Who Will Become Wealthy in the Information Age?
by Michael Southon As you know, we’re now well and truly in the Information Age. It began about 10 years ago. In fact, many economists say it began in 1989, with the Fall of the Berlin Wall (and the start of the World Wide Web). To understand who will become wealthy in the Information Age, first we need to understand how the Information Age differs from the Industrial Age (born about 1860, died about 1989). In fact, let’s get a complete overview and go back to the Agrarian Age. In the Agrarian Age, society was basically divided into two classes: the landowners and the people who worked on the land (the serfs). If you were a serf, there wasn’t much you could do about it: land-ownership passed down through families and you were stuck with the status you were born into. When the Industrial Age arrived, everything changed: it was no longer agriculture that generated most of the wealth, but manufacturing. Suddenly, land was no longer the key to wealth. A factory occupied far less land than
