Editing Future Shock (section)

===Development of society and production===
Toffler distinguished three stages in the development of society and production: agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial.

Each of these waves develops its own "super-ideology” to explain reality. This ideology affects all the spheres that make up a civilization phase: technology, social patterns, information patterns, and power patterns.

The first stage began in the period of the [[Neolithic|Neolithic Era]] with the advent of [[agriculture]], thereby passing from [[Barbarian|barbarity]] to  [[civilization]]. A large number of people acted as [[prosumers]] (eating their grown food, hunting animals, building their own houses, making clothes,....). People traded by exchanging their own goods for commodities of others. The second stage began in England with the Industrial Revolution with the invention of the [[machine tool]] and the [[steam engine]]. People worked in factories to make money they could spend on goods they needed (it means they produced for exchange, not for use). Countries also created new social systems. The third stage began in the second half of the 20th century in the West when people invented automatic production, robotics, and the [[computer]]. The [[services sector]] attained great value.

Toffler proposed one criterion for distinguishing between [[industrial society]] and [[post-industrial society]]: the share of the [[population]]  occupied in agriculture versus the share of city labor occupied in the services sector.  In a post-industrial society, the share of the people occupied in agriculture does not exceed 15%, and the share of city laborers occupied in the services sector exceeds 50%. Thus, the share of the people occupied with brainwork greatly exceeds the share of the people occupied with physical work in post-industrial society.

[[The Third Wave (Toffler book)|The third wave]] led to the [[Information Era]] (now). Homes are the dominant institutions. Most people carry produce and consume in their homes or electronic cottages, as they produce more of their own products and services markets become less important for them. People consider each other to be equally free as vendors of prosumer-generated commodities.