In Megatrends, published in 1982, John Naisbitt and I talked about the birth of the Information Economy. For millennia, the West’s developed economies had been based on agriculture. That was how people made their living. Then came the Industrial Revolution. Sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, we argued, another, more subtle upheaval occurred: More and more people held jobs in which they created, processed or manipulated information.

By 1982, the Information Economy was up and running, but it was still a controversial idea. “Information?” some folks scoffed. “There can’t possibly be any economic value in that.” But by the 1990s, the Information Economy had blossomed into the age of high technology, now a trillion-dollar industry.

Today we are on the brink of another extraordinary revolution. The Information Age is already over and an exciting new epoch is taking its place.

Remember, the key point is this: When wealth is derived from a new source—say information rather than industry—a new economic era is born.