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The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization
Don’t read this book unless you are in the mood for something wildly optimistic.
The Fourth Economy tells the story of Western Civilization since 1300 through a pattern of social invention and revolution, and uses that pattern to predict the big changes of the next few decades.
The emergence of each of the first three economies – the agricultural, industrial, and information economies – brought with them not only a slew of technological inventions like the steam engine and computer but social inventions like the bank and corporation. And each new economy has triggered a revolution in the dominant institution, revolutions as transformational as the Protestant and democratic revolutions.
Economic change is never just about economics.
The Fourth Economy predicts a new economy as different from the information economy we were born into as that was from the industrial economy before it.
It is a history book about your future.
The Fourth Economy tells the story of Western Civilization since 1300 through a pattern of social invention and revolution, and uses that pattern to predict the big changes of the next few decades.
The emergence of each of the first three economies – the agricultural, industrial, and information economies – brought with them not only a slew of technological inventions like the steam engine and computer but social inventions like the bank and corporation. And each new economy has triggered a revolution in the dominant institution, revolutions as transformational as the Protestant and democratic revolutions.
Economic change is never just about economics.
The Fourth Economy predicts a new economy as different from the information economy we were born into as that was from the industrial economy before it.
It is a history book about your future.
450 pages
First published July 11, 2011
24 people are currently reading
338 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 12, 2014
I read a fair amount and it's usually only a book or two a year noticeably shapes my thinking years into the future. A little over a year ago, I read The Fourth Economy and it's remained present in my memory ever since.
When I met with the author, Ron Davison, in San Diego, I told him it was the most influential book on my thinking I’d read since the Communist Manifesto at 18 and spent the next 3 years of my life chasing rabbits down socialist, ideological tunnels.
He was gracious enough to chuckle. Ron is both more humble than Marx and in much better touch with reality. To the extent that book predicts the future, it continues existing trends into the future rather than predicting unprecedented revolution.
I’ve probably recommended the book to fifty people in that time with as far as I can tell one person actually taking me up on it. The book is both incredibly dense and relatively long. Despite what you can tell is painstaking work to provide example and analogies, the concepts are complex and profound, all making it poorly summed up in bar talk.
It's astounding for the breadth and depth of human history that’s able to integrate into a single coherent framework.
The book has stuck with me in large part because I’ve seen the implications play out in my personal life and inside organizations I’ve worked with. While I don’t have anywhere near the macro-perspective that Ron has, I have seen the changes he’s describing on a micro, company by company, individual by individual level.
In an effort to improve success rate in recommending the book, I'd wrote a relatively brief, very rough annotated summary of the overall concept, and an exploration of the concepts I found most interesting in the book in terms of their implications on the day-to-day work of entrepreneurs and organizations. - http://taylorpearson.me/the-fourth-ec...
When I met with the author, Ron Davison, in San Diego, I told him it was the most influential book on my thinking I’d read since the Communist Manifesto at 18 and spent the next 3 years of my life chasing rabbits down socialist, ideological tunnels.
He was gracious enough to chuckle. Ron is both more humble than Marx and in much better touch with reality. To the extent that book predicts the future, it continues existing trends into the future rather than predicting unprecedented revolution.
I’ve probably recommended the book to fifty people in that time with as far as I can tell one person actually taking me up on it. The book is both incredibly dense and relatively long. Despite what you can tell is painstaking work to provide example and analogies, the concepts are complex and profound, all making it poorly summed up in bar talk.
It's astounding for the breadth and depth of human history that’s able to integrate into a single coherent framework.
The book has stuck with me in large part because I’ve seen the implications play out in my personal life and inside organizations I’ve worked with. While I don’t have anywhere near the macro-perspective that Ron has, I have seen the changes he’s describing on a micro, company by company, individual by individual level.
In an effort to improve success rate in recommending the book, I'd wrote a relatively brief, very rough annotated summary of the overall concept, and an exploration of the concepts I found most interesting in the book in terms of their implications on the day-to-day work of entrepreneurs and organizations. - http://taylorpearson.me/the-fourth-ec...
May 1, 2012
Very insightful book that takes the reader over a brief history of the western world from 1,300 AD to today and beyond. His theory of how social innovation disrupts and then transforms every economic era is very thought provoking. Our future looks bright if the author's thesis that entrepreneurs will become more and more common as the "self" is less defined by the institutions we associate with and more by what we do, create and believe individually.
December 28, 2019
Interesting book: long and dense
This book covers a lot of ground and sometimes loses focus because of it but it is an interesting read. I read a lot but I had to take breaks from this book’s density and read others in between. I took months to finish it which is unusual for me. I wish that he had spent more time exploring entrepreneurship’s role: his did this well but it was the shortest segment of the book.
This book covers a lot of ground and sometimes loses focus because of it but it is an interesting read. I read a lot but I had to take breaks from this book’s density and read others in between. I took months to finish it which is unusual for me. I wish that he had spent more time exploring entrepreneurship’s role: his did this well but it was the shortest segment of the book.
February 25, 2019
The editing could be better to reduce repetition, but the ideas are top notch. Reading this book provided a framework I now use to view the world. One of the best books I've ever read.
January 5, 2024
Staggeringly excellent book which details the history of money, what makes a revolution and what’s next.
October 30, 2013
This was an interesting book. However, it would have been greatly improved by tighter editing. The author repeated his theories throughout the book. This reader, and I suspect many others, understood him the first time.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews