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When Corporations Rule the World
When Corporations Rule the World has become a modern classic. Korten's warnings about the growing global power of multinational corporations seem prophetic today. This new edition has been revised throughout to make it more accessible to the general reader, and features a new introduction, a new epilogue, and three new chapters. While Korten points out that the multinationals are, if anything, more powerful now than they were when he first wrote the book, he also offers reason for hope: the growth of the international Living Democracy movement opposing corporate rule.
The new material in the book:
Documents the consolidation since 1995 of financial and corporate power at the expense of democracy, people, communities, and the planet
Looks in depth at the nature and cultural underpinnings of the burgeoning Living Democracy movement to resist corporate power
Offers a vision of a what a civil society grounded in life-centered values rather than immediate financial gain might look like.
The new material in the book:
Documents the consolidation since 1995 of financial and corporate power at the expense of democracy, people, communities, and the planet
Looks in depth at the nature and cultural underpinnings of the burgeoning Living Democracy movement to resist corporate power
Offers a vision of a what a civil society grounded in life-centered values rather than immediate financial gain might look like.
385 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
65 people are currently reading
2462 people want to read
About the author
David C. Korten
54 books69 followersDr. David C. Korten worked for more than thirty-five years in preeminent business, academic, and international development institutions before he turned away from the establishment to work exclusively with public interest citizen-action groups. He is the cofounder and board chair of YES! Magazine, the founder and president of The People-Centered Development Forum, 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. He is co-chair of the New Economy Working Group formed in 2008 to formulate and advance a new economy agenda.
Korten earned his MBA and PhD degrees at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Trained in organization theory, business strategy, and economics, he devoted his early career to setting up business schools in low-income countries—starting with Ethiopia—in the hope that creating a new class of professional business entrepreneurs who would be the key to ending global poverty. He completed his military service during the Vietnam War as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, with duty at the Special Air Warfare School, Air Force headquarters command, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Korten then served for five and a half years as a faculty member of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business, where he taught in Harvard’s middle management, MBA, and doctoral programs and served as Harvard’s adviser to the Central American Management Institute in Nicaragua. 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 left U.S. academia and moved to Southeast Asia, where he lived for nearly fifteen years, serving first as a Ford Foundation project specialist and later as Asia regional adviser on development management to the U.S. Agency for International Development. His work there won him international recognition for his contributions to the development of strategies for transforming public bureaucracies into responsive support systems dedicated to strengthening the community control and management of land, water, and forestry resources.
Increasingly concerned that the economic models embraced by official aid agencies were increasing poverty and environmental destruction and that these agencies were impervious to change from within, Korten broke with the official aid system. His last five years in Asia were devoted 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 positive national- and global-level change.
Korten came to realize that the crisis of deepening poverty, inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he observed in Asia was playing out in nearly every country in the world—including the United States and other “developed” countries. Furthermore, he concluded that the United States was actively promoting—both at home and abroad—the very policies that were deepening the crisis. If there were to be a positive human future, the United States must change. He returned to the United States in 1992 to share with his fellow Americans the lessons he had learned abroad.
Korten’s publications are required reading in university courses around the world. He has written numerous books, including Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism. He contributes regularly to edited books and professional journals, and to a wide variety of periodical publicatio
Korten earned his MBA and PhD degrees at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Trained in organization theory, business strategy, and economics, he devoted his early career to setting up business schools in low-income countries—starting with Ethiopia—in the hope that creating a new class of professional business entrepreneurs who would be the key to ending global poverty. He completed his military service during the Vietnam War as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, with duty at the Special Air Warfare School, Air Force headquarters command, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Korten then served for five and a half years as a faculty member of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business, where he taught in Harvard’s middle management, MBA, and doctoral programs and served as Harvard’s adviser to the Central American Management Institute in Nicaragua. 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 left U.S. academia and moved to Southeast Asia, where he lived for nearly fifteen years, serving first as a Ford Foundation project specialist and later as Asia regional adviser on development management to the U.S. Agency for International Development. His work there won him international recognition for his contributions to the development of strategies for transforming public bureaucracies into responsive support systems dedicated to strengthening the community control and management of land, water, and forestry resources.
Increasingly concerned that the economic models embraced by official aid agencies were increasing poverty and environmental destruction and that these agencies were impervious to change from within, Korten broke with the official aid system. His last five years in Asia were devoted 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 positive national- and global-level change.
Korten came to realize that the crisis of deepening poverty, inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he observed in Asia was playing out in nearly every country in the world—including the United States and other “developed” countries. Furthermore, he concluded that the United States was actively promoting—both at home and abroad—the very policies that were deepening the crisis. If there were to be a positive human future, the United States must change. He returned to the United States in 1992 to share with his fellow Americans the lessons he had learned abroad.
Korten’s publications are required reading in university courses around the world. He has written numerous books, including Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, the international best seller When Corporations Rule the World, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism. He contributes regularly to edited books and professional journals, and to a wide variety of periodical publicatio
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 73 reviews
August 21, 2008
This is an extraordinary book. It has taken me longer than usual to read it because it's not the kind of book you can race through and really grasp the concepts. Korten's writing is dryish, but clear. His arguments meticulously defined, logical and thorough. He traces how we, in our economic structuring of the social order, have created a world of continuing and increasing want even as the same capitalistic solutions---touted and installed over and over again---continue to perpetuate that want and ignorance and injustice. Korten explains things that most people don't know about or want to know about, but should---the bungled ostensible altruism of the World Bank and related development organization that have destroyed and homogenized cultures and thrown everybody into the same globalized race-to-the-bottom stewpot. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how international money and corporate interests actually work (it even has a reasoned, rather than hysterical analysis of how elitist groups such as the Bilderberg play into this dynamic), and how we've gotten to the effed-up state we're in. Some of Korten's solutions may sound too rosey, but there's much valid philosophical meat to chew on. Some of it gets repetitious, but what this book has to say is too important to nitpick. Korten's impeccable credentials and conservative background as part of the establishment prior to his epiphany (he was a military man, business teacher at Harvard, worked in official US aid agencies, etc.) make it hard to refute him as merely some eggheaded lefty. Everyone really needs to read this. A must. -EG
March 1, 2021
Korten gives a powerful overview of the dangers inherent in the corporatization of global society, and the forces for maintaining balance between public and private interests.
January 5, 2018
This book is a towering achievement. A devastating critique of modern day corporate capitalism - the best I've read since Michael Parenti's "Democracy for the Few." There is a reason that there are a gazillion editions of this book - it is fantastic.
Korten's argument has an incredibly wide focus that sharpens down to very fine detail. The shape and scope of his critique are easy to follow and understand. I'd very highly recommend this book to anyone.
Korten's argument has an incredibly wide focus that sharpens down to very fine detail. The shape and scope of his critique are easy to follow and understand. I'd very highly recommend this book to anyone.
February 1, 2014
When Corporations Rule the World is a testament to the misunderstanding and lack in knowledge of economics. The author needs to understand the difference between free market capitalism and crony capitalism. The author thinks he is describing the ill wills of free market capitalism, but in reality, it is crony capitalism. Crony capitalism is soft fascism, the only difference there is no dictatorship. Sure, some corporations are mischievous and rapacious but only with the help of government. Governments around the world help and assist corporations gain the edge in the marketplace through cronyism with bailouts, subsidies, taxes, regulations and tariffs. Corporations can’t force me to buy any product unless government is involved. Overall, the book has all the bells and whistles for socialist left propaganda, but it clearly misses the mark.
January 4, 2011
One of Cambridge Sustainability's Top 50 Books for Sustainability, as voted for by our alumni network of over 3,000 senior leaders from around the world. To find out more, click here.
When Corporations Rule the World suggests that the promises of the global economy are based on a number of myths: that growth in GNP is a valid measure of human well-being and progress; that free unregulated markets efficiently allocate a society's resources; that growth in trade benefits ordinary people; that economic globalisation is inevitable; that global corporations are benevolent institutions that, if freed from governmental interference, will provide a clean environment for all and good jobs for the poor; and that absentee investors create 'trickle-down' prosperity.
Korten believes that these myths are finally being unmasked and challenged by an Ecological Revolution that calls us 'to reclaim our political power and rediscover our spirituality to create societies that nurture our ability and desire to embrace the joyful experience of living to its fullest'. He argues that, instead of concentrating on increasing economic growth and GDP, we should concentrate on ending poverty, improving our quality of life, and achieveing a sustainable balance with the Earth.
When Corporations Rule the World suggests that the promises of the global economy are based on a number of myths: that growth in GNP is a valid measure of human well-being and progress; that free unregulated markets efficiently allocate a society's resources; that growth in trade benefits ordinary people; that economic globalisation is inevitable; that global corporations are benevolent institutions that, if freed from governmental interference, will provide a clean environment for all and good jobs for the poor; and that absentee investors create 'trickle-down' prosperity.
Korten believes that these myths are finally being unmasked and challenged by an Ecological Revolution that calls us 'to reclaim our political power and rediscover our spirituality to create societies that nurture our ability and desire to embrace the joyful experience of living to its fullest'. He argues that, instead of concentrating on increasing economic growth and GDP, we should concentrate on ending poverty, improving our quality of life, and achieveing a sustainable balance with the Earth.
December 29, 2007
what shitty little people we are
May 8, 2008
A disturbing review of the history and present of the corporation. Should be required reading.
November 16, 2019
David C. Korten is basically an economic realist. His work rests on meticulous research dating from the 1950's, and the recurring idea in his study of American economics is pretty sound: any one period of excess has a detrimental, sometimes devastating effect on the soundness of the economy. Total excess destroys and only gives wealth to the already privileged.
He is not right or left. He has never written during a time that capitalism has gone viral like a meme, and this is a reprint of a book released in 1995.
"The global economic system is rewarding corporations and their executives with generous profits and benefits packages for contracting out their production to sweatshops laying substandard wages, for clear-cutting primal forests, for introducing labor-saving technologies that displace tens of thousands of employees, for dumping toxic wastes, and for shaping political agendas to advance corporate interests over human interests.
The system shields those who take such actions from the costs of their decisions, which are borne by the system's weaker members--the displaced workers who no longer have jobs, the replacement workers who are paid too little to feed their families, the forest dwellers whose homes have been destroyed, the poor who live next, and the unorganized taxpayers who pick up the bills."
Korten laments the death of community life, the decreasing numbers of people who belong to communal strongholds (like the YMCA), and notes in particular corporate libertarianism as being responsible for some of the worst stretches of sociological deprivation in parts of civilization, where the numbers of poverty have gone up, not down.
1.1 people don't drink clean water, 1.1 billion live in rudimentary shelters or in the open; usually lack secure tenure, eat nurtritionally harmful, inadequate diets, and 1.1 billion wear secondhand clothing or scraps instead of good clothing.
