Money, Money, Money

“For at least the past three hundred years, the most basic political struggle within all the industrialized nations has been over the distribution of wealth: Who gets what? Terms like left and right, or capitalist and socialist, have pivoted on this fundamental question.

Yet, despite the vast maldistribution of wealth in a world painfully divided between rich and poor, it turns out that, compared with the other two sources of worldly power, wealth has been, and is, the least maldistributed. Whatever gulf separates the rich from the poor, an even greater chasm separates the armed from the unarmed and the ignorant from the educated.

Today, in the fast-changing, affluent nations, despite all inequities of income and wealth, the coming struggle for power will increasingly turn into a struggle over the distribution of and access to knowledge.

This is why, unless we understand how and to whom knowledge flows, we can neither protect ourselves against the abuse of power nor create the better, more democratic society that tomorrow’s technologies promise. The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow’s worldwide struggle for power in every human institution.”

A. Toffler, Powershift