Thanks to Michael O'Neill Johnston for the following book reports from The London Times:

The information age will give rise to the individual, ending the nation state, say James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg in their book "The Sovereign Individual" published by Macmillan (price 20 pounds, to order a copy call 01624 675 137.

The Revolution In Your Head

We stand at the threshold of the most sweeping revolution in history. Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation state, creating a new form of social organisation, the information society.

The coming transformation is both good news and bad. The good news is that the information revolution will liberate individuals as never before. For the first time, those who can educate themselves will be almost entirely free to invent their own work and realise the full benefits of their own productivity. Genius will be unleashed, freed from both the oppression of government and the drags of racial and ethnic prejudice.

In an environment where the greatest source of wealth will be the ideas you have in your head rather than physical capital alone, anyone who thinks clearly will potentially be rich. The information age will be the age of upward mobility. It will afford far more equal opportunity for the billions of humans in parts of the world that never shared fully in the prosperity of industrial socety. The brightest, most successful and ambitious of these will emerge as truly sovereign individuals operating in a realm without physical existence that will nonetheless develop what promises to be the world's largest economy by the second decade of the new millennium. By 2025, the cybereconomy will have many millions of participants. Some of them will be as rich as Bill Gates, worth more than $10 billion each. The cyberpoor may be those with an income of less than $200,000 a year. There will be no cyberwelfare. No cybertaxes and no cybergovernment. The cybereconomy could well be the greatest economic phenomenon of the next 30 years.

But there is bad news as well. The new organisation of society will leave individuals far more responsible for themselves than they have been accustomed to during the industrial period.

When technology is mobile and transactions occur in cyberspace, the capacity of nation states to redistribute income on a large scale will collapse. This means that you will no longer be obliged to live in a high-tax jurisdiction to earn high income. In the future, when most wealth can be earned anywhere, and even spent anywhere, governments that attempt to charge too much as the price of domicile will merely drive away their best customers.

Changes that diminish the power of predominant institutions are both unsettling and dangerous. Just as monarchs, lords, popes and potentates fought ruthlessly to preserve their accustomed privileges in the early stages of the modern period, so today's governments will employ violence, often of a covert and arbitrary kind, in the attempt to hold back the clock. But however ruthlessly governments behave, they will be increasingly required to bargain with autonomous individuals whose resources will no longer be so easily controlled.

The information revolution will not only create a fiscal crisis for governments, it will tend to disintegrate all large structures. Fourteen empires have disappeared in the 20th century. The breakdown of empires is part of a process that will dissolve the nation state. Government will have to adapt to the growing autonomy of the individual. Taxing capacity will plunge by 50 to 70 per cent. This will tend to make smaller jurisdictions more successful. The challenge of setting competitive terms to attract able individuals and their capital will be more easily undertaken in enclaves than across continents.

We believe that as the modern nation state decomposes, latter-day barbarians will increasingly try to exercise power behind the scenes. The modern barbarians have already infiltrated the forms of the nation state without greatly changing its appearance.

Groups, such as the Russian mafia, are microparasites feeding on a dying system. Violently unscrupulous, these groups employ the techniques of the state on a smaller scale. Their growing influence and power are part of the downsizing of politics. Efforts to contain violence will devolve in ways that depend more upon efficiency than power.

The rise of the sovereign individual will not be wholly welcomed as a promising new phase of history, even among those who benefit from it most. Everyone will feel some misgivings and many will despise innovations that undermine the territorial nation state. It is a fact of human nature that radical change is almost always seen as a turn for the worse.

There is a high probability that some who are offended by the new ways, as well as many who are disadvantaged by them, will react unpleasantly. Their nostalgia for compulsion will probably turn violent. The clash between the new and the old will shape the early years of the new millennium. We expect it to be a time of great danger and great reward, and a time of much diminished civility in some realms and unprecedented scope in others. Increasingly, autonomous individuals and bankrupt, desperate governments will confront one another across a new divide. We expect to see a radical restructuring of the nature of sovereignty and the virtual death of politics before the transition is over. You are destined to see the privatisation of almost all services governments now provide.

You will also see the re-emergence of associations of merchants and wealthy individuals with semi-sovereign powers. Such entities will re-emerge in place of the dying nation state in the new millennium, providing protection and helping to enforce contracts in an unsafe world.

