Word: toffler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...practitioners of a parascience, the authors are rightly humble about confusing their models with immutable truths. They may not have the lively journalistic bounce of an Alvin Toffler or the fluid drive of a Vance Packard, but Social Standing's scholarship adds some fascinating discriminations. For example, though money is the basic yardstick people use to rank themselves, income is only a component of status, not its cause. Education is the prime means to higher income - which is then translated into higher status. But schooling that does not lead to a high-paying job earns few points...
...Alvin Toffler...
Typically, Toffler's 90-second explication about what precipitated the transformation from feudal to industrial society would take the breath away from quite a few Harvard historians. It's simple, Toffler says, the society and economy, which was relatively easy to regulate during the feudal age, became too complex to be run by a handful of feudal barons. The inexorable trend toward modernization forced this small, powerful elite to involve more people in the decision making processes. Voila! The bourgeoisie...
...radicalism is a measure of sapience, then Toffler is the apotheosis of wisdom. You name it, he wants to change it--values, mores, political systems, economic organization, religion, democracy, the Constitution. Although Toffler's proposals are extreme. It is refreshing to hear a speaker who is not afraid to get up in front of an audience and to go beyond the parameters of what is commonly perceived as permissable discussion. Toffler not only asserted that a technological revolution was upon us, he advocated helping it along and shedding the shackles of the past, that is, industrial society, as quickly...
Fortunately, however, Toffler is probably doomed to be lost in the annals of pop sociology. There does not seem to be enough evidence to indicate that industrial society is in its death throes. The new technological society that Toffler heralds seems a lot like the old industrial society we all have known. About the only thing that is going to save Toffler from future anonymity is a cataclysmic breakdown of society within the next few decades. But in the meantime, Toffler will be doing a commendable service by allowing us momentarily to break out of traditional patterns of thinking about...