You keep getting it incorrectly — "Third Wave" is not "Third Way" — which is entirely different, political concept of public-private economic integration, which was promoted by the Clintons and Tony Blair. **
** Ref: Donna Shalala to head Clinton Foundation [long history with Hillary] - FR, post #38 by CutePuppy, 2015 March 08
If I remember correctly, back when Newt first was Speaker he held a press conf. on CSPAN where he advocated reading Alvin and Heidi Tofflers book which was about advancing the Third Way.
Third Wave in Tofflers' terminology is the Information Age, contrasted with the Second Wave which was the Industrial Age, assigning the First Wave to the Agrarian Age **. It has nothing to do with the Third Way which is a euphemism for a fascist socialist tight public-private economic integration, which was promoted by the Clintons and Tony Blair, among others. ***
I found an old copy of Future shock a few years ago and read it expecting it to have been wrong, like most of the prediction books. But it was not. It was pretty darn accurate. .....
How much was he predicting vs working toward? .....
Could you please provide one example of his "predictions" from "Future Shock" which had NOT come to pass within 50 years of it's publication? .....
Futurists are not — nor do they claim to be — clairvoyants, mediums or psychics, so "prediction" is not an accurate way to describe or evaluate the content.
Futurism, not unlike good [technological] science fiction, is not about hard "predictions" — rather it's a vision of one or more possibilities or paths the civilization or [some] societies may take based on the state and trends of current technology and political or population shifts.
It's not necessarily what they personally want to happen or are afraid that would happen, rather these are things or paths that they see that have a good chance and high probability of happening and how they might evolve and affect people in different societies.
Often, even if the technology comes true, it may not be either economically viable at that period of time for society as a whole or there may be other new technology that, while not necessarily better may be cheaper or better promoted and catches the people's fancy or will be imposed on them by the industry or the governments. There are too many variables so exactly which paths the society will take is impossible to "predict" but getting some of the minor future developments "wrong" shouldn't detract from the overall value of the content — it's an opportunity to escape the daily news cycle and learn about things we don't necessarily know, understand or think about and look a little further ahead.
Alvin and Heidi Toffler's book Third Wave (1980) was a sequel to Future Shock (1970), which later was followed by Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (1990). However, in 2006, an updated theme of Third Wave was published in a much expanded book Revolutionary Wealth (2006), which I would highly recommend — particularly because many of the things described there as "the future" have already happened, and some are happening with lightening speed... whether we like it or not, it helps to know what to expect so we could either be ready for them, help advance some of them or lead the fight against some of them.