Toffler on the economy

" The Year 2000 is closer to us in time than the great depression, yet the world's economists, traumatized by that historic disaster, remain frozen in the attitudes of the past. Economists, even those who talk the language of revolution, are peculiarly conservative creatures. If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2025, it would look very much like 1970-only more so.
Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organization nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashioned bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary extension of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which man's basic material wants have been satisfied.
One reason for their lack of imagination is that when they think about technological advance, they concentrate solely on the means of economic activity. Yet the super-industrial revolution challenges the ends as well. It threatens to alter not merely the 'how' of production but the 'why'. It will, in short, transform the very purposes of economic activity.
Before such an upheaval, even the most sophisticated tools of today's economists are helpless. Input-output tables, econometric models-the whole paraphernalia of analysis that economists employ simply do not come to grips with the external forces-political, social and ethical-that will transform economic life in the decades before us.
What does 'productivity' or 'efficiency' mean in a society that places a high value on psychic fulfillment? What happens to an economy when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness? How are economies likely to be affected by the rise of supra-national planning, taxing, and regulatory agencies or by kind of dialectical return to 'cottage industry' based on the most advanced cybernetic technologies? Most important, what happens when 'no growth' replaces 'growth' as an economic objective when GNP ceases to be the holy grail?
Only by stepping outside the framework of orthodox economic thought and examining these possibilities can we begin to prepare for tomorrow. And among these, none is more central than the shift in values that is likely to accompany the super-industrial revolution.
Under conditions of scarcity, men struggle to meet their immediate material needs. Today under more affluent conditions, we are reorganizing the economy to deal with a new level of human needs. From a system designed to provide material satisfaction , we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification. This process of 'psychologization', one of the central themes of the super-industrial revolution, has been all but overlooked by the economists. Yet it will result in a novel, surprise-filled economy unlike any man has ever experienced. The issues raised by it will reduce the great conflict of the twentieth century, the conflict between capitalism and communism, to comparative insignificance. For these issues sweep far beyond economic or political dogma. They involve, as we shall see, nothing less than sanity, the human organisms ability to distinguish illusion from reality."

Alvin Toffler, 'Future Shock', Chapter 10