Wealth & Money Quote by Alvin Toffler

Calling the new economy "over" isn’t just wrong in Alvin Toffler’s view; it’s historically illiterate. The line works because it yanks the debate out of the pundit cycle and drops it into a longer timeline, where today’s panics look embarrassingly small. By picking London in 1830, Toffler points to a familiar blindness: the center of commentary watching the periphery of production, mistaking local business failures for civilizational reversal. The industrial revolution didn’t stop because a few mills collapsed; it reorganized labor, capital, cities, and social life on its way to becoming the default setting.

The subtext is a critique of how elites narrate change. We’re addicted to neat endings: boom, bust, and then a comforting return to "normal". Toffler argues there is no normal to return to once an economy’s underlying logic shifts. Bankruptcies are not the obituary; they’re the churn. In a transformation, some early winners get wiped out, business models expire, bubbles pop, and the infrastructure of the future keeps quietly hardening underneath.

Context matters: Toffler spent his career mapping waves of societal change, insisting that technology and information would rewire power and work. This analogy is a warning against mistaking market corrections for the end of a paradigm. He’s not denying pain; he’s refusing the lazy conclusion that pain equals reversal. In that sense, the quote isn’t optimism so much as discipline: judge revolutions by trajectories, not headlines.