Akio Morita, the President of SONY once remarked that "trade cultures are consumer barriers". The idea of respecting distinctive local cultures, local tastes and cultural differences as a condition of gaining consumer acceptance complicates global marketing campaigns. The dream of corporate marketers is a globalized consumer culture united around brand name loyalties that will allow a company to sell its products with the same advertising copy in Bangkok as in Paris or New York. This is what is taking place. This was in 1992, and in 1993 a year more corporate (and successful for this particular CEO) hold took place all over the world, with nearly everyone tuned into MTV for most of the time. Though MFA programs had existed in small cells for years, this is when they became a mainstream fixture, seemingly beyond criticism. In 1994 aggressive consumer culture took hold everywhere, especially in American education. The AVON makeup corporation soared in profit, and there were even infomercials which showed Avon ladies walking around India, knocking on huts where starving women who earned 3 dollars a day answered the door looking the worse for wear.
The ideal of capital and non regulated (non charitable) economic "philosophies" have led, Korten writes, to an almost complete victory of this lifestyle. NAFTA, he believes, was one trade agreement which loosened the differentiation between "Republican" and "Democrat" pretty badly. Once, Bill Clinton--a Reagan Democrat if ever there was one-- exited an interview with the not subtle comment "you're crazy" when a libertarian discussed removing the Code of Federal Regulations so trade could become freer. Korten notes that it is sometimes impossible to speak without corporate language having become part and parcel of what we say in daily dialogue.
This is a sound, cold analysis of the American economy up till the present from a student of the Harvard School of Business (and a military veteran.) He does not cover Trump.
He is not right or left. He has never written during a time that capitalism has gone viral like a meme, and this is a reprint of a book released in 1995.
"The global economic system is rewarding corporations and their executives with generous profits and benefits packages for contracting out their production to sweatshops laying substandard wages, for clear-cutting primal forests, for introducing labor-saving technologies that displace tens of thousands of employees, for dumping toxic wastes, and for shaping political agendas to advance corporate interests over human interests.
The system shields those who take such actions from the costs of their decisions, which are borne by the system's weaker members--the displaced workers who no longer have jobs, the replacement workers who are paid too little to feed their families, the forest dwellers whose homes have been destroyed, the poor who live next, and the unorganized taxpayers who pick up the bills."
Korten laments the death of community life, the decreasing numbers of people who belong to communal strongholds (like the YMCA), and notes in particular corporate libertarianism as being responsible for some of the worst stretches of sociological deprivation in parts of civilization, where the numbers of poverty have gone up, not down.
1.1 people don't drink clean water, 1.1 billion live in rudimentary shelters or in the open; usually lack secure tenure, eat nurtritionally harmful, inadequate diets, and 1.1 billion wear secondhand clothing or scraps instead of good clothing.
Akio Morita, the President of SONY once remarked that "trade cultures are consumer barriers". The idea of respecting distinctive local cultures, local tastes and cultural differences as a condition of gaining consumer acceptance complicates global marketing campaigns. The dream of corporate marketers is a globalized consumer culture united around brand name loyalties that will allow a company to sell its products with the same advertising copy in Bangkok as in Paris or New York. This is what is taking place. This was in 1992, and in 1993 a year more corporate (and successful for this particular CEO) hold took place all over the world, with nearly everyone tuned into MTV for most of the time. Though MFA programs had existed in small cells for years, this is when they became a mainstream fixture, seemingly beyond criticism. In 1994 aggressive consumer culture took hold everywhere, especially in American education. The AVON makeup corporation soared in profit, and there were even infomercials which showed Avon ladies walking around India, knocking on huts where starving women who earned 3 dollars a day answered the door looking the worse for wear.
The ideal of capital and non regulated (non charitable) economic "philosophies" have led, Korten writes, to an almost complete victory of this lifestyle. NAFTA, he believes, was one trade agreement which loosened the differentiation between "Republican" and "Democrat" pretty badly. Once, Bill Clinton--a Reagan Democrat if ever there was one-- exited an interview with the not subtle comment "you're crazy" when a libertarian discussed removing the Code of Federal Regulations so trade could become freer. Korten notes that it is sometimes impossible to speak without corporate language having become part and parcel of what we say in daily dialogue.
This is a sound, cold analysis of the American economy up till the present from a student of the Harvard School of Business (and a military veteran.) He does not cover Trump.
January 12, 2016
For anyone who has doubts about how pervasive corporations are in global politics, this is a book you need to read. Korten published the original edition, which is the bulk of this 20 year anniversary edition, in 1995, but it is as fresh as it was then in unveiling the make-believe world of phantom wealth--money that is not based on any useful product or service. The mantra of continuous growth that, according to libertarian economic theory, will eventually lead to the end of poverty is a myth, and instead is more of a suicide economy which does not recognize the limitations that nature puts on us.
After fully outlining the death spiral we are inexorably heading toward as caused by the transnational corporations, which feel no responsibility to any community or person, Korten outlines what he calls a living economy. Such an economy is locally based, locally owned and responsive to community needs. It does not exploit nature beyond its limits, It is not based on growth of money, but rather on meeting the needs of society and respecting humans and nature. I am convinced, as is Korten, if we do not move more in the direction of market based living economies, instead of capital based exploitative practices, we may do irreparable harm to the earth and the people that inhabit it. It is easy to feel depressed about where we are and how far we have to go to even bring about modest change, but I think it is worth striving for. We do not have to let corporations rule the world, and if we band together and develop alternative market based, local systems, we might just have a chance.
After fully outlining the death spiral we are inexorably heading toward as caused by the transnational corporations, which feel no responsibility to any community or person, Korten outlines what he calls a living economy. Such an economy is locally based, locally owned and responsive to community needs. It does not exploit nature beyond its limits, It is not based on growth of money, but rather on meeting the needs of society and respecting humans and nature. I am convinced, as is Korten, if we do not move more in the direction of market based living economies, instead of capital based exploitative practices, we may do irreparable harm to the earth and the people that inhabit it. It is easy to feel depressed about where we are and how far we have to go to even bring about modest change, but I think it is worth striving for. We do not have to let corporations rule the world, and if we band together and develop alternative market based, local systems, we might just have a chance.
January 10, 2009
This is a great book, even for those who disagree with everything it says. People should read this book, along with Bastiat's THE LAW, and then download Eric-Charles Banfield's article BUSINESS-GOVERNMENT COLLUSION. cuz you see, the government is the enabler for what gets by in Korten's book. Also read the article Welfare for the Rich, by Robert Murphy i think. both articles can be found at fee.org
If big gov and big bizness can continue to combine powers, we can continue to screw the world.
If big gov and big bizness can continue to combine powers, we can continue to screw the world.
November 10, 2019
Not amazing but certainly pokes huge holes in the libertarian ideals of free trade, lower taxes, global corporations, and monopolies. His best arguments center around the creation of “real wealth” vs “phantom wealth.” We do not have an economy built around people creating goods, but rather that of financial instruments creating wealth with magic.
January 27, 2009
Korten does an excellent job explaining the problems caused by our modern global corporate capitalist economic system, the causes of that system, and some methods by which we can change the system. Good use of examples and comparison to Adam Smith's theories.
Read
December 14, 2008This book is an important read for EVERYONE! It was written back in 1995 and it's amazing how many of the predictions have come true.
May 13, 2009
An absolute must read. You know that basically everything in the world is wrong, but you don't know why things are so bad. Read this book and you will understand.
August 28, 2018
When Corporations Rule the World - David Korten
In this extremely idealistic proclamation, consultant majorly in development David C. Korten (former USAID official and Harvard Business School professor) argues that “something has gone terribly wrong,” and has presented a powerful critique of corporate capitalism, showing how market economics is undermined and how it destroys the foundations of line on earth. Korten’s diagnosis hits all the right buttons: the fixation of unlimited growth, the adrenaline to privatise everything in sight, the implacably spreading inequality between the rich and poor, the wholesale destruction of the environment, and the list goes on. The author has offered a well-crafted summary of the critisism levelled at globalized economic integration and, an exposition of the ‘alternative’ or ‘people-centric’ or ‘environmental’ economics that’s out there. Essentially, Korten’s message is optimistic; the point of no return has yet to arrive. The course can be altered if people so decide. Escape depends on a culture move, a spiritual awakening that asserts life over money. However, where Korten’s message falls short is in explaining how change will happen, as wishful thinking, simplistic understanding of social change, and faulty complexity theory pervade the analysis. It is unable to respond to the robust and unapologetic empire of the capitalists.
When Corporations Rule the World is intended for the general audience. It is an invaluable introduction to corporate power, negative impact of capitalism, and the depths of false consciousness. Readers who are not familiar with these topics will find his approach an eye opener and very informative. Korten begins the book by outlining his credentials; this is quite effective, because he belongs to a conservative background. Through his work in neoliberal development, he began to question the ideology of the status quo. Now as a self-proclaimed “defector” who recognized the fallacy of the “globalization cure” to the poverty alleviation agenda, his work carries added weight. Korten devotes three-quarters of his book to illustrate the manifold horrors of globalization, and he leaves few stones unturned –the putatively malign influence of money, television, free capital markets, large retailers, a host of transnational institutions (IMF, World Bank), allegedly elitist associations (Business Roundtable, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission), and patent protection for genetic materials (reverently referred to as life forms), all get their innings.
The book systematically tackles the various illusions of the current financial ecosystems. It has cited the deep woven mistakes present within both the systems of Marxism and Free-Market Capitalism and demonstrates a disgust for both "extremist ideologies." For instance, under the disguise of free market economics, Korten asserts that, modern corporations assume enormous economic and political power, which results in an transfer of power, wealth, and resources from the public to the private sector. Unabashed to the public will, corporations will place their immediate self-interest over the public good. The corporate goal of maximizing short-term profits often acts against the common good, especially when corporations externalize their costs and export jobs and capital. More than greed and self-interest is required to sustain a healthy society.
Corporations, Korten explains, seize power from people and the state. With one simple observation he disables the argument that equates free-market economics with democracy: 'In a political democracy, each person gets the vote. In the market, one dollar is one vote, and you get as many votes as you have dollars. No dollar, no vote.' Korten puts forth a well stated argument against what he calls “Corporate Libertarianism” which demands that all political, economic, and civic barriers to the free reign of corporate interests be demolished, and for “Democratic Pluralism” which requires a “pragmatic, institutional balance between the forces of government, market, and civic society.” While doing so he repeatedly stresses the importance of creating economic sustainability, through ecological sustainability.
