SOURCE: Raksin, Alex. Review of Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, by Alvin Toffler. Los Angeles Times Book Review (28 October 1990): 6.

In the following review, Raksin asserts that the central ideas in Powershift are unoriginal, overly simplistic, and sometimes factually inaccurate.

Alvin Toffler's world [in Powershift] is so rocked by “powershifts,” you'd think he was writing on the San Andreas Fault: “We live at a moment when the entire structure of power that held the world together is now disintegrating. … We stand at the edge of the deepest powershift in human history. … Gone is the proletariat; now welcome the cognitariat.”

None of us “cogs” wants to be stranded on the wrong edge of the Shift, of course, and so it's not difficult to see why this breathless book is being translated into 11 languages while its author lectures in America's top boardrooms, including the...