Industrial Age

The Industrial Age is the book’s name for the period in which factories and production made industrialists the owners of wealth. Its significance lies in the contrast it establishes: the economic basis of wealth has shifted from land, to industrial production, and then to information, while educational habits and conventional advice have lagged behind that change.

Wealth and Historical Change

The book sketches three successive bases of economic power. Three hundred years ago, landownership meant wealth; in the Industrial Age, factories and production took that role, and America rose to dominance. In the present Information Age, the text argues, timely information is the source of wealth. This compressed historical sequence makes the Industrial Age a hinge between land-based wealth and an economy in which information moves rapidly across national borders.

Education and Employment

The Industrial Age also supplies the historical context for the book’s challenge to familiar schooling and career advice. Robert T. Kiyosaki argues that children are educated in an antiquated system, studying subjects they may never use and preparing for a world that no longer exists. Advice to earn good grades and seek a safe job belongs, in this account, to rules that have changed: employees can lose when a corporation downsizes, while owners and investors may benefit if its share price rises. The contrast is not simply between two kinds of work, but between dependence on an employer and control over one’s financial choices.

Sharon Lechter’s framing likewise treats education as necessary but insufficient. Robert’s educated father advised him to work for a corporation, while Rich Dad advised him to own one; both paths required education, but not the same education. The book therefore does not reject learning. It calls for financial knowledge alongside conventional schooling, so that employment is not mistaken for the only route to security.

The Industrial Legacy and Its Costs

The book links the older employment model to taxation and retirement insecurity. It argues that families may work for months to cover taxes, and that many people rely on jobs or pension plans without understanding the financial rules that shape those arrangements. In this account, people who lack financial aptitude have little escape from the consequences of working for income and paying taxes, while those who understand legal structures and investment can respond differently. These are the book’s prescriptions and claims, not a neutral history of industrialization.

The proposed response is preparation for change rather than a return to the Industrial Age’s assumptions. The book urges readers to develop financial intelligence, learn how assets and liabilities differ, and make deliberate choices about money. Its closing appeal casts the future as a matter of individual decisions: people can spend on liabilities, or invest in learning how to acquire assets. The Industrial Age thus functions less as a detailed historical setting than as a benchmark against which the book measures outdated advice and argues for financial education adapted to a new economic era.