Photo by Mister V.

The ancient alchemist and modern Wall Street capitalist have much in common. The latter has achieved the modern equivalent of the alchemist's dream of turning cheap metals into gold. He creates money out of absolutely nothing and wholly free from exertion or the inconvenience of producing anything of real value.

Making money with no effort can be an addictive experience. I recall my excitement back in the mid-1960s, when Fran, my wife, and I first made a modest investment in a mutual fund and watched our savings grow magically by hundreds and then thousands of dollars with no effort whatsoever on our part. We got a case of Wall Street fever on what, by current standards, was a tiny scale.

Of course, most of what we call magic is illusion. When the credit collapse pulled back the curtain to expose Wall Street’s secret inner workings, we learned the extent to which Wall Street is a world of deception, misrepresentation, and insider dealing on a breathtaking scale. It was such an ugly picture that Wall Street’s seriously corrupted institutions stopped lending even to each other for the simple reason that no one trusted the other guy’s financial statements.

Much of what Wall Street celebrates as financial innovation involves borrowing to inflate the value of financial assets to create collateral to support more borrowing to further inflate the assets to create more collateral… Whether you call it a loan pyramid or a Ponzi scheme, it is a form of theft.

A responsible Federal Reserve would have raised interest rates to dampen asset bubbles like the tech-stock bubble of the 1990s and housing bubble of the 2000s. Instead, captive to Wall Street interests, it pursued cheap money policies to encourage and facilitate ever more borrowing by speculators to keep the bubbles growing.

Academics who never learned the difference between real wealth and phantom financial wealth published scholarly articles celebrating the discovery of the secret of effortless wealth creation. Back in 1997, I came across an article in Foreign Policy by John Edmunds, then a finance professor at Babson College and the Arthur D. Little School of Management, titled “Securities: The New Wealth Machine” [pdf]. This is a defining quote:

Historically, manufacturing, exporting and direct investment produced prosperity through income creation. Wealth was created when a portion of income was diverted from consumption into investment in buildings, machinery and technological change. Societies accumulated wealth slowly over generations. Now many societies, and indeed the entire world, have learned how to create wealth directly. The new approach requires that a state find ways to increase the market value of its stock of productive assets. [Emphasis in the original.] … An economic policy that aims to achieve growth by wealth creation therefore does not attempt to increase the production of goods and services, except as a secondary objective.

The thesis was so absurd that on first reading I thought it must surely be some sort of joke or parody intended to expose the irrationality of the exuberance surrounding the inflation of financial bubbles. In his 2008 book, Bad Money, the journalist and former Republican Party political strategist Kevin Phillips notes the Edmunds article was widely discussed on Wall Street and implies that it may have inspired the securitization of housing mortgages.

System Failure? Look Upstream
Why it's important to address our economic problems at their Wall Street roots.

Contrary to the Edmunds “logic,” an asset bubble—real estate or otherwise—does not create wealth. A rise in the market price of a house from $200,000 to $400,000 does not make it more functional or comfortable. The real consequence of a real estate bubble is to increase the financial power of those who own property relative to those who do not. Wall Street encouraged homeowners to monetize their market gains with mortgages they lacked the means to repay except by further borrowing. It then converted these toxic mortgages into worthless toxic securities and sold them to the unwary, including the pension funds that many of those who borrowed against their inflated home values counted on for their retirement.

Why do we tolerate Wall Street’s reckless excess and abuse of power? In part, it is because so many people of influence have bought into the Edmunds fallacy. If you have difficulty understanding "economist speak," it may be because you are in touch with reality.

[Next: Good Debt, Bad Debt]

David Korten (livingeconomiesforum.org) is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine and co-chair of the New Economy Working Group. This Agenda for a New Economy blog series is co-sponsored by CSRwire.com and YesMagazine.org based on excerpts from Agenda for a New Economy, 2nd edition.

The ideas presented here are developed in greater detail in Agenda for a New Economy available from the YES! Magazine web store — where there are 3 WAYS TO GET THE BOOK and a 22% discount!

Interested?

•   Agenda for a New Economy available from the YES! Magazine web store.

More by David Korten:

• The Illusion of Money
  Real wealth or phantom assets? David Korten explores the difference between the kind of wealth that makes life better and the phantom wealth created by financial speculation.
  
• Bankers, Bookies, and Gamblers
  What is the proper role and social function of a bank? The answer starts with getting the question right.
• 10 Common Sense Principles for a New Economy
  It’s time we the people declare our independence from the money-favoring Wall Street economy.
  