The book further explores the economic underpinnings through which the corporate world justifies the actions of the capitalists. Corporate libertarians propound the ideas of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who “maintain that the market turns unrestrained greed into socially optimal outcomes.” However, Korten argues that “Smith never suggested that government should not intervene to set and enforce minimum social, health, worker safety, and environmental standards in the common interest or to protect the poor and nature from the rich.” Moreover, Korten’s stand against corporations focuses on the destructive impact of externalized costs. By externalizing costs corporations give further away their benefits and society’s costs to a global level through a distortion of comparative advantage. Corporations surpass national restraints upon the chasing of profit and power. The result is a “race to the bottom” where corporations pit nations against each other for the most advantageous terms of doing business. “As local settings are opened to the global economy, it becomes possible, and highly profitable, for a firm to take advantage of the differences between localities with regard to wages, market potential, employment standards, taxes, environmental regulations, local facilities, and human resources”
The above is an accusation of the transnational organisations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) which have helped multinational corporations to grow. The new global economic environment created by the norms set by these global associations, has resulted in a huge transfer of jobs and capital and a wastage of natural resources. Corporate expansion has been charged by the disconnection between money and value in a ravening financial system, by corporates merging and buyouts, and most of all by the illusions of possibility of unlimited growth in finite world. With global corporate power growing unlimitedly, Korten has forseen the emergence of a new corporate colonialism leading to the loss of national sovereignty, economic dependence, and continued environmental and social decline. The worldwide consumerism goal on a Western scale is simply unsustainable, Korten warns, without catastrophic social and environmental consequences.
Korten hasn’t rejected stariaghtaway all the parts of the globalized society. He has acknowledged the work done by NGOs, and other socially centric associations in the fight against the threefold human crisis: the deepening of poverty, social disintegration and environmental degradation. In the book, there is sporadic praise for small, cohesive, and self-reliant societies organized in accordance with such principles as environmental sustainability, economic justice, biological and cultural diversity, and people's sovereignty. Korten has a lot of belief in the market place and talks about the strength of local economies. He believes that to achieve the goal of “sustainable well-being for all people”, we need a multilevel system of nested economies with the household as the fundamental economic unit, up through successive geographical aggregations to localities, districts, nations, and regions. Each level would seek to function as an integrated, self-reliant, self-managing political, economic and ecological community.
According to Korten, radical changes to the status quo is critical to tackle the problems plaguing the society currently. He has included some strong reform proposals in his blueprint for an “Ecological Revolution” which puts people in front of corporations, local communities ahead of global trade and nature ahead of money. “The Guiding Principles for an “Ecological Revolution” calls for environmental sustainability, economic justice, biological and cultural diversity, subsidiarity (where the economy serves human needs, not the needs of money, corporations or governments), intrinsic responsibility (internalising externalities), and common heritage (of the planet’s environmental resources and the accumulated human knowledge).”
To bring about such a revolution, Korten lists out certain concrete policy changes among other arresting recommendations: he would abrogate the political rights of corporations, eliminate tax deductions for other than informational advertising, tax imposition on all financial transactions (to discourage speculative trading), preferential treatment to be given to community banks, levy taxes on packaging and other activities that presumably contribute to socioenvironmental problems, provide a guaranteed income for all, and to ensure equitable allocations of paid employment. “The coming “Ecological Revolution” will require a new corporate vision of social responsibility.” However, Korten is unsure as to how and when this paradigm shift will occur.
The book is the most comprehensive primer one is likely to discover on the current ugly realities of economic globalization and provides a searing indictment of an unjust international economic order. Corroborated through empirical data further legitimizes the book’s assertions. However, the book seems to have an anticorporate bias and offers little constructive proposals as to how a new age might be ushered in. Furthermore, the economic and analytical theories used to prove the claims seem to contradict on certain occasions, for example, he states on one instance that “we have passed the threshold “, but optimistically argues we can change the course. Moreover, with global population approaching 7 billion but moving toward 9 billion, we need to question Korten’s proposed alternatives. Small and local may best fit a world before the great transformations of modern world; but there were only 1.5 billion people in 1850. Could we rescale and relocate production while supporting 7-9 billion people, or is Korten’s world really that of 1.5 Billion? If we do not do the above , will demographic adjustment happen with collapse of catastrophic system? The means for Korten’s desired paradigm shift does not exist, nor are the “cultural creatives” able to cause it in the face of neoliberal and neoconservative power. While his solutions may not be realistic, Korten does provide a valuable contribution for glimpsing the abyss of unforeseeable consequences concerning survival of humankind.
By-
Abhishree
Abijeet Singh
Ankita Madan
Anshika Sharma
Anushka Dwivedi
G-39 Group
Introduction to Sustainable Development Course
Batch of Msc Economics at TERI SAS.
In this extremely idealistic proclamation, consultant majorly in development David C. Korten (former USAID official and Harvard Business School professor) argues that “something has gone terribly wrong,” and has presented a powerful critique of corporate capitalism, showing how market economics is undermined and how it destroys the foundations of line on earth. Korten’s diagnosis hits all the right buttons: the fixation of unlimited growth, the adrenaline to privatise everything in sight, the implacably spreading inequality between the rich and poor, the wholesale destruction of the environment, and the list goes on. The author has offered a well-crafted summary of the critisism levelled at globalized economic integration and, an exposition of the ‘alternative’ or ‘people-centric’ or ‘environmental’ economics that’s out there. Essentially, Korten’s message is optimistic; the point of no return has yet to arrive. The course can be altered if people so decide. Escape depends on a culture move, a spiritual awakening that asserts life over money. However, where Korten’s message falls short is in explaining how change will happen, as wishful thinking, simplistic understanding of social change, and faulty complexity theory pervade the analysis. It is unable to respond to the robust and unapologetic empire of the capitalists.
When Corporations Rule the World is intended for the general audience. It is an invaluable introduction to corporate power, negative impact of capitalism, and the depths of false consciousness. Readers who are not familiar with these topics will find his approach an eye opener and very informative. Korten begins the book by outlining his credentials; this is quite effective, because he belongs to a conservative background. Through his work in neoliberal development, he began to question the ideology of the status quo. Now as a self-proclaimed “defector” who recognized the fallacy of the “globalization cure” to the poverty alleviation agenda, his work carries added weight. Korten devotes three-quarters of his book to illustrate the manifold horrors of globalization, and he leaves few stones unturned –the putatively malign influence of money, television, free capital markets, large retailers, a host of transnational institutions (IMF, World Bank), allegedly elitist associations (Business Roundtable, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission), and patent protection for genetic materials (reverently referred to as life forms), all get their innings.
The book systematically tackles the various illusions of the current financial ecosystems. It has cited the deep woven mistakes present within both the systems of Marxism and Free-Market Capitalism and demonstrates a disgust for both "extremist ideologies." For instance, under the disguise of free market economics, Korten asserts that, modern corporations assume enormous economic and political power, which results in an transfer of power, wealth, and resources from the public to the private sector. Unabashed to the public will, corporations will place their immediate self-interest over the public good. The corporate goal of maximizing short-term profits often acts against the common good, especially when corporations externalize their costs and export jobs and capital. More than greed and self-interest is required to sustain a healthy society.
Corporations, Korten explains, seize power from people and the state. With one simple observation he disables the argument that equates free-market economics with democracy: 'In a political democracy, each person gets the vote. In the market, one dollar is one vote, and you get as many votes as you have dollars. No dollar, no vote.' Korten puts forth a well stated argument against what he calls “Corporate Libertarianism” which demands that all political, economic, and civic barriers to the free reign of corporate interests be demolished, and for “Democratic Pluralism” which requires a “pragmatic, institutional balance between the forces of government, market, and civic society.” While doing so he repeatedly stresses the importance of creating economic sustainability, through ecological sustainability.
The book further explores the economic underpinnings through which the corporate world justifies the actions of the capitalists. Corporate libertarians propound the ideas of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who “maintain that the market turns unrestrained greed into socially optimal outcomes.” However, Korten argues that “Smith never suggested that government should not intervene to set and enforce minimum social, health, worker safety, and environmental standards in the common interest or to protect the poor and nature from the rich.” Moreover, Korten’s stand against corporations focuses on the destructive impact of externalized costs. By externalizing costs corporations give further away their benefits and society’s costs to a global level through a distortion of comparative advantage. Corporations surpass national restraints upon the chasing of profit and power. The result is a “race to the bottom” where corporations pit nations against each other for the most advantageous terms of doing business. “As local settings are opened to the global economy, it becomes possible, and highly profitable, for a firm to take advantage of the differences between localities with regard to wages, market potential, employment standards, taxes, environmental regulations, local facilities, and human resources”
The above is an accusation of the transnational organisations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) which have helped multinational corporations to grow. The new global economic environment created by the norms set by these global associations, has resulted in a huge transfer of jobs and capital and a wastage of natural resources. Corporate expansion has been charged by the disconnection between money and value in a ravening financial system, by corporates merging and buyouts, and most of all by the illusions of possibility of unlimited growth in finite world. With global corporate power growing unlimitedly, Korten has forseen the emergence of a new corporate colonialism leading to the loss of national sovereignty, economic dependence, and continued environmental and social decline. The worldwide consumerism goal on a Western scale is simply unsustainable, Korten warns, without catastrophic social and environmental consequences.
Korten hasn’t rejected stariaghtaway all the parts of the globalized society. He has acknowledged the work done by NGOs, and other socially centric associations in the fight against the threefold human crisis: the deepening of poverty, social disintegration and environmental degradation. In the book, there is sporadic praise for small, cohesive, and self-reliant societies organized in accordance with such principles as environmental sustainability, economic justice, biological and cultural diversity, and people's sovereignty. Korten has a lot of belief in the market place and talks about the strength of local economies. He believes that to achieve the goal of “sustainable well-being for all people”, we need a multilevel system of nested economies with the household as the fundamental economic unit, up through successive geographical aggregations to localities, districts, nations, and regions. Each level would seek to function as an integrated, self-reliant, self-managing political, economic and ecological community.
According to Korten, radical changes to the status quo is critical to tackle the problems plaguing the society currently. He has included some strong reform proposals in his blueprint for an “Ecological Revolution” which puts people in front of corporations, local communities ahead of global trade and nature ahead of money. “The Guiding Principles for an “Ecological Revolution” calls for environmental sustainability, economic justice, biological and cultural diversity, subsidiarity (where the economy serves human needs, not the needs of money, corporations or governments), intrinsic responsibility (internalising externalities), and common heritage (of the planet’s environmental resources and the accumulated human knowledge).”
To bring about such a revolution, Korten lists out certain concrete policy changes among other arresting recommendations: he would abrogate the political rights of corporations, eliminate tax deductions for other than informational advertising, tax imposition on all financial transactions (to discourage speculative trading), preferential treatment to be given to community banks, levy taxes on packaging and other activities that presumably contribute to socioenvironmental problems, provide a guaranteed income for all, and to ensure equitable allocations of paid employment. “The coming “Ecological Revolution” will require a new corporate vision of social responsibility.” However, Korten is unsure as to how and when this paradigm shift will occur.
