The Revolution and Antoine van Agtmael

Further to the revolution is the author Antoine van Agtmael who was quite accurate when he coined the phrase “emerging markets” several decades ago. This term, accurately replacing what was formerly labeled “Third World,” describes the mega-shifts in the global market. According to van Agtmael, these markets will have claimed fifty percent of the global economy within the next quarter century. Truly a man ahead of his time.

The Emerging Markets Century: How a New Breed of World-Class Companies Is Overtaking the World , by Antoine van Agtmael, was the gold medal winner of the Economics category. Visit the website here . The book describes how countries like Brazil, India, and China have scaled the economic ladder and how they will continue to do so. Drawing upon years of experience and knowledge, van Agtmael also informs readers of how understanding this growth is crucial to understanding globalization in the future as well as the fate of the Western influence.

Still, closing with tips on how to make money in emerging markets, his book cautions that “the real secret is that the secret is always changing.” Indeed, amid the hype about emerging markets, Mr. van Agtmael understands that some had a long history of fabulous wealth before 1800, so they are essentially re- emerging, like India and China. He also grasps that 80 of the top 100 companies in the original Emerging Markets Index he created 25 years ago have vanished. These organizational disappearances are likely more a result of overall impacts of the revolution, of which globalization is but one.

Toffler and the Revolution

Lawrence Fisher’s interview of Alvin Toffler, published in Strategy+Business, is an excellent review of the thinking and writings of the futurist and author. His books, Future Shock and its successors, The Third Wave (Morrow, 1980) and Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (Bantam, 1990) were at their best when not making predictions, but when synthesizing an array of disciplines, including science, technology, sociology, and religion, thus providing plausible explanations for happenings on the world’s stage.

In his new book, Revolutionary Wealth (Knopf, 2006), Mr. Toffler and his wife, Heidi, argue that more and more economic activity takes place through processes that do not involve the exchange of currency. The rapid rise of this nonmonetary wealth system has major implications for both the global economy and for humanity in general — implications that have been unmeasured and underestimated.

The interview also recounts some fundamental trends, like education, which this blog has addressed previously. 

Here is an excerpt from the Fisher interview: In the book, you write of education’s failure to move from the industrial age to the knowledge economy. Is homeschooling a “prosumer” response to this crisis?

TOFFLER: Yes, now that you mention it. It is an important and growing form of prosuming. The parents do it themselves, because the market does not supply what they want or need, or for that matter what the market needs.

Think about how we learned to use personal computers. PC use went from zero to hundreds of millions of people who know and use PCs routinely, and nobody went to school to learn how. Instead, chances are you found a “guru,” and a guru was anyone who bought his PC a week before you bought yours. And there were user groups — volunteers passing valuable knowledge back and forth. If you agree that the PC has had an impact on productivity in the money economy, then the fact that people taught each other how to use this thing without money changing hands is another example of what a big impact prosumers can have on the money economy. Add these things together — homeschooling, teaching how to use PCs, Linux, etc. — and you begin to understand this big invisible economic force. People have written about each of these pieces, but haven’t seen them as part of a huge nonmoney economy interacting with the money economy.

Jim Rodgers' "A Bull in China"

Excerpts from a recent Forbes.com interview with Jim Rogers, co-founder of the Quantum Fund and one of the most successful Global Macro investors in history. He tells Forbes.com why he's so bullish on China, sour on America and will raise his family in Singapore.

So, why China?

A big change is taking place. Most people do not understand the full breadth and depth of what's happening there. All Americans are spending a lot of money in China now, so why don't we get something back? They're among the best capitalists in the world. Massachusetts is more communist than China is these days. You can benefit too; you don't have to sit back and moan and say, "What do we do?" Investing in the U.S. in 1907 was a brilliant thing to do. Investing in China in 2007 is a brilliant thing to do. Just call your broker. It's that easy.

How are you preparing for Chinese dominance in the next century?

My daughter is 4-and-a-half. She has two native languages. One is Mandarin. When she was born, we got a Chinese nanny from China who moved in with us, and I told her you only speak Mandarin to her. She speaks Chinese like a native. We've moved to Singapore to insure that it continues. We're having another daughter in March, and she'll be brought up the same way. There are 1.5 billion people who speak Chinese every day. That most Americans are monolingual I see as a bad situation.

You've no doubt been told you're being alarmist and that despite China's rapid growth it's a small part of the world economy.

Nobody quite understood in 1907 that the U.S. was the next great country in the world. The U.S. was a debtor nation, we were lawless, we had a huge Civil War and presidents were assassinated. We didn't have human rights. We had massacres, people would demonstrate and they would call the army and the Pinkertons. As recently as 1945, the British still thought they were the greatest country in the world and they could prevent America from growing.

Perception - Our Beliefs of What "Is" and How Shift Happens

Adequately conveying to people invested in the past the tremendous and real change that is occuring in the world today and the implications of the revolution is challenging. It is one thing to generally express the concept of rapid change and another to codify the reality of this change in a manner which people can grasp. Thus consider the following presentation and perhaps you will be more prepared and able to grasp the shift and just some of the implications of the revolution: http://www.youtube.com/v/ljbI-363A2Q"