"If I would need to make a prediction I still believe Kaplan's scenario is very plausible." -- David Korten
David C. Korten (1937– ) is an American economist, author, and former Professor of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business,political activist and prominent critic of corporate globalization, "by training and inclination a student of psychology and behavioral systems". His best-known publication is When Corporations Rule the World (1995 and 2001).
"And each of these perspectives comes to the same conclusion, which is that our global economy is out of control and performing contrary to basic principles of market economics.""As long as you have a system that is based on the rational that if you are making money you are thereby making a contribution to society, these financial rogue practices will continue.""But in the past, US companies have been able to increase their profits through downsizing in the US, through colonizing other people's resources, and through the increase of globalization.""But we can also take the radical view that the test of an economy has to do with the extent to which it is providing everybody with a decent means of living.""Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy.""Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way.""Europeans say they are proud of their social fabric, of strong rights for workers and the weak in society.""Global competition is about winners and losers.""If you look at the US economy over the last 15-20 years wages have been stagnating or even declining.""If you look internationally over the last 50 years there have been improvements in the third world, but in the last 20 years the reverse has happened, with debt crises and increased poverty.""In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of "the Haves" over the human rights of "the Have Nots" is inevitably called into serious question.""In the US, most progressives start to see the differences between internationalism and economic globalization.""It is interesting to note that the 200 richest people have more assets than the 2 billion poorest.""It will take some time before a politician will capture the imagination of the American people and have the vision and understanding to do what is necessary for a better future for the people of America and the world.""Money flows into the US, and inflates US assets, and allows the US to have a monstrous trade deficit. That means we are consuming more than we are producing.""Money is a mechanism for control.""Money is not wealth. Money is a claim on wealth.""More and more surveys in the US are indicating a change in values taking place among consumers, who become more concerned about quality of life, food, health and the environment.""More humane societies are usually smaller, like the Scandinavian countries and Holland, where it is much easier to reach consensus and cooperation.""Moreover, statistics can be deceiving: the growth of jobs in the US in the 90s was due to many part-time jobs, with no benefits and generally low pay.""My claim is that we do not have a market economy, but a capitalist economy.""My own experience in the third world was that even if people started to make more money, the cost of living and housing increased often faster than the wages.""Not exclusively, but the bulk of our local economy should be covered by local currencies, which is more efficient than having global currencies which lose connection with reality in the markets, shops and communities of the people.""So, there is enormous instability in the global economy with a shift of winners and losers.""The EU will face problems similar to the US: an increasing gap between the citizens and decision makers in Brussels and a perceived or even real lack of democracy.""The first principle of the market economy is that it is comprised of many small buyers and sellers, which implies a substantial degree of equity. Another fundamental market principle is that costs are internalized in the producer's price.""The professional study of economics has become ideological brainwashing. It is a defense of the excesses of the capitalist system.""There are actually very few US politicians who have integrity and vision.""There is a huge shift taking place in the global awareness in the last 5 years with strong views about globalization and the power structures of major corporations.""There is no visible sign that the current politicians in the US are willing to see the need for change.""Wall Street sees a social fabric or social contract as inefficiencies, which need to be removed.""We should be moving toward local currencies not global or European currencies."
David Korten was born in Longview, Washington in 1937 and is a 1955 graduate of Longview's R. A. Long high school. He received a Master of Business Administration and PhD from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He says: "My early career [after leaving Stanford in 1959] was devoted to setting up business schools in low-income countries - starting with Ethiopia". He served during the Vietnam War as a captain in the United States Air Force, undertaking US-based teaching and organisational duties; and for 5½ years was a visiting professor in the Harvard Business School. While at Stanford in the 1950s, he married Frances Fisher Korten, with whom he now lives on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, Washington.
He served for five and a half years as a Visiting Associate Professor of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business where he taught in Harvard's middle management, M.B.A. and doctoral programs.
He also served as the Harvard Business School adviser to the Nicaragua-based Central American Institute of Business Administration. He subsequently joined the staff of the Harvard Institute for International Development, where he headed a Ford Foundation-funded project to strengthen the organization and management of national family-planning programs.
In the late 1970s, Korten moved to Southeast Asia, where he lived for nearly 15 years, serving as a Ford Foundation project specialist and, later, as Asia regional advisor on development management to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which involved him in regular travel between Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Korten says he became disenchanted with the official aid system and devoted his last five years in Asia to "working with leaders of Asian nongovernmental organizations on identifying the root causes of development failure in the region and building the capacity of civil society organizations to function as strategic catalysts of national- and global-level change". He formed the view that the poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he was observing in Asia was also being experienced in nearly every country in the world, including the United States and other "developed" countries. He also concluded that the United States was actively promoting...both at home and abroad...the very policies that were deepening the resulting global crisis.
He returned to the US in 1992 and has assisted in raising public consciousness of the political and institutional consequences of economic globalization and the expansion of corporate power at the expense of democracy, equity, and environmental protection.
Korten is co-founder and board chair of the Positive Futures Network which publishes the quarterly YES! Magazine. He is also a board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, an associate of the International Forum on Globalization., and a member of the Club of Rome.