The book is the most comprehensive primer one is likely to discover on the current ugly realities of economic globalization and provides a searing indictment of an unjust international economic order. Corroborated through empirical data further legitimizes the book’s assertions. However, the book seems to have an anticorporate bias and offers little constructive proposals as to how a new age might be ushered in. Furthermore, the economic and analytical theories used to prove the claims seem to contradict on certain occasions, for example, he states on one instance that “we have passed the threshold “, but optimistically argues we can change the course. Moreover, with global population approaching 7 billion but moving toward 9 billion, we need to question Korten’s proposed alternatives. Small and local may best fit a world before the great transformations of modern world; but there were only 1.5 billion people in 1850. Could we rescale and relocate production while supporting 7-9 billion people, or is Korten’s world really that of 1.5 Billion? If we do not do the above , will demographic adjustment happen with collapse of catastrophic system? The means for Korten’s desired paradigm shift does not exist, nor are the “cultural creatives” able to cause it in the face of neoliberal and neoconservative power. While his solutions may not be realistic, Korten does provide a valuable contribution for glimpsing the abyss of unforeseeable consequences concerning survival of humankind.
By-
Abhishree
Abijeet Singh
Ankita Madan
Anshika Sharma
Anushka Dwivedi
G-39 Group
Introduction to Sustainable Development Course
Batch of Msc Economics at TERI SAS.
January 25, 2015
This is one of those books that are probably very persuasive to those who already agree with its premise. I was one of them when I first added this book to my list, but now that I've gotten around to reading it 15 years later, I'm not very impressed. It says a lot, but mostly just seems like new ways of re-stating the premise, rather than supporting it with evidence. Here's a typical paragraph:
This is just a liberal platitude, full of empty calories.
It is the job of governments to ensure that costs are not allowed to be externalized. They often fail at this, due to corruption. What does this have to do with rigged games? In a globally competitive market, companies are only trying to maximize profits. This incentivizes them to innovate in ways that benefit themselves and the people. It's not a zero-sum game of companies vs. people. Not all incentives are benevolent, and the incentive to externalize costs wherever possible is one of those. This is why we need regulation. It's not a case for why the globally competitive market is just one big, rigged game, much less for one which the people almost always lose.
How, exactly, are they losing? By which metrics are you measuring this? Please, be specific. This book talks an awful lot about the ways that the gap between the wealthy and the poor is growing. I agree this is something that we should improve. But it's only one metric. There are many others. By many quality of life metrics, everyone is living better than they have ever before in history, thanks to the successes of capitalism. It's so easy to take this for granted. Yes, the wealthy elite have taken a larger piece of this pie, but that doesn't mean the people lost. It just means they didn't win as much as the wealthy did. Which sucks, but at the same time, it doesn't. I like how my life expectancy looks now much better than my grandparents had. I don't mind people getting richer than me to make that happen.
And this incentive to get stupid wealthy is necessary to make this happen. The power of the free market and profit motive is unprecedented in it capacity for improving lives. It's a trade-off that is just better than any we've had in the past. It's possible there's a better way to do it. I don't know of any, and this author doesn't either. Ultimately, he says he's only arguing for a pluralistic economy, a free market with strong regulations, which is something I can partly get on board with. In some ways, we need even stronger regulation, done intelligently and carefully. But why all this B.S. about rigged games?
Here's another example:
Big words for someone who doesn't actually live in such a state. This is just a ridiculous claim. Any totalitarian state would include Stalinist Russia, where you could be killed on the spot for writing poetry, or Nazi Germany, where people were rounded up by the millions and sent to gas chambers. Does he seriously believe corporations behave this way?
In support of this claim, he says, "those who work for corporations spend the better portion of their waking hours living under a rule that dictates their dress, their speech, their values, their behavior, and their levels of income--with limited opportunity for appeal." Yes, it's called working for The Man. I agree this sucks, but that's the trade-off that comes with exchanging a piece of your life for a paycheck. It's just hyperbole to compare this sucky trade-off to all totalitarian states.
What I like about this book is that it calls attention to the possibility of corporate tyranny. After centuries of governmental tyranny, we've learned to fear big government, but maybe the problem wasn't with governments, but too much centralized control in general? Gathering too much power in too few hands? So, shouldn't we be wary of big corporations, just as we are of big government? Likewise, we've learned the dangers of mixing church and state. Shouldn't we also be trying to separate business and state?
I also really liked its answer to big government fears of conservatives: "The bigger our corporations, the greater their power to externalize costs and the greater the need for big government to protect the public interest and to clean up the consequent social and environmental messes. The more we cut our giant corporations down to human scale, the more we will be able to reduce the size of government."
This book was written a long time ago. After 9/11, liberal values were dropped like a hot potato as everyone collecting wrung their hands over terrorism, a statistically insignificant threat. Since then, Apple has discovered the key to the liberal heart: hipness and convenience. Turns out, environmental destruction, monopolization, and sweatshop labor are fine as long as we can play Angry Birds on the train.
This is the globally competitive market at work, forcing localities to absorb private costs to increase private private profits. The game of global competition is rigged. It pits companies against people in a contest that the people almost always lose.
This is just a liberal platitude, full of empty calories.
It is the job of governments to ensure that costs are not allowed to be externalized. They often fail at this, due to corruption. What does this have to do with rigged games? In a globally competitive market, companies are only trying to maximize profits. This incentivizes them to innovate in ways that benefit themselves and the people. It's not a zero-sum game of companies vs. people. Not all incentives are benevolent, and the incentive to externalize costs wherever possible is one of those. This is why we need regulation. It's not a case for why the globally competitive market is just one big, rigged game, much less for one which the people almost always lose.
How, exactly, are they losing? By which metrics are you measuring this? Please, be specific. This book talks an awful lot about the ways that the gap between the wealthy and the poor is growing. I agree this is something that we should improve. But it's only one metric. There are many others. By many quality of life metrics, everyone is living better than they have ever before in history, thanks to the successes of capitalism. It's so easy to take this for granted. Yes, the wealthy elite have taken a larger piece of this pie, but that doesn't mean the people lost. It just means they didn't win as much as the wealthy did. Which sucks, but at the same time, it doesn't. I like how my life expectancy looks now much better than my grandparents had. I don't mind people getting richer than me to make that happen.
And this incentive to get stupid wealthy is necessary to make this happen. The power of the free market and profit motive is unprecedented in it capacity for improving lives. It's a trade-off that is just better than any we've had in the past. It's possible there's a better way to do it. I don't know of any, and this author doesn't either. Ultimately, he says he's only arguing for a pluralistic economy, a free market with strong regulations, which is something I can partly get on board with. In some ways, we need even stronger regulation, done intelligently and carefully. But why all this B.S. about rigged games?
Here's another example:
The corporation is among the most authoritarian of organizations and can be as repressive as any totalitarian state.
Big words for someone who doesn't actually live in such a state. This is just a ridiculous claim. Any totalitarian state would include Stalinist Russia, where you could be killed on the spot for writing poetry, or Nazi Germany, where people were rounded up by the millions and sent to gas chambers. Does he seriously believe corporations behave this way?
In support of this claim, he says, "those who work for corporations spend the better portion of their waking hours living under a rule that dictates their dress, their speech, their values, their behavior, and their levels of income--with limited opportunity for appeal." Yes, it's called working for The Man. I agree this sucks, but that's the trade-off that comes with exchanging a piece of your life for a paycheck. It's just hyperbole to compare this sucky trade-off to all totalitarian states.
What I like about this book is that it calls attention to the possibility of corporate tyranny. After centuries of governmental tyranny, we've learned to fear big government, but maybe the problem wasn't with governments, but too much centralized control in general? Gathering too much power in too few hands? So, shouldn't we be wary of big corporations, just as we are of big government? Likewise, we've learned the dangers of mixing church and state. Shouldn't we also be trying to separate business and state?
I also really liked its answer to big government fears of conservatives: "The bigger our corporations, the greater their power to externalize costs and the greater the need for big government to protect the public interest and to clean up the consequent social and environmental messes. The more we cut our giant corporations down to human scale, the more we will be able to reduce the size of government."
This book was written a long time ago. After 9/11, liberal values were dropped like a hot potato as everyone collecting wrung their hands over terrorism, a statistically insignificant threat. Since then, Apple has discovered the key to the liberal heart: hipness and convenience. Turns out, environmental destruction, monopolization, and sweatshop labor are fine as long as we can play Angry Birds on the train.
November 14, 2024
Intensely boring, only reason I finished it was because of sunk cost
January 10, 2016
The political economy of globalized neoliberal capitalism, in detail.
In a system that consolidates power in the hands of a few inter-generational, wealthy politicians and their mindless ("blameless"), profit-driven businesses, there are no incentives to redistribute that power. Policy interventions that target any one aspect of that system, like welfare safety nets or environmental regulations, may alleviate some suffering and may even offer control of a particular part of people’s lives to the impacted people themselves. This is especially true when a policy redistributes wealth or power between similarly (im)potent stakeholders, like between workers and consumers. But policy operates within a political economy that is above all designed to function in its own self-interest, to perpetuate and expand itself. There are no policies that can be successfully enacted through this system that would fundamentally challenge the underlying structure of the system.
After pages and pages of bleak exposition of the global system of incentives and feedback loops in which powerful politicians and corporations maintain and build their power-—simply in rational response to incentive structures, for which, under the hegemonic paradigm of capitalism, we cannot blame them, even if it is the same politicians who create the incentives in which their crony business partners operate—-Korten declares “there is an alternative.” His alternatives, however, “to localize economies, disperse economic power, and bring democracy closer to the people,” do not fit anywhere within the self-replicating, dominant power structure he has so carefully laid out. As the chant goes, "It's bullshit, get off it: the enemy is profit."
So what is there to do? Create local, diversified, agro-ecological economic systems. Target all forms of power (economic, political, neocolonial, patriarchal, white/ethnic supremacist, etc) at their sources to change the incentive structure. Materially and emotionally support those who are on the losing side of the economic structure; redistribute all kinds of wealth and power (educational, financial).
[read pages 123-174, part III]
In a system that consolidates power in the hands of a few inter-generational, wealthy politicians and their mindless ("blameless"), profit-driven businesses, there are no incentives to redistribute that power. Policy interventions that target any one aspect of that system, like welfare safety nets or environmental regulations, may alleviate some suffering and may even offer control of a particular part of people’s lives to the impacted people themselves. This is especially true when a policy redistributes wealth or power between similarly (im)potent stakeholders, like between workers and consumers. But policy operates within a political economy that is above all designed to function in its own self-interest, to perpetuate and expand itself. There are no policies that can be successfully enacted through this system that would fundamentally challenge the underlying structure of the system.
After pages and pages of bleak exposition of the global system of incentives and feedback loops in which powerful politicians and corporations maintain and build their power-—simply in rational response to incentive structures, for which, under the hegemonic paradigm of capitalism, we cannot blame them, even if it is the same politicians who create the incentives in which their crony business partners operate—-Korten declares “there is an alternative.” His alternatives, however, “to localize economies, disperse economic power, and bring democracy closer to the people,” do not fit anywhere within the self-replicating, dominant power structure he has so carefully laid out. As the chant goes, "It's bullshit, get off it: the enemy is profit."
