AGENDA FOR A NEW ECONOMY - From phantom wealth to real wealth

AGENDA FOR A NEW ECONOMY

From phantom wealth to real wealth

David C. Korten

Tata McGraw-Hill 2009

Pp 196    Rs.275

Around two thousand years ago was reported a voice crying in the wilderness, a man who fed on locusts and wore a coat of camel’s hair. With a single-point message of ‘repentance’, he embarrassed the king extremely about his adulterous life. The ‘woman scorned’ asked for his head – and for reasons beyond conscience and morality, she got it on a platter. The voice was temporarily silenced.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century and several million multiple-hue prophets later, we again hear voices crying hoarse against the generations of rape of Mother Earth, a macabre oedipal ritual that must end in mutual annihilation. We have also crossed the limits of conscience and morality. For as David C. Korten says: 5000 years of attempting to conquer nature and one another, we now realise we are actually attacking our life support system. Someone has rightly pointed out that the initial letters of ‘Mother Earth’ spell ME. What we do to her affects me, us. A theme played passionately by Korten as he shows how greenhouse gases and climate change, depletion of non-renewable resources and paving over of agricultural lands for indiscriminate industrialisation / urbanisation, sub-prime lending and the collapse of Wall Street are all c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d. Like John Donne said way back in 1624: …I am involved in mankind. / Therefore, send not to know / For whom the bell tolls, / It tolls for thee.

Korten’s message is clear: our pursuit of Phantom Wealth (illusory; created by inflation of asset bubbles unrelated to the creation of anything of real value or utility) perpetuates the very circumstances that brought us to the present juncture. Real wealth (healthy happy children, loving families, caring communities, and a beautiful, healthy natural environment; healthy food, fertile land, pure water, clean air, caring relationships and loving parents, education, etc.) on the other hand is yet a distant dream. And it is dreamy principles that can help bring us back on track. The creators of phantom wealth, symbolised by ‘Wall Street buccaneers’ seek self-enrichment by wealth they have not created; they minimised local self-reliance so that dependence on distant resources and markets was maximised. We need to shrink the economy, and reallocate real wealth to secure the long-term well-being of all. As against the old form of imperialism, the current stranglehold of Wall Street needs identification of the enemy that lies within us – our thinking, our wants, our greed, at the individual and the community level.

Korten gives several suggestions for taking the fate of Spaceship Earth in hand to collectively and cooperatively guide it to a path of survival. He therefore suggests six criteria of economic health – which include bringing human consumption into balance with earths’ natural systems, nurturing relationships within caring communities, and so on. Idealistic peroration? The alternative is Felo de se.

The book comes straight from the heart of a person who realised that the economic models embraced by official aid agencies were actually increasing poverty and environmental destruction. It comes from a person who understood that the US was actively promoting policies that were deepening the crisis; that if there is to be a human future, US must change. The book reads easily – and not just because it attacks the establishment. An honest tale speeds best being plainly told, perhaps. But there are times when like Somerset Maugham, the proverbial spade has to be called a bloody shovel. Rather the situation we are facing today needs earth-moving (pun intended) machinery! As in Victor Hugo’s Kingdom of the Blind we have a choice of opening our own eyes to the stark realities around us or gouging out the eyes of the few who can see – bringing them to our state of blind unconcern. The book needs to be shoved into the hands of each and every inhabitant of this earth, particularly the policy makers, the law makers, the industrialists, brokers of all colours who deal in phantom money, owners of pollutant devices (like motor cars!), and… the list is endless. Korten ends the book with a short, powerful statement: We are the ones we have been waiting for. The question is, are we? If not, Korten falls among those myriad voices screaming…eyeless, in the kingdom of the blind.