Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics and Ecology, Revised Edition

The Information Society

The information society will be one that develops around the production of information values, according to Japanese futurist Yoneji Masuda, and will therefore differ fundamentally from the agricultural and industrial societies of the past, which developed around the production of material values. More precisely, the term “information society” refers to an economy in which:

1. Information is the core of society's economic needs.
2. The economy, and society itself, grow and develop around this core – the production and use of information values.
3. The importance of information as an economic product exceeds goods, energy, and services.

This economic structure could be called an “information-axis economy.”