So what is there to do? Create local, diversified, agro-ecological economic systems. Target all forms of power (economic, political, neocolonial, patriarchal, white/ethnic supremacist, etc) at their sources to change the incentive structure. Materially and emotionally support those who are on the losing side of the economic structure; redistribute all kinds of wealth and power (educational, financial).
[read pages 123-174, part III]
May 28, 2007
Invaluable resource for understanding the activities of the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and international development and trade policies. Describes the historical development of these aid agencies and the global financial market (globalization), and some of the wrong turns they have taken. Korten also discusses people-centered aide and the pro-democracy movements that are forming in the developing world and the Industrial nations.
Read
June 14, 2007As with most non-fiction, I struggled to finish this, but, nonetheless, thought it was a powerful, very worthwhile exercise. Very compelling position on the impact of corporations--kind of a companion to the documentary "The Corporation."
April 21, 2009
Makes me want to go out and kill a corporate CEO LOL...still reading this though
March 6, 2015
Although packed with great info, the doom and gloom in this book made it hard to read.
Read
March 7, 2015I'd really rather not rate this book. However, here's a review:
I read it for my International Political Economy class for a book presentation and since I had one week to read it and was taking 3 other classes at the same time I decided to split reading the book with a classmate. I read the first 3 parts/chapters. I wanted to get a general info about the author to get an idea of how the book is going to be structured and so I have to say this I felt kinda intimidated criticizing this knowing he was a faculty at Harvard Graduate Business School. It was informative especially since he gave multiple examples of case studies to explain the effect of corporations. However the general premise of the book is around the notion that corporations is this new form of colonization that its power is exceeding any governmental influence. However, an alliance between the world’s largest corporations and the most powerful governments does exist, which only exist thanks to money and self-interest and the freedom to move money and goods anywhere in the world without governmental interference. The author claims that Corporate Globalization is the product of international decisions and policies promoted by the WTO, World Bank, and IMF.
Find below a detailed summary of the first 3 chapters.
My classmate talked about how the author suggested that corporations should take responsibility and does offer solutions to the problem in the other 3 chapters.
Summary of the three chapters:
First Chapter:
Started with some positives and what is believed to be wanted by the people; luxurious airplane seats.. etc.
When in reality what people actually want and need is different; decent place to live, health, good education..
Cowboys and Astronauts: His analogy of cowboys living in astronauts’ spaceships is what we’re facing these days. We have passed over the threshold from open frontiers to a spaceship world.
The myth that colonialism benefited the people of colonizing countries. Which is what is happening now; The new corporate colonialism of economic globalization.
So far the only one who’s actually benefiting is monied class.
Moral dilemma: rich vs. poor.
The growth illusion: GDP is technically a measure of the rate in which money is flowing through the economy, might also be described as a measure of the rate at which we are turning resources into garbage.
Advocate for: ending poverty, improving quality of life and achieving a balance with earth.. ---→ economic growth didn’t create this problems, however it hasn’t solved it.
Economic growth often raises the income of the wealthy faster than of those of the poor. Ironically, those who claim that it helps the poor are professional development workers, economists, financiers, corporate heads, and others who have no problem putting food on their table.
Examples where growth in the name of development was an illusion:
Bangkok, Thailand: evictions of 300,000 people, electricity cut.
Second Chapter/Part:
It appears that people of wealth are monopolizing the corporate world.
The reach of this corporate world is virtually everywhere and it seems that it is the interest of the corporate is more important than the human interest.
The corporations came to claim the full rights enjoyed by individual citizens (freedom of speech and other constitutional rights) while being exempted from many of the responsibilities and liabilities of citizenship.
The advance of free market is the advance of democracy. / Corporations seem to have control over everyone.
The corporate libertarian alliance: the combination of economic theory, moral philosophy and elite political interest make for a powerful alliance.
• Neoclassical economists.
• Property Right Advocates.
• Corporations and members of the Corporate Class.
The justification: equating the freedom and rights of individuals with market freedom and property rights. The freedom of the market is the freedom of those with money. If corporate libertarians had a serious allegiance to market principles and human rights, they would be calling for policies aimed at achieving the conditions under which market functions in democratic fashion in the public interest.
Communism established the hegemony of the state. Capitalism establishes the hegemony of financial markets and the corporations.
The need for balance for a healthy society:
• Civic.
• Governmental.
• Economic.
Without the focus on the conditions required to maintain the market’s self-regulating balance, a poor system is created.
Third Chapter/Part:
Korten argues that global corporation has forced governments to compete against each other to the point where some private costs of the corporation are transferred to public costs. i.g. Taxes.
The greater the political power of corporations and those aligned with them, the less the political power of the people, and the less meaningful democracy becomes.
A possible solution: there is an alternative; to localize economics, disperse economic power, and bring democracy closer to the people.
Buying out democracy: the Democratic Party banner dependent on developing their own fund-raising organizations → vulnerable to the influence of monied interests.
Corporates in:
• The media.
• The classroom.
Shaped the culture and politics.
Creating a demand for debt:
• World Bank; primary goal was to finance Europe reconstruction.
• IMF.
I read it for my International Political Economy class for a book presentation and since I had one week to read it and was taking 3 other classes at the same time I decided to split reading the book with a classmate. I read the first 3 parts/chapters. I wanted to get a general info about the author to get an idea of how the book is going to be structured and so I have to say this I felt kinda intimidated criticizing this knowing he was a faculty at Harvard Graduate Business School. It was informative especially since he gave multiple examples of case studies to explain the effect of corporations. However the general premise of the book is around the notion that corporations is this new form of colonization that its power is exceeding any governmental influence. However, an alliance between the world’s largest corporations and the most powerful governments does exist, which only exist thanks to money and self-interest and the freedom to move money and goods anywhere in the world without governmental interference. The author claims that Corporate Globalization is the product of international decisions and policies promoted by the WTO, World Bank, and IMF.
Find below a detailed summary of the first 3 chapters.
My classmate talked about how the author suggested that corporations should take responsibility and does offer solutions to the problem in the other 3 chapters.
Summary of the three chapters:
First Chapter:
Started with some positives and what is believed to be wanted by the people; luxurious airplane seats.. etc.
When in reality what people actually want and need is different; decent place to live, health, good education..
Cowboys and Astronauts: His analogy of cowboys living in astronauts’ spaceships is what we’re facing these days. We have passed over the threshold from open frontiers to a spaceship world.
The myth that colonialism benefited the people of colonizing countries. Which is what is happening now; The new corporate colonialism of economic globalization.
So far the only one who’s actually benefiting is monied class.
Moral dilemma: rich vs. poor.
The growth illusion: GDP is technically a measure of the rate in which money is flowing through the economy, might also be described as a measure of the rate at which we are turning resources into garbage.
Advocate for: ending poverty, improving quality of life and achieving a balance with earth.. ---→ economic growth didn’t create this problems, however it hasn’t solved it.
Economic growth often raises the income of the wealthy faster than of those of the poor. Ironically, those who claim that it helps the poor are professional development workers, economists, financiers, corporate heads, and others who have no problem putting food on their table.
Examples where growth in the name of development was an illusion:
Bangkok, Thailand: evictions of 300,000 people, electricity cut.
Second Chapter/Part:
It appears that people of wealth are monopolizing the corporate world.
The reach of this corporate world is virtually everywhere and it seems that it is the interest of the corporate is more important than the human interest.
The corporations came to claim the full rights enjoyed by individual citizens (freedom of speech and other constitutional rights) while being exempted from many of the responsibilities and liabilities of citizenship.
The advance of free market is the advance of democracy. / Corporations seem to have control over everyone.
The corporate libertarian alliance: the combination of economic theory, moral philosophy and elite political interest make for a powerful alliance.
• Neoclassical economists.
• Property Right Advocates.
• Corporations and members of the Corporate Class.
The justification: equating the freedom and rights of individuals with market freedom and property rights. The freedom of the market is the freedom of those with money. If corporate libertarians had a serious allegiance to market principles and human rights, they would be calling for policies aimed at achieving the conditions under which market functions in democratic fashion in the public interest.
Communism established the hegemony of the state. Capitalism establishes the hegemony of financial markets and the corporations.
The need for balance for a healthy society:
• Civic.
• Governmental.
• Economic.
Without the focus on the conditions required to maintain the market’s self-regulating balance, a poor system is created.
Third Chapter/Part:
Korten argues that global corporation has forced governments to compete against each other to the point where some private costs of the corporation are transferred to public costs. i.g. Taxes.
The greater the political power of corporations and those aligned with them, the less the political power of the people, and the less meaningful democracy becomes.
A possible solution: there is an alternative; to localize economics, disperse economic power, and bring democracy closer to the people.
Buying out democracy: the Democratic Party banner dependent on developing their own fund-raising organizations → vulnerable to the influence of monied interests.
Corporates in:
• The media.
• The classroom.
Shaped the culture and politics.
Creating a demand for debt:
• World Bank; primary goal was to finance Europe reconstruction.
• IMF.
August 14, 2021
A book from college for one of my classes--not sure which one anymore. I appreciate the values reflected in this book. Some people may call it "socialist" or even "communist" ideas. But they resonate with me for upholding the integrity of our societies and our planet. Not nearly enough space to capture all the illuminating passages here!
“These experiences left me with a deep conviction that real development cannot be purchased with foreign aid monies. Development depends on people’s ability to gain control of and use effectively the real resources of their localities—land, water, labor, technology, and human ingenuity and motivation—to meet their own needs. Yet most development interventions transfer control of local resources to ever larger and more centralized institutions that are unaccountable to local people and unresponsive to their needs. The greater the amount of money that flows through these central institutions, the more dependent people become, the less control they have over their own lives and resources, and the more rapidly the gap grows between those who hold central power and those who seek to make a living for themselves within local communities.” pg. 5
“It seemed evident from our analysis that to reestablish a sustainable relationship to the living earth, we must break free of the illusions of the world of money, rediscover spiritual meaning in our lives, and root our economic institutions in place and community so that they are integrally connected to people and life. Consequently, we concluded that the task of people-centered development in its fullest sense must be the creation of life-centered societies in which the economy is but one of the instruments of good living—not the purpose of human existence. Because our leaders are entrapped in the myths and the reward systems of the institutions they head, the leadership in this creative process of institutional and value re-creation must come from within civil society.