It's easy to fix the symptoms of a problem, but finding a real solution involves looking upstream to figure out what's causing the problem in the first place.

Photo by Stu Mayhew.

Many years ago a wise Canadian colleague, Tim Brodhead, explained to me why most efforts to end poverty fail. “They stop at treating the symptoms of poverty, such as hunger and poor health, with food programs and clinics.” They never ask the obvious question: “Why do a few people enjoy effortless abundance, while billions of others who work far harder experience extreme deprivation?”

I realized it was the same lesson my business school professors had drummed into my head in my student days. “The visible problem—a defective product or an underperforming employee—is a symptom of system failure. Look upstream to find and fix the problem at its source. Step back and look at the big picture.”

Tim summed up his observation with a profound lesson, “If you act to correct a problem without a theory about its cause, you inevitably treat only the symptoms.”

I soon found myself asking a yet larger question: “Why does our economic system consign billions of people to degrading poverty, destroy Earth’s ecosystem, and tear apart the social fabric of civilized community?”

It turns out that the consequences of acting on a bad theory based on a false premise can be even worse than acting without a theory. Indeed, it can lead to collective self-extinction.
Cultural historian Jared Diamond tells of the Viking colony on the coast of Greenland that perished of hunger next to waters abundant with fish; it had a cultural theory that eating fish is not “civilized.”

As we are perplexed by the foolishness of the Viking colony, future generations may be perplexed by our equally foolish devotion to an economic theory that using borrowed money to speculate on financial bubbles will eventually result in prosperity for all. No need for concern that in the process we are trashing Earth’s life support system and destroying the social bonds of family and community. Eventually, or so the theory goes, we will have enough money to heal the environment and end poverty.

As I looked ever further up-stream I was startled to find that the source of our foolish behavior is an illusion: the belief that money—a mere number created with a simple accounting entry that has no reality outside the human mind—is wealth—indeed the standard against which all other forms of wealth are properly measured.

Time for a New Theory of Money
Ellen Brown: When we recognize that money is simply credit, we can unleash it as a powerful tool for our communities.

Because money represents a claim on so many things essential to our survival and well-being, it is easy to confuse it with the things for which it may be exchanged. From there, we easily slip into evaluating economic performance by the rate at which it is growing phantom wealth financial assets. Focused on returns to money, we embrace GDP growth, essentially a measure of the rate at which human relationships are being monetized and commodified and real assets are being converted to financial assets, as our primary measure of progress.

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.”

This misdirection ultimately explains why we tolerate an economy that cycles violently between boom-and-bust; decimates the middle class; forces families to choose between paying the rent, putting food on the table, and caring for their children; and wantonly destroys the relationships of community and Earth’s biosphere.

It explains why we have allowed Wall Street to assume control of our most powerful economic, political, and media institutions to make financial speculation, accounting fraud, and the inflation of financial bubbles our national economic priorities. It explains why we allow the perpetrators of this fraud to reward themselves with obscene bonuses for creating phantom financial assets that inflate their claims to the real wealth created by others—an act that in a slightly different context would be considered counterfeiting, a form of theft.

The Wall Street edifice sits on a foundation of a false theory grounded in grand illusion. Spending trillions of dollars to renovate the edifice is a fool’s errand. Our best hope for a viable future is to build a New Economy grounded in reality-based theories and devoted to the sustainable production and exchange of real goods and services to meet the real needs of our children, families, communities, and natural environmental systems. [Next: Money from Nothing?]

David Korten (livingeconomiesforum.org) is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine and co-chair of the New Economy Working Group. This Agenda for a New Economy blog series is co-sponsored by CSRwire.com and YesMagazine.org based on excerpts from Agenda for a New Economy, 2nd edition.

The ideas presented here are developed in greater detail in Agenda for a New Economy available from the YES! Magazine web store — where there are 3 WAYS TO GET THE BOOK and a 22% discount!

Interested?

•   Agenda for a New Economy available from the YES! Magazine web store.

• The Illusion of Money
  Real wealth or phantom assets? David Korten explores the difference between the kind of wealth that makes life better and the phantom wealth created by financial speculation.
• 7 Ways to Transform Banking
  Each of us can help build a resilient financial system that will serve real people in real communities.
  

People often fail to recognize the difference between phantom financial assets and real, living wealth.