In short, the future is likely to confound the expectations of those who have absorbed the civic myths of 20th-century industrial society. Among them are the illusions of social democracy. They presuppose that societies evolve in whatever way governments wish them to

AD preferably in response to opinion polls and scrupulously counted votes. This was never as true as it seemed 50 years ago. Now it is an anachronism, as much an artefact of industrialism as a rusting smokestack. The civic myths reflect not only a mindset that sees society's problems as susceptible to engineering solutions, they also reflect a false confidence that resources and individuals will remain as vulnerable to political compulsion in the future as they have been in the 20th century. We doubt it. Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome. As they do, the naive view that history is what people wish it to be will prove wildly misleading.

It will therefore be crucial that you see the world anew. That means looking from the outside to re-analyse much that you have probably taken for granted. If you fail to transcend conventional thinking at a time when conventional thinking is losing touch with reality, then you will be more likely to fall prey to an epidemic of disorientation that lies ahead. Disorientation breeds mistakes that could threaten your business, your investments and your way of life.

...and for even more reinforcement of our direction:

Body and Mind: Caught in the culture trap

Globally connected

BUSINESS people in the Information Age will have the world as their market.

Soon, the differences between your telephone, your computer and your television will be minimal. All will be interactive communications devices. You will be able to hold a voice conversation over the Internet, using microphones and speakers on your personal computer. Or watch a film.

You will be able to talk back to your television and communicate vast amounts of data through the network provided by the television entertainment media. As the industrial-era distinction between various forms of communication breaks down and costs plunge, more and more services will bill you by time of use rather than according to the destination of your messages. Conversation or data transmission anywhere in the world will cost little more than a local call did in 1985.

You will be able to earn credits to your account with all manner of transactions and carry your phone box with you. Your PC will be the branch office of your bank and global money brokerage. And like the smart-card pay phones that are useless to thieves if broken open with a crowbar, your computer could only be raided by someone capable of breaking or manipulating a sophisticated computer code.

You will be able to transact business almost anywhere north of Antarctica. You will be able to speak, transmit data, and journey via virtual reality over borders and boundaries at will. Telephone numbers that identify the locale of the speaker by area codes are likely to be superseded by universal access numbers, which will reach the party with whom you wish to communicate anywhere on the planet.

In time, you will be able to shorten a multi-year learning process and converse in Chinese with a factory foreman in Shanghai. It will no longer matter as much that you do not speak his language or dialect. His words may be in Chinese but you will hear them roughly translated into English. He will hear your conversation in Chinese. In time, the capacity to employ instantaneous translation will significantly increase competition in regions where obstacles of language and idiom have heretofore been significant. When that happens, it will matter little or not at all that the Chinese Government may not wish the call to be placed.

As the world grows closer together, you will have a greater opportunity than at any other time in history to customise your particular place in it. Even the information you receive on a regular basis from the media will be information of your choosing. You will be able to select news compiled and edited according to your instructions.

If the news is slow, you will access a virtual catalogue on the World Wide Web. If you see a suit that you almost like, you can adjust the width of the cuff when you place your order. It will be custom-cut and tailored to fit your body by robots in Malaysia from photographs scanned into your computer and transmitted through the Net.

You will be able to use cybermoney to make investments as well as pay for services and products. If you live in a jurisdiction like the United States that heavily regulates your investment options, you can choose to domicile your activities in a jurisdiction that permits the freedom to pursue a full range of investment options. You will be able to employ expert systems to help select your investments and cyberaccounts and cyberbookkeepers to monitor the progress of your holdings.

When you are not reviewing profit-and-loss data, you may take a virtual visit to the Louvre or download S.I. Hsiung's translation of The Romance of the Wester Chamber. At times of your choosing, your personal communications system will read the text aloud like a bard of old. Multi-tasking programs will allow you to perform many functions simultaneously.

If you are inspired by your dose of the classics, you can organise a virtual corporation to market dramatic productions of famous literature for viewing through three-dimensional retinal display. Instead of being projected into the air, the images will be projected directly onto the retinas of viewers with low-energy lasers fluctuating fifty thousand times a second. This technology, already under development, will allow many persons who are legally blind to see.