In the last 10,000 years there has been three ages of humanity.  The first age was the Agricultural Age which began around 8,000 B.C. when humanity stopped be nomadic and began to put down roots, literally.  The advent of agriculture allowed humanity to start to build a social fabric that was placed based and that created values around land and the process of growing food.  

The Agricultural Age lasted until the late 1700s, when the Industrial Age first began in Europe.  With the commercial use of the new invention called the steam engine, the world started to change rapidly, with mechanized production, transport and the growing importance of cities as places of production and distribution.  If you live in an urban area, what you see was largely created during the Industrial Age.  Approximately thirty years ago the Information Age began in the developed countries.  This age was initiated by communications satellites, computers, and historically unprecedented numbers of college graduates.  The number of white collar workers surpassed the number of blue collar, or production workers, for the first time. 

Each of these ages created not only new economic structures, activities and places of work, they also created new economic values.  The dominant value of the Agricultural Age was land and the wealth that came from the land.  Large landowners were regarded as the wealthy.  Once the Industrial Age reached maturity, the new economic value became production.  Wealth was created through production.  The wealthy initially were the early captains of industry, the robber barons, …