It was in many ways an unremarkable insight. What we had accomplished was little more than to rediscover the ancient wisdom that a deep tension exists between our spiritual nature and our economic lives and that healthy social and spiritual function depends on keeping the two in proper balance and perspective. Nor was there anything new in recognizing the importance of civil society, which has always been the foundation of democratic governance. Yet we felt that we had deepened our own insights into the practical relevance of these ideas for the crisis that imperils contemporary societies.” pg. 7
“Whole-systems thinking calls for a skepticism of simplistic solutions, a willingness to seek out connections between problems and events that conventional discourse ignores, and the courage to delve into subject matter that may lie outside our direct experience and expertise.” pg. 11
“The leaders and institutions that promised a golden age are not delivering. They assail us with visions of wondrous new technological gadgets, such as airplane seats with individual television monitors, and an information highway that will make it possible to fax messages while we sun ourselves on the beach. Yet the things that most of us really want—a secure means of livelihood, a decent place to live, healthy and uncontaminated food to eat, good education and health care for our children, a clean and vital natural environment—seem to slip further from the grasp of most of the worlds’s people with each passing day.
Fewer and fewer people believe that they face a secure economic future. Family and community units and the security they once provided are disintegrating. The natural environment on which we depend for our material needs is under deepening stress. Confidence in our major institutions is evaporating, and we find a profound and growing suspicion among thoughtful people the world over that something has gone very wrong. These conditions are becoming pervasive in almost every locality of the world—and point to a global-scale failure of our institutions.” pg. 19
“It is relevant to our current inquiry to note that the out-migration from Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that the commonly held idea that colonialism benefited the people of the colonizing countries is largely myth. The situation was more ambiguous and has much in common with the new corporate colonialism of economic globalization. For the most part, its benefits went to the monied classes, not to the average citizen. A recent study of the British colonial experience by two American historians found that although wealthy investors profited from investments in the colonies, the middle class received only the tax bills that supported the vast military establishment required to maintain the empire. They concluded, ‘Imperialism can best be viewed as a mechanism for transferring income from the middle to the upper classes.’ Economic globalization is largely a modern form of the imperial phenomenon, and it carries much the same consequence.” pg. 27-28
“Adding insult to injury, the rich commonly point to the miserable environmental conditions in which the poor sometimes live as proof that the poor are less environmentally responsible than themselves. Such claims draw attention away from two important realities. First, most environmental stress is a direct function of human consumption, and rich people unquestionably consume far more than do poor people. Second, although it is true that poor people are far more likely to be found living next to waste dumps, polluting factories, and other scenes of environmental devastation than are wealthy people, this doesn’t mean that it is their waste filling those dumps or that they are major consumers of the products produced in those factories. Nor does it mean that they wouldn’t prefer to live in more environmentally pristine settings. It simply means that wealthy people have the economic and political power to make sure that pollutants and wastes are dumped somewhere other than in their neighborhoods and to ensure that their neighborhoods are not stripped bare of trees to become the sites of polluting factories. Poor people do not. What we are seeing is purely a consequence of income inequality, not a difference in environmental awareness and concern. It can be corrected only by equalizing power.” pg. 31
“In conclusion, they [Cornell researchers] posed a fundamental question: ‘Does human society want 10 to 15 billion humans living in poverty and malnourishment or one to two billion living with abundant resources and a quality environment?’ They argue for a population of 1 to 2 billion, which by their calculations would allow a level of consumption roughly equivalent to the current per capita standard for Europe. They note that ‘a drastic demographic adjustment to one to two billion humans will cause serious social, economic, and political problems, but to continue rapid population growth to 12 billion or more will result in more severe social, economic, and political conflicts plus catastrophic public health and environmental problems.’ What they do not mention is that in a world of 10 to 15 billion humans, there will be no place for other forms of animal or plant life that are not immediately essential to human survival.” pg. 35
“Furthermore, the more environmentally burdensome ways of meeting a given need are generally those that contribute most to the gross national product (GNP). For example, driving a mile in a car contributes more to GNP than riding a mile on a bicycle. Turning on an air conditioner adds more than opening a window. Relying on processed packaged food adds more than using natural foods purchased in bulk in reusable containers. We might say that GNP, technically a measure of the rate at which money is flowing through the economy, might also be described as a measure of the rate at which we are turning resources into garbage.
We could expend a lot of effort on the probably unrealistic goal of making GNP go up indefinitely without creating more garbage. But why not instead concentrate on ending poverty, improving our quality of life, and achieving a balance with the earth? These are achievable goals—if we can free ourselves from the illusion that growth is the path to better living.” pg.38
“Rapid economic growth in low-income countries brings modern airports, television, express highways, and air-conditioned shopping malls with sophisticated consumer electronics and fashion labels for the fortunate few. It rarely improves living conditions for the many. This kind of growth requires gearing the economy toward exports to earn the foreign exchange to buy the things that wealthy people desire. Thus, the lands of the poor are appropriated for export crops. The former tillers of these lands then find themselves subsisting in urban slums on starvation wages paid by sweatshops producing for export. Families are broken up, the social fabric is strained to the breaking point, and violence becomes endemic. Those whom growth has favored then need still more foreign exchange to import arms to protect themselves from the rage of the excluded.” pg. 42
“Social economies are by nature local, nonwaged, nonmonetized, and nonmarket. They are energized more by love than by money.
As productive and reproductive functions such as child care, health care, food preparation, entertainment, and physical security are transferred from the social economy to the market economy, they show up as additions to economic output and thus contributors to economic growth—though they do little, if anything, to improve the quality of the services we receive. This shift also increases the demand for economic overhead functions, which are counted as additions to economic output although they are actually an enormous source of economic inefficiency. Consider that when family and community members worked directly with and for one another, there were no tax collectors, managers, government regulators, accountants, lawyers, stockbrokers, bankers, middlemen, advertising account executives, marketing specialists, investment brokers, or freight haulers collecting their share of the output of those who did the actual productive work. The full value of the goods and services produced was shared and exchanged within the family and the community, among those who actually created the value. The result was an extraordinarily efficient use of resources to meet real needs.” pg. 45
“World War II brought the government into an even more central and politically accepted role in managing economic affairs. The government placed controls on consumption, coordinated industrial output, and decided how national resources would be allocated in support of the war effort. A combination of a highly progressive tax system put in place to finance the war effort, full employment at good rates, and a strong social safety net brought about a massive shift in wealth distribution in the direction of greater equity. In 1929, there had been 20,000 millionaires in the United States and two billionaires. By 1944, there were only 13,000 millionaires and no billionaires. The share of total wealth held by the top 0.5 percent of U.S. households fell from a high of 32.4 perception in 1929 to 19.3 percent in 1949. It was a great victory for the expanding middle class and for those among the working classes who rose to join its ranks.” pg. 62-63
“Pluralism flourished into the 1960s, a period of cultural rebellion in the United States. A new generation, the flower children, vocally challenged basic assumptions about lifestyles, the military-industrial complex, foreign military intervention, the exploitation of the environment, the rights and roles of women, civil rights, equity, and poverty. The U.S. corporate establishment was badly shaken by the apparent threat to its values and interests. Perhaps most threatening of all was the fact that the young were dropping out of the consumer culture. This generation was rebelling not against poverty and the deprivations of exploitation so much as against the excesses of affluence. This rejection of materialism by a new generation of Americans in some ways presented a more fundamental threat to the system than had earlier generations of angry workers seeking a living wage and safe working conditions.
The names of consumer activist Ralph Nader and environmentalist Rachel Carson became household words.” pg. 63
“Interwoven into the political discourse about free markets and free trade is a persistent message: the advance of free markets is the advance of democracy. Advocates of the free market would have us believe that free markets are a more efficient and responsive mechanism for political expression than even the ballot, because business is more efficient and more responsive to people’s needs than are inefficient and uncaring politicians and bureaucrats. The logic is simple: In the free market, people express their sovereignty directly by how they vote with their consumer dollars. What they are willing to buy with their own money is ultimately a better indicator of what they value than the ballot, and therefore the market is the most effective and democratic way to define the public interest.
Given the growing distrust of government, it is a compelling message, and it embodies an important truth: markets and politics are both about governance, power, and the allocation of society’s resources. It is also a misleading message that masks an important political reality. In a political democracy, each person gets one vote. In the market, one dollar is one vote, and you get as many votes as you have dollars. No dollar, no vote. Markets are inherently biased in favor of people of wealth. Even more important in our present world, and less often acknowledged, is that markets have a very strong bias in favor of very large corporations, which command far more massive financial resources than even the wealthiest of individuals. As markets become freer and more global, the power to govern increasingly passes from national governments to global corporations, and the interests of those corporations diverge ever farther from the human interest.” pg. 66-67
“Adam Smith’s ideal was a market composed solely of small buyers and sellers. He showed how the workings of such a market would tend toward a price that provides a fair return to land, labor, and capital; produce a satisfactory outcome for both buyers and sellers; and result in an optimal outcome for society in terms of the allocation of its resources. He made clear that this outcome can result only when no buyer or seller is sufficiently large to influence the market price. Such a market implicitly assumes a significant degree of equality in the distribution of economic power.” pg. 74
“When the seller retains the benefit of an externalized cost, this represents an unearned profit—an important source of market inefficiency, because it rewards cost externalizing behaviors. Passing the benefit to the buyer in the form of a lower price creates still another source of inefficiency by encouraging forms of consumption that use finite resources inefficiently. For example, the more the environmental and social costs of producing and driving automobiles are externalized, the more automobiles people buy and the more they drive them. Urban sprawl increases, more productive lands are paved over, more pollutants are released, petroleum reserves are depleted more rapidly, and voters favor highway construction over public transportation, sidewalks, and bicycle paths.” pg. 76-77
“It is a profound paradox that extremist ideologies become most attractive during times of uncertainty, when rapid change is making old solutions obsolete. At such times, people have an understandable craving for the security of the simple, self-justifying prescriptions of ideological demagogues. Yet this is also the time when societies can least afford the rigidity, the self-justifying interpretation of failure, and the suppression of debate and experimentation that are the hallmarks of ideological extremism.” pg. 101
“The consequence of delinking benefits from their costs is that the system is telling the world’s most powerful decision makers that their decisions are creating new benefits, when in fact they are simply shifting more of the earth’s available wealth to themselves at the expense of people and the planet.” pg. 115
“Washington’s major growth industry consists of the for-profit public-relations firms and business-sponsored policy institutes engaged in producing facts, opinion pieces, expert analyses, opinion polls, and direct-mail and telephone solicitation to create ‘citizen’ advocacy and public-image-building campaigns on demand for corporate clients. William Greider calls it ‘democracy for hire.’ Burson Marsteller—the world’s largest public-relations firm, with net 1992 billings of $204 million—worked for Exxon during the Exxon Valdez oil spill and for Union Carbide during the Bhopal disaster. The top fifty public-relations firms billed over $1.7 billion in 1991.
