Mr. Calacanis is not wholly optimistic about where all this change will lead. “In my mind, candidly, we’ve got a 70 percent chance of figuring out this massive sea change without starting a full-on revolution in the streets, like we saw in Greece or Egypt, or any other place where unemployment among young adults breaks 20 percent,” he writes in “Angel.”

Be warned: One reason that Mr. Calacanis is willing to diagnose this economic ill is that he is also selling a prescription that he claims will alleviate it.

His book is intended as a guide for getting into the business of investing in very young tech companies at their earliest stages, known as “angel investing.” Mr. Calacanis is peddling a kind of populist movement for investing — he wants doctors, lawyers and other wealthy people, and even some in the middle class, to bet on start-ups, which he says is the best way to prepare financially for tech change.

“I want to inspire 10,000 people to become full-time angel investors,” he says.

Financial advisers I spoke to were not won over by Mr. Calacanis’s advice. They called his method indistinguishable from gambling, and they warned that the potential gains were not worth the risks. Invest in start-ups with your “fun money” but not the money you are counting on for your future, advised Spencer Sherman, the founder of Abacus Wealth Partners.

Even other tech investors aren’t sold on Mr. Calacanis’s movement. Hunter Walk, a partner at the seed-stage fund Homebrew, said ordinary investors would be better off putting their money into public tech giants rather than gambling on small firms. “Unless you’re willing to lose all your money, you shouldn’t do that,” Mr. Walk said.

Mr. Calacanis genuinely believes that investing in start-ups is good advice; he has even offered his three children a chance to skip college and to use the tuition money on betting on start-ups. His 7-year-old daughter, he said, is leaning toward taking the deal.