After enduring 50 million layoffs and a quarter-century of falling wages, America has finally reached the prosperous phase of the Information Revolution. David Snyder takes you on a guided tour of the first decade of the 21st Century, during which mature, easy-to-use technology will empower all of us with chatty computers, "smart" tools and appliances, and a flood-tide of rising productivity that will lift everybody's boat.

Snyder spells out the specific managerial, organizational and operational changes and innovations that are enabling individual firms – and government agencies– to achieve consistently superior performance through comprehensive socio-technical transformation.

A lively scenario depicting the ways that millions of families – America's most adaptive institutions – are dealing with the return of prosperity, and with living and working longer in a world increasingly filled with info-mated goods and services.

Now that our high-tech economy has actually "taken off," U.S. public schools will have to undertake a dramatic shift in their instructional methods if they are to provide all students a mastery of the information-handling skills that will be required by most jobs in the post-industrial workplace. Snyder describes how a growing number of American communities are re-vitalizing their local education systems by integrating project work, community service and experiential learning with classroom instruction.

Freed from the constraints of the Cold War and protectionist tariffs, the world’s economies are being turbulated by access to new markets and exposure to new competition. As the world’s political leaders and financial institutions seek to re-stabilize international commerce through regional trading blocs, the World Wide Web is fostering the rapid growth of new economic relationships and mutual interests, new flows of information, and a multitude of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) that will eventually become the basis of the post-industrial global economy.

After detailing recent break-through applications of info-com technology by U.S. health care providers, futurist Snyder describes how the integration of these individual successes into a single provider-patient support system over the next decade will cause the quality of U.S. health care to soar and its costs to fall as the superior performance of "precision care" eliminates the need for managed care.