How Do You Measure Wealth?

When I was a child, I walked through a bookstore and saw a tome titled, "Future Shock." The title intrigued me, most probably because of the word, future. I leaned against the book display and read the future classic, skimming through the chapters and marveling at the adult world that the author, Alvin Toffler, told me was speeding by faster and faster. Yet, there I stood in the world of books, where piles of discount duds sat gathering dust, not moving at all. I could imagine what Toffler was talking about but I could not see it. In school, we still sat and listened to teachers lecture us about the material we were supposed to have read the night before, who would subsequently hand us a list of 10 or 20 incomplete items (T/F and multiple choice questions, for the most part) that required us to prove our retention of the information the teachers and accompanying text had imparted to us. The only shock we felt in the classroom was the occasional pop quiz or open-ended essay question for which we were unprepared. [To be sure, some students were shocked in general, having not mastered the skill of listening and studying, but that subject I will discuss another time (in a previous blog entry, I alluded to the KIPP schools, which serve as an example of what I think future schools should be like).]

Almost 40 years later, I sit here and read "Revolutionary Wealth" by Heidi and Alvin Toffler, published in 2006. How did the future play out compared to the predictions of the first book and how does the future look in the second? Well, it comes down to how you measure wealth, it appears.

How do you measure wealth? I suppose most of us think first of our monetary holdings (assets vs. liabilities) and then perhaps our health. We might even talk of the wealth we expect to inherit in this life or the next one.

The Tofflers look at wealth in another form, that of intangible wealth, such as time and knowledge.

As I read the futurists' vision of a world ruled not by limited land, building and manufacturing capability but by inexhaustible resources, I remember that the book, written between the dot-com bust and the leveraged mortgage burst, gives us an insight we should appreciate more than we probably do. I'm not saying that the Tofflers and their kind are the ultimate wise gurus to whom we must turn to save this planet from economic destruction. Instead, I believe we can compare their vision against reality and find a projected path upon which to base our investments for the future.

For instance, a Who's-Who of leaders recently met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Imagine the tribal leaders of old gathering in a circular ceremony to divine the future by reading the position of the stars in relation to the ashes of the fire and you get a clear idea of the value of our current leaders gathering to produce the documents that will tell the world how to recover from the current economic slump.

The Tofflers examined the role of knowledge (part of the trinity of data-information-knowledge, well discussed in many books and Internet articles) and prognosticated about the need for knowledge to be free. Well, most of this babble I read about in the late 1990s, during the dot-com rise, so nothing of this revealed anything new to me.

Instead, I came to realize that the Tofflers rehashing of the concept of prosumers continues to show where the future is headed.

In this current economic crisis, the world decries the inept spending habits of Americans, who mortgaged their futures in order to enjoy the present, driving economic frenzy on a worldwide scale to milk the mortgage market for all it was worth. No one denies the intangibles of the economy are like a house of cards or the invisible clothes that an emperor once wore to great ridicule. So why do we sit here and cry in our mortgaged milk that was spoiled by imaginary hands?

Think about it. You probably spend your day in one activity or another where you exchange your capabilities for nothing. Nothing, in this case, is a substance that we call money, love, or some other intangible thing that we all say clearly exists, even if you can't see it. In other words, you spend time at home raising your kids, watching their behavior and providing guidance to put their behavior into what you and others around you consider an acceptable range. From where is that range derived? Remember, the world is full of different ways to raise children, all of which provides good survival skills for them. Or you developed a set of skills that helped you acquire the right to sit in a building and display those skills in a something called a job, as if a job is something that has always existed. But our forebears, some of whom worked directly on a plot of land, did not have jobs. They subsisted on the land, doing what they had to do to feed themselves and their offspring. They may have gone days or weeks without any activity necessary to put food on the table because it had already been gathered and stored or hunted and dried. There was no job to speak of, such as something you could easily say had a time value (like an hourly wage or total subcontract worth).

For those who don't know what a prosumer is, I'll summarize the best I can – the combination of producer and consumer. I go to the kitchen, fix myself a PB&J sandwich and eat it. I am a prosumer of that sandwich. In that sense, all of our forebears who worked the land were prosumers. Sure, some of them sold excess food or animals, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Looking at the history of the human species, I think we can clearly say that the majority of our history involved consuming. We picked berries, ate wild grain, hunted animals, all of it "produced" by this planet. Over time, our brains developed the habit of prosuming to enhance our rate of survival. We picked up stones and broke off pieces to increase our killing capability. We wrapped animal skins around our bodies that we had cut off and cured. We learned how to sew animal skins together and later how to make cloth using our sewing skills. Along the way, we developed our first intangible skills, including language and writing (via pictographs).

And it is language that stays with us today. And where our prosuming will take us into the future.

For you see, while Americans are used to carrying the world on their backs, claiming the lead in technological developments and per capita consumption, a revolutionary change occurred. Their language, a derivation of English, will no longer dominate the language spoken on the Internet. There are now more Chinese-speaking people on the Internet than Americans. And their domination of the languages spoken on the Internet is catching up fast.

What does this mean for the future? If history teaches us anything, it appears to show us that humans have mastered the skill of prosuming and will continue to use that skill to great advantage, whether in the home or at the local/corporate/national/global level. The 20^th Century view of the world as having distinct populations divided into national territories will soon become obsolete if it hasn't completely done so already. Therefore, the intangible wealth of the future, as measured in the form of economic power, time management and knowledge prosuming, rests in the hands of those whose language facilitates prosuming.

If I sat at the World Economic Forum, I would propose that we modify the current language of world business, English, to incorporate the numbering system of Asian languages, which enables people to learn math at an earlier age and speak to each other no matter where they live, physically or virtually. We create a truely basic but extensible world language (we can add more characters or pictographs at any time). I would recommend that we empower those who desire to join the world economy – no matter how poor or rich – by issuing all of them both credit and assets, including a virtual mortgage they can borrow against but also pay interest on as well as ownership in a few global companies and NGOs that gives them a stake in the goings-on of their fellow humans all around the globe.

Knowledge seeks to be free but so does prosuming. If we free up people to produce and consume within a flexible framework of an ever-changing world economy, our intangible wealth will grow, every one of us building an inexhaustible surplus with which we can share or barter, as needed.

That's the kind of wealth I want. Don't you?