Photo by Mike Bitzenhofer

In business school, we were taught to assess investment options to maximize financial return. I don’t recall that the professor ever mentioned that this meant maximizing returns to people who have money—to make rich people richer. Or that money is a system of power and that the more our lives depend on money, the greater our subservience to those who control the creation and allocation of money.

Nor do I recall asking my professors, “What is money?” “Why do we assume that maximizing financial return maximizes the creation of real value?” “How does the conversion of natural living wealth to financial wealth create real value?” “What about the many fortunes built through financial speculation, fraud, government subsidies, the sale of harmful products, and the abuse of monopoly power?” I may have had some doubts, but kept them to myself for fear of being dismissed as hopelessly stupid.

Perhaps those who taught us economics, finance, and accounting did not themselves recognize the difference between real living wealth and phantom financial wealth.

Real wealth has intrinsic value. Examples include fertile land, healthful food, knowledge, productive labor, pure water and clean air, labor, and physical infrastructure. The most important forms of real wealth are beyond price and are unavailable for market purchase. These include healthy, happy children, loving families, caring communities, a beautiful, healthy, natural environment.

Real wealth also includes all the many things of intrinsic artistic, spiritual, or utilitarian value essential to maintaining the various forms of living wealth. These may or may not have a market price. They include healthful food, fertile land, pure water, clean air, caring relationships and loving parents, education, health care, fulfilling opportunities for service, and time for meditation and spiritual reflection.

Money, a number on a piece of paper or created with an accounting enter, has no intrinsic value. Wall Street generates it in astonishing quantities through accounting tricks, financial bubbles, and debt pyramids. It appears from nowhere and can disappear in an instant, as a phantom in the night. 

Those engaged in creating phantom wealth collect handsome “performance” fees for their services and walk away with their gains. When the bubble bursts, borrowers default on debts they cannot pay and the bubbles and debt pyramid collapse in a cascade of bankruptcies.

What is Real Wealth?
John Robbins: We've been measuring happiness in all the wrong ways. How can we find true quality of life?

It is easy to confuse phantom financial assets with the real wealth for which they can be exchanged. Indeed, the illusions of phantom wealth are so convincing that most Wall Street players believe they are creating real wealth.

The market, of course, makes no distinction between the dollars acquired through means that enrich society, those created by means that impoverish society, and those simply created out of thin air. Money is money, and the more you have, the more the market eagerly responds to your every whim. It is still only a number with no existence outside the human mind.

Those who benefit from the creation of phantom wealth may never realize that their gain is unfairly diluting everyone else’s claim to the available stock of real wealth. They may also fail to realize that Wall Street and its international counterparts have generated total phantom-wealth claims far in excess of the value of all the world’s real wealth, thus creating expectations of future security and comforts that can never be fulfilled.

The deceptions are built right into our language. We refer to speculation as “investment” and to phantom financial wealth as “capital.” Indeed, when we hear the terms wealth, capital, assets, or resources we have no way to know whether the reference is to a real asset or only to a phantom financial asset. Our language gives us no way to make this essential distinction. It is no wonder we get confused and fail to recognize that Wall Street produces nothing of real value.

[Next: System Failure? Look Upstream]

David Korten (livingeconomiesforum.org) is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine and co-chair of the New Economy Working Group. This Agenda for a New Economy blog series is co-sponsored by CSRwire.com and YesMagazine.org based on excerpts from Agenda for a New Economy, 2nd edition.

The ideas presented here are developed in greater detail in Agenda for a New Economy available from the YES! Magazine web store — where there are 3 WAYS TO GET THE BOOK and a 22% discount!

Interested?

•   Agenda for a New Economy available from the YES! Magazine web store.

• Putting the Science of Happiness into Practice
  Countries around the world are beginning to apply the science of well-being to the decisions they make. News from the 5th International Conference on Gross National Happiness.
  

• Building Community: An Economic Approach
  David Korten and David Brancaccio discuss what economic transformation has to do with building stronger, happier communities.

David Korten's roots in small town America taught him the value of community.

Photo by Steve Minor

Many people are intrigued by the story of my defection from my establishment roots to becoming a rebel voice challenging the legitimacy of the institutions I once served. It is the story of a lifelong journey filled with an uncommonly rich and varied collection of experiences. Here are some highlights:

I grew up in a conservative small town where I learned to value family, community, and nature. I was raised to believe in the special character of America as a middle-class democracy, free from the extremes of wealth and poverty that supposedly characterized the world’s less advanced nations. In my childhood, my dad, a local retail merchant, taught me that if your primary business purpose is not to serve your customers and community, then you have no business being in business.

