The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization

by Ron Davison

The simple but sweeping premise of this book is that a fourth, entrepreneurial economy is emerging. This will be as different from the information economy as that was from the industrial economy before it.Last century we popularized knowledge work, transforming from an industrial economy dependent on child labor to an information economy dependent on adult education. This century we will popularize entrepreneurship, changing what it means to be an employee.Since medieval times, the West has been defined by agricultural, industrial, and information economies. These three economies have transformed religion, politics, and finance. An emerging entrepreneurial economy promises to transform business.Perhaps the most interesting prediction is that social invention will be as common for the next generation as technological invention became in the last century. The Fourth Inventing Western Civilization is a wildly optimistic book that will change how you think about the past and your future.

Genres: Business, Economics, Finance, Nonfiction, History, Entrepreneurship

421 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 11, 2011

Reviews

[Taylor Pearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

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...

[camcollins · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Chris Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Rossco · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Whitney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Staggeringly excellent book which details the history of money, what makes a revolution and what’s next.

[Maureen Mahowald · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.