THE THIRD WAVE
He strongly urges governments to remove these ohstacles and to help people supply their own housing, offering them “assistance in organization, the provision of some materials otherwise difficult to obtain . . . and, if possible, site development”—i.e., water or electricity. What Friedman and others are beginning to say is that anything that helps the individual presume more effectively may be just as important as production measured in conventional GNP terms.
To increase the “productivity” of the prosumer, governments need to focus scientific and technological research on presumption. But even now they could, at remarkably low cost, provide simple hand tools, community workshops, trained craftsmen or teachers, limited communications facilities and, where possible, power generation equipment—plus favorable propaganda or moral support for those who invest “sweat equity” hi building their own homes or improving their bits of land.
Second Wave propaganda today unfortunately conveys to even the world’s most remote and poorest people the idea that the things they make themselves are inherently inferior to the worst mass-produced junk. Rather than teaching people to despise their own efforts, to value Second Wave products and downgrade what they themselves create, governments should be offering prizes for the best or most imaginative self-built homes and goods, the most “productive” presumption. The knowledge that even the world’s richest people are increasingly presuming may help change attitudes among the very poorest. For the Third Wave casts into a dramatic new light the entire relationship of market to nonmarket activities in all the societies of the future.
The Third Wave also raises non-economic and non-technological concerns to primary importance. It makes us look at education, for example, with fresh eyes. Education, everyone agrees, is central to development. But what kind of education?
When the colonial powers introduced formal education into Africa, India, and other parts of the First Wave world, they transplanted either factory-style schools or set up miniature, tenth-rate imitations of their own elite schools. Today Second Wave education models are being questioned everywhere. The Third Wave challenges the Second Wave notion that education necessarily takes place in a classroom. Today we need to combine learning with work, political struggle, community service, and even play. All our conventional assumptions about education need to be re-examined both in the rich countries and the poor.
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