In an environment where the greatest source of wealth will be the ideas you have in your head rather than physical capital alone, anyone who thinks clearly will potentially be rich.

This is worth remembering as you plan ahead. The twilight of state systems in the past has seldom been a polite, orderly process.

The key to unlocking the implications of megapolitical change is understanding the factors that precipitate revolutions in the use of violence. These variables can be somewhat arbitrarily grouped into four categories: topography, climate, microbes, and technology.

During the first half of the next century there will be a massive transfer of wealth from the Old West to the New East. Political failures—and China is still a politically backward country—may delay this transfer of wealth and strategic power, but are most unlikely to prevent it. They cannot reverse it. This process of the shift in wealth would in

whether these developments can or should proceed in the face of opposition from legions of losers will be among the more important controversies of the Information Age.

To see “outside” an existing system is like being a stagehand trying to force a dialogue with a character in a play. It breaches a convention that helps keep the system functioning. Every social order incorporates among its key taboos the notion that people living in it should not think about how it will end and what rules may prevail in the new

The brightest, most successful and ambitious of these will emerge as truly Sovereign Individuals. At first, only a handful will achieve full financial sovereignty. But this does not negate the advantages of financial independence. The fact that not everyone attains an equally vast fortune does not mean that it is futile or meaningless to become

As the example of the late Soviet Union illustrated so well, until a few years ago it was possible for states to exercise great power in the world even while wasting resources on a massive scale. When returns to violence are high and rising, magnitude means more than efficiency. Larger entities tend to prevail over smaller ones. Those governments

As the scale of technology plunges, governments will find that they must compete like corporations for income, charging no more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them. The full implications of this change are all but unimaginable.