In the United State, the 170,000 public-relations employees engaged in manipulating news, public opinion, and public policy to serve the interests of paying clients now outnumber actual news reporters by about 40,000—and the gap is growing. These firms will organize citizen letter-writing campaigns, provide paid operatives posing as ‘housewives’ to present corporate views in public meetings, and place favorable news items and op-ed pieces in the press. . . .The distinction between advertising space and news space grows less distinct with each passing day.” pg. 146
“Consider the implications of the fact that a major part of the burden we overconsumers place on the planet comes from our use of automobiles and airplanes, our consumption of unhealthy foods produced by methods that destroy the earth and leave what we eat poisoned with toxic residues, and our use of throwaway products that come in unnecessary packaging. Would it really be a burden to give up long commutes on crowded freeways, constant noise, job insecurity, gadgets we never use, clothes we seldom wear, unhealthy fatty diets, chemically contaminated fruits and vegetables, products that don’t last, unless packaging, tiring business trips, and energy-inefficient homes and buildings? Or what about the military activities that account fo approximately 30 percent of all global environmental degradation? Would it be a hardship if we were to resolve our disputes by nonmilitary means?” pg. 282-283
“These experiences left me with a deep conviction that real development cannot be purchased with foreign aid monies. Development depends on people’s ability to gain control of and use effectively the real resources of their localities—land, water, labor, technology, and human ingenuity and motivation—to meet their own needs. Yet most development interventions transfer control of local resources to ever larger and more centralized institutions that are unaccountable to local people and unresponsive to their needs. The greater the amount of money that flows through these central institutions, the more dependent people become, the less control they have over their own lives and resources, and the more rapidly the gap grows between those who hold central power and those who seek to make a living for themselves within local communities.” pg. 5
“It seemed evident from our analysis that to reestablish a sustainable relationship to the living earth, we must break free of the illusions of the world of money, rediscover spiritual meaning in our lives, and root our economic institutions in place and community so that they are integrally connected to people and life. Consequently, we concluded that the task of people-centered development in its fullest sense must be the creation of life-centered societies in which the economy is but one of the instruments of good living—not the purpose of human existence. Because our leaders are entrapped in the myths and the reward systems of the institutions they head, the leadership in this creative process of institutional and value re-creation must come from within civil society.
It was in many ways an unremarkable insight. What we had accomplished was little more than to rediscover the ancient wisdom that a deep tension exists between our spiritual nature and our economic lives and that healthy social and spiritual function depends on keeping the two in proper balance and perspective. Nor was there anything new in recognizing the importance of civil society, which has always been the foundation of democratic governance. Yet we felt that we had deepened our own insights into the practical relevance of these ideas for the crisis that imperils contemporary societies.” pg. 7
“Whole-systems thinking calls for a skepticism of simplistic solutions, a willingness to seek out connections between problems and events that conventional discourse ignores, and the courage to delve into subject matter that may lie outside our direct experience and expertise.” pg. 11
“The leaders and institutions that promised a golden age are not delivering. They assail us with visions of wondrous new technological gadgets, such as airplane seats with individual television monitors, and an information highway that will make it possible to fax messages while we sun ourselves on the beach. Yet the things that most of us really want—a secure means of livelihood, a decent place to live, healthy and uncontaminated food to eat, good education and health care for our children, a clean and vital natural environment—seem to slip further from the grasp of most of the worlds’s people with each passing day.
Fewer and fewer people believe that they face a secure economic future. Family and community units and the security they once provided are disintegrating. The natural environment on which we depend for our material needs is under deepening stress. Confidence in our major institutions is evaporating, and we find a profound and growing suspicion among thoughtful people the world over that something has gone very wrong. These conditions are becoming pervasive in almost every locality of the world—and point to a global-scale failure of our institutions.” pg. 19
“It is relevant to our current inquiry to note that the out-migration from Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that the commonly held idea that colonialism benefited the people of the colonizing countries is largely myth. The situation was more ambiguous and has much in common with the new corporate colonialism of economic globalization. For the most part, its benefits went to the monied classes, not to the average citizen. A recent study of the British colonial experience by two American historians found that although wealthy investors profited from investments in the colonies, the middle class received only the tax bills that supported the vast military establishment required to maintain the empire. They concluded, ‘Imperialism can best be viewed as a mechanism for transferring income from the middle to the upper classes.’ Economic globalization is largely a modern form of the imperial phenomenon, and it carries much the same consequence.” pg. 27-28
“Adding insult to injury, the rich commonly point to the miserable environmental conditions in which the poor sometimes live as proof that the poor are less environmentally responsible than themselves. Such claims draw attention away from two important realities. First, most environmental stress is a direct function of human consumption, and rich people unquestionably consume far more than do poor people. Second, although it is true that poor people are far more likely to be found living next to waste dumps, polluting factories, and other scenes of environmental devastation than are wealthy people, this doesn’t mean that it is their waste filling those dumps or that they are major consumers of the products produced in those factories. Nor does it mean that they wouldn’t prefer to live in more environmentally pristine settings. It simply means that wealthy people have the economic and political power to make sure that pollutants and wastes are dumped somewhere other than in their neighborhoods and to ensure that their neighborhoods are not stripped bare of trees to become the sites of polluting factories. Poor people do not. What we are seeing is purely a consequence of income inequality, not a difference in environmental awareness and concern. It can be corrected only by equalizing power.” pg. 31
“In conclusion, they [Cornell researchers] posed a fundamental question: ‘Does human society want 10 to 15 billion humans living in poverty and malnourishment or one to two billion living with abundant resources and a quality environment?’ They argue for a population of 1 to 2 billion, which by their calculations would allow a level of consumption roughly equivalent to the current per capita standard for Europe. They note that ‘a drastic demographic adjustment to one to two billion humans will cause serious social, economic, and political problems, but to continue rapid population growth to 12 billion or more will result in more severe social, economic, and political conflicts plus catastrophic public health and environmental problems.’ What they do not mention is that in a world of 10 to 15 billion humans, there will be no place for other forms of animal or plant life that are not immediately essential to human survival.” pg. 35
“Furthermore, the more environmentally burdensome ways of meeting a given need are generally those that contribute most to the gross national product (GNP). For example, driving a mile in a car contributes more to GNP than riding a mile on a bicycle. Turning on an air conditioner adds more than opening a window. Relying on processed packaged food adds more than using natural foods purchased in bulk in reusable containers. We might say that GNP, technically a measure of the rate at which money is flowing through the economy, might also be described as a measure of the rate at which we are turning resources into garbage.
We could expend a lot of effort on the probably unrealistic goal of making GNP go up indefinitely without creating more garbage. But why not instead concentrate on ending poverty, improving our quality of life, and achieving a balance with the earth? These are achievable goals—if we can free ourselves from the illusion that growth is the path to better living.” pg.38
“Rapid economic growth in low-income countries brings modern airports, television, express highways, and air-conditioned shopping malls with sophisticated consumer electronics and fashion labels for the fortunate few. It rarely improves living conditions for the many. This kind of growth requires gearing the economy toward exports to earn the foreign exchange to buy the things that wealthy people desire. Thus, the lands of the poor are appropriated for export crops. The former tillers of these lands then find themselves subsisting in urban slums on starvation wages paid by sweatshops producing for export. Families are broken up, the social fabric is strained to the breaking point, and violence becomes endemic. Those whom growth has favored then need still more foreign exchange to import arms to protect themselves from the rage of the excluded.” pg. 42
“Social economies are by nature local, nonwaged, nonmonetized, and nonmarket. They are energized more by love than by money.
As productive and reproductive functions such as child care, health care, food preparation, entertainment, and physical security are transferred from the social economy to the market economy, they show up as additions to economic output and thus contributors to economic growth—though they do little, if anything, to improve the quality of the services we receive. This shift also increases the demand for economic overhead functions, which are counted as additions to economic output although they are actually an enormous source of economic inefficiency. Consider that when family and community members worked directly with and for one another, there were no tax collectors, managers, government regulators, accountants, lawyers, stockbrokers, bankers, middlemen, advertising account executives, marketing specialists, investment brokers, or freight haulers collecting their share of the output of those who did the actual productive work. The full value of the goods and services produced was shared and exchanged within the family and the community, among those who actually created the value. The result was an extraordinarily efficient use of resources to meet real needs.” pg. 45
“World War II brought the government into an even more central and politically accepted role in managing economic affairs. The government placed controls on consumption, coordinated industrial output, and decided how national resources would be allocated in support of the war effort. A combination of a highly progressive tax system put in place to finance the war effort, full employment at good rates, and a strong social safety net brought about a massive shift in wealth distribution in the direction of greater equity. In 1929, there had been 20,000 millionaires in the United States and two billionaires. By 1944, there were only 13,000 millionaires and no billionaires. The share of total wealth held by the top 0.5 percent of U.S. households fell from a high of 32.4 perception in 1929 to 19.3 percent in 1949. It was a great victory for the expanding middle class and for those among the working classes who rose to join its ranks.” pg. 62-63
“Pluralism flourished into the 1960s, a period of cultural rebellion in the United States. A new generation, the flower children, vocally challenged basic assumptions about lifestyles, the military-industrial complex, foreign military intervention, the exploitation of the environment, the rights and roles of women, civil rights, equity, and poverty. The U.S. corporate establishment was badly shaken by the apparent threat to its values and interests. Perhaps most threatening of all was the fact that the young were dropping out of the consumer culture. This generation was rebelling not against poverty and the deprivations of exploitation so much as against the excesses of affluence. This rejection of materialism by a new generation of Americans in some ways presented a more fundamental threat to the system than had earlier generations of angry workers seeking a living wage and safe working conditions.
The names of consumer activist Ralph Nader and environmentalist Rachel Carson became household words.” pg. 63
“Interwoven into the political discourse about free markets and free trade is a persistent message: the advance of free markets is the advance of democracy. Advocates of the free market would have us believe that free markets are a more efficient and responsive mechanism for political expression than even the ballot, because business is more efficient and more responsive to people’s needs than are inefficient and uncaring politicians and bureaucrats. The logic is simple: In the free market, people express their sovereignty directly by how they vote with their consumer dollars. What they are willing to buy with their own money is ultimately a better indicator of what they value than the ballot, and therefore the market is the most effective and democratic way to define the public interest.
