The Missing Vision for a New Economy

Thursday, January 6, 2011 by YES! Magazine
by David Korten

This is the first of a series  based on excerpts adapted from the 2nd edition of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth.

New and fortunate are those whose lives have not been directly touched by the 2008 Wall Street meltdown and its consequences. People want to understand what went wrong and how we can set it right. Yet the public commentary continues to center primarily on finger-pointing. Who knew what when? Which regulators were asleep at the switch, and why?

Most calls for action seek only to limit the excesses and deceptions of greedy bankers and complicit regulators. We have yet to engage in a much-needed national conversation that addresses essential, yet unasked, questions. For example:

• Do Wall Street institutions do anything so vital for the national interest as to justify opening the national purse strings and showering them with trillions of dollars in order to save them from the consequences of their own excess?
• Is it possible that the whole Wall Street edifice is built on an illusion that has no substance yet carries deadly economic, social, and environmental consequences for the larger society?
• Might there be other ways to provide necessary and beneficial financial services with greater effectiveness and at less cost?

Ultimately, it comes down to a question of the values we believe the economy should serve. Should it give priority to money, or to life? To the fortunes of the few, or the well-being of all?

The existing Wall Street-led economy is highly effective and efficient at converting real living wealth to phantom financial wealth to make rich people richer. It is a path to collective suicide.

Our future and that of our children depend on replacing the values and institutions of the Wall Street economy with the culture and institutions of a New Economy designed to provide an adequate and satisfying livelihood for all people in balanced relationship to Earth's biosphere. I believe that an honest public examination of these questions will lead to a unifying national political consensus that Wall Street institutions produce nothing of value to the society and fulfill no need not better served in other ways. They can and should be replaced with institutions that act like mature, caring adults and serve real needs in ways appropriate to the realities of the twenty-first century.

We cannot, however, simply let the Wall Street financial institutions collapse, as would have happened in 2008 without the federal bailout. Wall Street controls the creation and flow of the money that facilitates the economic transactions on which we depend for meeting most all our material needs. If its institutions suddenly shut down with no alternative in place, we would be left only the money in our pockets and instantly reduced to barter for most essentials of daily life, including food and water.

The process of shutting down Wall Street properly proceeds in parallel with action to put in place the institutions of a New Economy, including a new system for creating and allocating national currencies in ways more responsive to society's needs.

Leadership for institutional transformation rarely comes from within the institutions of Empire, which bring special privilege to the few and hardship to the many. It invariably comes from authentic grassroots movements that self-organize from outside the establishment to challenge the status quo and create alternative institutions that ultimately displace those that no longer serve.

Efforts to form a social movement to confront the Wall Street-Washington axis are handicapped, however, by the absence of a broadly shared vision of an economic system structured to achieve and maintain financial stability, ecological balance, prosperity for all, and full democratic participation.

As I will elaborate in a future post, the true alternative to the Wall Street capitalism that is imposing an intolerable burden on society is not totalitarian Soviet-style socialism. It is a system of locally rooted, self-reliant market economies that honor true market principles, operate by clear rules maintained and enforced by truly democratic governments, and mimic the structure and dynamics of Earth's biosphere.