David Korten’s Agenda for a New Economy
Posted by George Shears | Filed under Global Crises
Since this blog is dedicated to promoting wise ways to happiness, I would like to raise a crucially important question here: To what degree (if any) does the way of Wall Street contribute to true happiness?
I’m afraid that the prevailing answer that is most deeply engraved in our mass consciousness is that the Wall Street “roadmap” provides an absolutely essential means to this felicitous end.
Even after millions of Americans, while following this primrose path, were tragically ambushed and fleeced of their lifetime savings by the Wall Street pirates in 2008, a remarkably large segment of them continue to be loyal devotees of its key seductive proposition: Money equals Wealth, which in turn is a necessary condition for true happiness.
In reality, however, the major failures of our economic system, as well as the progressive trashing of our planet, can be traced directly to the fallacious assumption that money is synonymous with wealth. In the words of David Korten, author of the revolutionary and highly inspiring “Agenda for a New Economy,”
Once the belief that money is wealth is implanted firmly in the mind, it is easy to accept the idea that money is a storehouse of value rather than simply a storehouse of expectations, and that ‘making money’ is the equivalent of ‘creating wealth.’ Because Wall Street makes money in breathtaking quantities, we have allowed it to assume control of the whole economy—and therein lies the source of our problem.
He states, moreover, that the recent Wall Street meltdown has suddenly revealed that Wall Street is amazingly like the Mafia. Its Mafia-like dons are paid incredible sums of money for creating “phantom wealth” that has no relation to anything of real value. Most basically, it’s an outlandish form of theft.
He argues accordingly that spending vast sums of money in trying to rehabilitate Wall Street (as we’ve already done) is extremely foolish. Instead of trying to fix the capitalist economy that it has masterfully engineered, he says we need to return to the original vision of Adam Smith and use the “Main Street” model as the foundation in building a new real-wealth economy. He holds that this can be accomplished only through a vigorous grassroots, bottom-up process based on a new set of twenty-first century assumptions, values, and institutions.
He also points out that “real wealth has intrinsic, as contrasted to exchange, value. Life, not money, is the measure of real-wealth value. . .The most important forms are beyond price and unavailable for market purchase. These include healthy, happy children, loving families, caring communities, and a beautiful, healthy, natural environment.”
In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of his inspiring proposal for a new economy and the truly wise way to happiness it entails, I invite and encourage you to watch the following two-part video, entitled “Taking Back our Lives from the Wall Street Mafia.”
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