Given the growing distrust of government, it is a compelling message, and it embodies an important truth: markets and politics are both about governance, power, and the allocation of society’s resources. It is also a misleading message that masks an important political reality. In a political democracy, each person gets one vote. In the market, one dollar is one vote, and you get as many votes as you have dollars. No dollar, no vote. Markets are inherently biased in favor of people of wealth. Even more important in our present world, and less often acknowledged, is that markets have a very strong bias in favor of very large corporations, which command far more massive financial resources than even the wealthiest of individuals. As markets become freer and more global, the power to govern increasingly passes from national governments to global corporations, and the interests of those corporations diverge ever farther from the human interest.” pg. 66-67
“Adam Smith’s ideal was a market composed solely of small buyers and sellers. He showed how the workings of such a market would tend toward a price that provides a fair return to land, labor, and capital; produce a satisfactory outcome for both buyers and sellers; and result in an optimal outcome for society in terms of the allocation of its resources. He made clear that this outcome can result only when no buyer or seller is sufficiently large to influence the market price. Such a market implicitly assumes a significant degree of equality in the distribution of economic power.” pg. 74
“When the seller retains the benefit of an externalized cost, this represents an unearned profit—an important source of market inefficiency, because it rewards cost externalizing behaviors. Passing the benefit to the buyer in the form of a lower price creates still another source of inefficiency by encouraging forms of consumption that use finite resources inefficiently. For example, the more the environmental and social costs of producing and driving automobiles are externalized, the more automobiles people buy and the more they drive them. Urban sprawl increases, more productive lands are paved over, more pollutants are released, petroleum reserves are depleted more rapidly, and voters favor highway construction over public transportation, sidewalks, and bicycle paths.” pg. 76-77
“It is a profound paradox that extremist ideologies become most attractive during times of uncertainty, when rapid change is making old solutions obsolete. At such times, people have an understandable craving for the security of the simple, self-justifying prescriptions of ideological demagogues. Yet this is also the time when societies can least afford the rigidity, the self-justifying interpretation of failure, and the suppression of debate and experimentation that are the hallmarks of ideological extremism.” pg. 101
“The consequence of delinking benefits from their costs is that the system is telling the world’s most powerful decision makers that their decisions are creating new benefits, when in fact they are simply shifting more of the earth’s available wealth to themselves at the expense of people and the planet.” pg. 115
“Washington’s major growth industry consists of the for-profit public-relations firms and business-sponsored policy institutes engaged in producing facts, opinion pieces, expert analyses, opinion polls, and direct-mail and telephone solicitation to create ‘citizen’ advocacy and public-image-building campaigns on demand for corporate clients. William Greider calls it ‘democracy for hire.’ Burson Marsteller—the world’s largest public-relations firm, with net 1992 billings of $204 million—worked for Exxon during the Exxon Valdez oil spill and for Union Carbide during the Bhopal disaster. The top fifty public-relations firms billed over $1.7 billion in 1991.
In the United State, the 170,000 public-relations employees engaged in manipulating news, public opinion, and public policy to serve the interests of paying clients now outnumber actual news reporters by about 40,000—and the gap is growing. These firms will organize citizen letter-writing campaigns, provide paid operatives posing as ‘housewives’ to present corporate views in public meetings, and place favorable news items and op-ed pieces in the press. . . .The distinction between advertising space and news space grows less distinct with each passing day.” pg. 146
“Consider the implications of the fact that a major part of the burden we overconsumers place on the planet comes from our use of automobiles and airplanes, our consumption of unhealthy foods produced by methods that destroy the earth and leave what we eat poisoned with toxic residues, and our use of throwaway products that come in unnecessary packaging. Would it really be a burden to give up long commutes on crowded freeways, constant noise, job insecurity, gadgets we never use, clothes we seldom wear, unhealthy fatty diets, chemically contaminated fruits and vegetables, products that don’t last, unless packaging, tiring business trips, and energy-inefficient homes and buildings? Or what about the military activities that account fo approximately 30 percent of all global environmental degradation? Would it be a hardship if we were to resolve our disputes by nonmilitary means?” pg. 282-283
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 26, 2017
I have read this book in its entirety at least three times, that is how much I enjoyed it. My PhD friend says that it is not rigorous enough to assign to her students and prefers assigning The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. To me, this belies a total misunderstanding because first, they aren't comparable texts as they explore issues that cross but are fundamentally different. Second, because Jeffrey Sachs approaches poverty abolition in a way that ignores the forces so carefully explained in Korten's book. Ignoring the race to the bottom, for example, in one's efforts to attack poverty is comparable to ignoring the gorilla in the room. Sachs does not talk effectively about what people can do to improve their condition because Sachs is more interested in fixing the political and nongovernmental structures that create poverty in the first place. However, and this is Korten's main point, corporations now rule the world, and nation states, and even the U.N., no longer have the power to enforce environmental or social laws that make corporations into good "citizens" again.
Third, although it is written in layman's terms, it is quite rigorous. It makes potentially complex topics easy to grasp and I have always felt that the discussion here is carefully selected; these are the relevant topics.
I do believe that the U.S., the Eurpean Union and China could use political muscle to reverse this relationship, but at least the Western powers are far too inebriated with the corporate perks in the current situation to make any changes.
This is an absolutely essential read for anybody who wants to clearly understand how corporations have evolved to become "people", untethered to place or ideology and how this has affected local communities around the world that have long been identified with specific companies.
Third, although it is written in layman's terms, it is quite rigorous. It makes potentially complex topics easy to grasp and I have always felt that the discussion here is carefully selected; these are the relevant topics.
I do believe that the U.S., the Eurpean Union and China could use political muscle to reverse this relationship, but at least the Western powers are far too inebriated with the corporate perks in the current situation to make any changes.
This is an absolutely essential read for anybody who wants to clearly understand how corporations have evolved to become "people", untethered to place or ideology and how this has affected local communities around the world that have long been identified with specific companies.
September 8, 2011
It reads like a textbook which in the beginning made it hard for me to read. Numbers and statistics don't usually keep me interested in a book. But overall, everything it discussed was informative and now I feel that I understand more about corporations than I previously did. Three fourths of the book cover how corporations have already messed up on some scale and overall that makes it a somewhat depressing read if you're part of the "I'm going to save the world" mindset. The final fourth of the book discusses ways that things can be changed and hopefully create a nicer global/local economy. It makes it a worthwhile read.
Having spent a few months reading the book, the parts I remember best are the beginning creation of corporations and how they didn't use to have rights similar to the rights of your average human. I have learned much more about the World Trade Organization, IMF, and the World Bank. As well as the inefficiency of the United Nations.
The book ended with examples of peaceful protest that have proved effective and offers up some new(ish) ideas for how we can change the way the global economy is turning.
Although the second edition was written in 2001 and recently things have drastically changed, it is still an informative and worthwhile read. If you're into these types of books.
Having spent a few months reading the book, the parts I remember best are the beginning creation of corporations and how they didn't use to have rights similar to the rights of your average human. I have learned much more about the World Trade Organization, IMF, and the World Bank. As well as the inefficiency of the United Nations.
The book ended with examples of peaceful protest that have proved effective and offers up some new(ish) ideas for how we can change the way the global economy is turning.
Although the second edition was written in 2001 and recently things have drastically changed, it is still an informative and worthwhile read. If you're into these types of books.
February 8, 2013
This book should be made a text book (not the only one of course!) for all students of Economics, Politics and Journalism.
4.5 starts from me.
There were parts of the book which i do not agree with, and then there were parts which i did not completely understand. Requires a re-read i think. But most of the book is very readable, with analogies from popular culture to explain complicated topics.
David Korten presents a lot of facts before proceeding to make his arguments. Whatever disposition you are of, capitalist, monopolist, communist or a freeloader (there are freeloaders on both left and right, just saying), you must read this book and reevaluate your position. I feel book is so very relevant to the times we are in now. The development model the World Bank and IMF are forcing down the throats of Asian and African countries is simply unsustainable. There is a huge human as well as ecological price that has already been paid, and there is still no sign of any wisdom gained.
I read this book in 2007-08 and could easily relate some of the arguments presented by David C Korten with the Lehman Brothers in the US and the similar scandals that came to light soon after and the sub-prime crisis that started the recession, which show no signs of abating in 2013.
4.5 starts from me.
There were parts of the book which i do not agree with, and then there were parts which i did not completely understand. Requires a re-read i think. But most of the book is very readable, with analogies from popular culture to explain complicated topics.
David Korten presents a lot of facts before proceeding to make his arguments. Whatever disposition you are of, capitalist, monopolist, communist or a freeloader (there are freeloaders on both left and right, just saying), you must read this book and reevaluate your position. I feel book is so very relevant to the times we are in now. The development model the World Bank and IMF are forcing down the throats of Asian and African countries is simply unsustainable. There is a huge human as well as ecological price that has already been paid, and there is still no sign of any wisdom gained.
I read this book in 2007-08 and could easily relate some of the arguments presented by David C Korten with the Lehman Brothers in the US and the similar scandals that came to light soon after and the sub-prime crisis that started the recession, which show no signs of abating in 2013.
October 24, 2012
I always get a little fidgety when authors start talking about the spiritual aspect of whatever. Maybe it is my association of this word with religion, maybe I just don't buy it. Whatever the case, Korten uses the word and I cringe. This is not to say that what he writes about drips with god or an appeal to a higher power. Korten is a believer in the markets and maybe has read Adam Smith more closely than the free marketers who reference him all the time. This seems quite likely to me since so many people claim they believe in things but don't understand what they are. Like religion. Anyway, Korten seems to know the referenced text. The downside is that, at least for me, the book drags in the last 1/3 and his predictions or hopes for the future haven't turned up - which is part of the problem of reading a book that was written almost 20 years ago. History has shown me that corporations have gained even more control over the world. I believe in what he has to say, wish he was right in his hopes, but sadly, know from experience that even a major financial crisis didn't turn the tide.
August 2, 2015
Although the focus of When Corporations Rule the World is one of my favorite topics –ecological economics – it is no easy read.
Despite the slog, Korten's analysis is more comprehensive, more historical, and more insightful than other similar works. I walked away with a much deeper and broader understanding of how we got to this point in human society and global destruction. All the more amazing that I can say this of a 1995 edition in the year 2015. I have not read the 20th anniversary edition which offers an update to Korten's original edition.
What's more, Korten also offers a fairly detailed outline of the direction in which we should head. It too is spot on from my viewpoint. As one might expect, Naomi Klein's 2014 This Changes Everything has a more up to date and detailed strategy, but Korten's prescience is all the more clear when one considers Klein's work. To this day, a very worthwhile read.
Despite the slog, Korten's analysis is more comprehensive, more historical, and more insightful than other similar works. I walked away with a much deeper and broader understanding of how we got to this point in human society and global destruction. All the more amazing that I can say this of a 1995 edition in the year 2015. I have not read the 20th anniversary edition which offers an update to Korten's original edition.
What's more, Korten also offers a fairly detailed outline of the direction in which we should head. It too is spot on from my viewpoint. As one might expect, Naomi Klein's 2014 This Changes Everything has a more up to date and detailed strategy, but Korten's prescience is all the more clear when one considers Klein's work. To this day, a very worthwhile read.
February 25, 2018
Overall, I thought this was a well thought out book. The author covered a lot of material and was persuasive with his arguments. The premise of the book is about how global corporations are profit driven and that goal usually differs from society's goal of wanting to improve the world and the human life within it. I won't cover all of the author's evidence to support that premise because I don't think I could give it justice. Speaking of justice, it's sad to see, at least in my perspective of the world, that global corporations still act the same (environmental destruction, outsourcing labor to 3rd world sweatshops, lobbying for more deregulation, etc.) 17 years after this omen of a book was written. Considering the same persistent issues exist, it makes this book still hold value, and I hope it inspires activism or at least some minor boycotting of global corporations. I would encourage anybody with a business interest who can handle a little capitalism bashing to read this book.
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