My Stanford Business School education taught me to look for the big picture. My doctoral dissertation research on cultural change in Ethiopia and its impact on modern organizations taught me the power of culture in shaping collective behavior.

From my experience as an Air Force captain on the faculty of the Special Air Warfare School and as a military aide in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, I learned how the world’s most powerful military was thwarted by the self-organizing networks of an ill-equipped peasant army motivated by a vision of independence and self-rule. That experience helped me later recognize the potential of a committed citizenry to likewise thwart the seemingly invincible power of Wall Street and gave me insights into how that resistance might self-organize.

While academic director of the Central American Institute for Business Administration in Managua, Nicaragua, I witnessed the extreme gap between the super-rich and the super-poor.
While a professor on the organization faculty at the Harvard Business School, I learned how the structures of large-scale institutional systems shape behavior and how system structures can be designed to support intended outcomes.

During fifteen years in Asia with the Ford Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development, I experienced the positive power and potential of local community self-organization and the importance of the local control and management of essential natural resources and participated in many experiences in large-scale organizational change. These were the years of my awakening to the terrible truth that development models centered on economic growth almost inevitably make a few people fabulously wealthy at an enormous social and environmental cost to the substantial majority.

In 1992, Fran (my wife) and I returned to the United States and settled in New York City near Union Square between Madison Avenue and Wall Street and engaged the inquiry into the nature of the publicly traded limited liability, private-benefit corporation as an inherently destructive anti-market business form that produced When Corporations Rule the World.

As a founding member of the International Forum on Globalization, I learned about the power of a new story propagated through global citizen networks to thwart the agenda of the world’s most powerful corporations and reshape the course of history.

As the co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine, I have come to realize that every act of resistance against what we don’t want must be paired with a positive vision of what we do want.

The Missing Vision
David Korten begins a blog series outlining his Agenda for a New Economy

Writing The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism drew me into in the study of the incredible reality of life’s capacity for creative, cooperative self-organization and the implications for the design of economies that mimic healthy living systems.

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community drew me into an examination of contemporary impact of five thousand years of organizing human societies as hierarchies of domination governed by institutions that nurture and reward moral, emotional, and behavioral dysfunction.

My experience as a founding board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies has immersed me in the experience of communities all across the United States and Canada that are taking control of their economic future by rebuilding their local economies.

These are a few of the experiences and lessons that inform and find expression in Agenda for a New Economy and the blogs I will be sharing here in the next few months.

[Next The Illusion of Money]

David Korten (livingeconomiesforum.org) is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine and co-chair of the New Economy Working Group. This Agenda for a New Economy blog series is co-sponsored by CSRwire.com and YesMagazine.org based on excerpts from Agenda for a New Economy, 2nd edition.

The ideas presented here are developed in greater detail in Agenda for a New Economy available from the YES! Magazine web store – where there are 3 WAYS TO GET THE BOOK and a 22% discount!

Interested?

•   Agenda for a New Economy available from the YES! Magazine web store.

• Building Community: An Economic Approach
  David Korten and David Brancaccio discuss what economic transformation has to do with building stronger, happier communities.

• Lighting the Way to a New Economy
  All across the United States and Canada people are rebuilding their local economies to restore community and regain control of their economic lives. How do these local efforts add up to global economic transformation?.

Photo by Hernan Seoane

Few 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.

Building Community: An Economic Approach: David Korten: What economic transformation has to do with building stronger, happier communities.

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 blog, 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.

[Next: My Defection Story]

David Korten (livingeconomiesforum.org) is the author of Agenda for a New Economy, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World. He is board chair of YES! Magazine and co-chair of the New Economy Working Group. This Agenda for a New Economy blog series is co-sponsored by CSRwire.com and YesMagazine.org based on excerpts from Agenda for a New Economy, 2nd edition.

The ideas presented here are developed in greater detail in Agenda for a New Economy available from the YES! Magazine web store – where there are 3 WAYS TO GET THE BOOK and a 22% discount!

Interested?

•   Agenda for a New Economy available from the YES! Magazine web store.

• Building Community: An Economic Approach
  David Korten and David Brancaccio discuss what economic transformation has to do with building stronger, happier communities.

• 10 Common Sense Principles for a New Economy
  It’s time we the people declare our independence from the money-favoring Wall Street economy.