THE THIRD WAVE
One can begin to picture a transformation strategy based on the development of both low-stream, village-oriented, capital-cheap, rural industries and certain carefully selected, high-stream technologies, with an economy zoned to protect or promote both.
Jagdish Kapur has written: “A new balance has now to be struck between” the most advanced science and technology available to the human race and “the Gandhian vision of the idyllic green pastures, the village republics.” Such a practical combination, Kapur declares, requires a “total transformation of the society, its symbols and values, its system of education, its incentives, the flow of its energy resources, its scientific and industrial research and a whole lot of other institutions.”
Yet an increasing number of long-range thinkers, social analysts, scholars, and scientists believe that just such a transformation is now under way, carrying us toward a radical new synthesis: Gandhi, in short, with satellites.
THE ORIGINAL PROSUMERS
Implied in this approach is another synthesis at an even deeper level. This involves the entire economic relationship of people to the market—irrespective of whether that market is capitalist or socialist in form. It forces us to question how much of any individual’s total time and labor should be devoted to production and how much to prosumption—i.e., how much to working for pay in the marketplace as against working for self.
Most First Wave populations have already been drawn into the money system. They have been “marketized.” But while the wretched money income earned by the world’s poorest people may be vital to their survival, production for exchange provides only part of their income; prosumption provides the rest.
The Third Wave encourages us to look at this situation, too, in a fresh way. In country after country millions are jobless. But is full employment in these societies a realistic goal? What combination of policies can possibly, within our lifetime, provide full-time jobs for all these surging millions? Is the very notion of “unemployment” itself a Second Wave concept, as hinted at by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myr-dal?
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