Desire may reflect
anything from a desperate need to be transitory want. In either case, wealth is anything that
satisfies the craving.
If the First Wave
wealth system was chiefly based on growing things, and the Second Wave on
making things, the Third Wave wealth system is increasingly based on serving,
thinking, knowing and experiencing.
What most business,
political and civil leaders have not yet clearly understood is a simple fact:
An advanced economy needs an advanced society, for every economy is a product
of the society in which it is embedded and is dependent on its key institutions.
Today an estimated 8
percent of the human race -- roughly half a billion people -- travel across
some national boundary in the course of a year.
This number is equal to the entire population of the earth in 1650.
Illegal drugs, for
example, are a $400 billion business, according to the United Nations, and add
up to about 8 percent of the world economy.
Few are aware that
every time they use an ATM or a telephone they are relying on technology twelve
thousand miles from Earth.
In each of us there
is a crowded, invisible warehouse full of knowledge and its precursor data and
information. But unlike a warehouse, it
is also a workshop in which -- or, more accurately, the electrochemicals in our
brains -- continually shift, add, subtract, combine and rearrange numbers,
symbols, words, images and memories combining them with emotions to form new
thoughts.
As we move farther
into the twenty-first century, and more societies develop economies based on
ideas, culture and wealth-relevant knowledge, why we believe what we believe
becomes more critical than ever.
Those who wish to
blindfold or silence science would not merely shrink tomorrow's wealth and
indirectly slow the alleviation of poverty but return humanity to the physical
and mental poverty of the Dark Ages.
In 2001, our chances
of dying in a hospital from a medical mistake or new infection were much
greater than our chances of being killed while driving.
Today's main killers
in the affluent nations are no longer communicable diseases like pneumonia,
tuberculosis or influenza. They are
heart disease, lung cancer and other illnesses that are clearly affected by
individual behavior.
In a hurry-up
economy every minute counts.
At one time,
groceries were kept behind the counter and clerks retrieved them as
requested. Self-serve supermarkets were
invented in 1916.
[In 1977] at that
time there were, for all practical purposes, zero personal computers on the
planet. By the year 2003, however, there
were 190 million in use in the United States alone.
Education should be
more than occupational.
Until recent
centuries, the overwhelming majority of our ancestors lived in a pre-market
world. Pockets of commerce existed, but
most humans never bought or sold anything during their lives.
