center following a talk to the “Leadership Forum,” an event co-sponsored by Georgia Tech’s DuPree College of Management and the Leadership Center.
“Probably the most important event of the last thousand years was the rise of an industrial society—something previously unknown on the planet after 10,000 years of peasant-based societies. That was not the doing of any one person.”
The “gang” includes such giants as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, and the idealism of the French enlightenment—Toffler stops the list and adopts another strategy.
“I can tell you a story that illustrates what I’m saying.” He tells the story of the Lunar Society, which met monthly in Birmingham, England, on the night of the full moon from 1765 to 1805. Although their neighbors called them lunatics, Toffler explains their rationale: “It was dangerous to walk the streets, but on the night of the full moon, you had better light. It was safer.
“They never in all those 40 years passed a resolution and never made a common decision. But they just talked and wrote each other letters. They smelled the future. They had a sense that something—they didn’t call it the industrial revolution—something gigantic was coming. Looking back, we now know who they were: Benjamin Franklin (when he was in England), Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather), Matthew Boulton (who with James Watt built the steam engine). They were entrepreneurs; they were scientists (as they were known in those days); they were philosophers; they were business people, and they were regarded as hicks by the Royal Society in London. There were groups like that formed in many places, but they [members of the Lunar Society] were the memorable ones.”
What about the milestones that shaped the past century?
Toffler’s answer comes readily.
“The shift from a traditional, smokestack, lunch-pail economy and culture,” Toffler says tops his list. This “historical turning point” of human social development, which he calls the “Third Wave,” occurred in the United States about 1955, during the decade in which white-collar and service workers outnumbered blue-collar workers for the first time.
It was during the 1950s, he says, that a number of innovations started becoming widespread, including the computer, commercial air travel and birth-control pills.
In his book, The Third Wave, Toffler calls this dawn of a new age “the single most explosive fact of our lifetimes.”
According to Toffler’s social “wave-front” analysis, the first wave or turning point in human development was the rise of agriculture, which began about 10,000 years ago. The second wave was the industrial era, which began between 1650 and 1750.
The third wave is an era of technology that has been called the Space Age, Information Age, Electronic Era, Global Village and, by Toffler, a “super-industrial society.” None of the labels, including his own, measure up, he says.
Milestones of the past century include “the development of tools to empower the intellect,” Toffler says. “Also, the biological discoveries of DNA and the human genome project are immense historical events. They dwarf the cold war.
“Certainly the world wars were enormous, powerful, world-shaking events, but when we look back from 100 years or 200 years or 300 years, they will not be remembered as well as [the biological breakthroughs].”