David C. Korten

The threat of continued warfare to the future of humanity has become dire. The Great Turning explores that threat in detail and provides an equally detailed plan for meeting and overcoming it.

In this book, David Korten makes a compelling and well-documented case that capitalism's claims to being the engine of wealth creation, the champion of democracy, and the embodiment of the market economy are unfounded. Among Korten's conclusions: Capitalism is a pathology that afflicts democracies and market economies in the absence of vigilant public oversight. The consolidation of economic power under a handful of global mega-corporations is a victory for central planning - not the market economy. The alternative to the new global capitalism is a planetary system of democratically governed market economies that honor basic market principles of the sort actually advocated by Adam Smith.

A handful of corporations and financial institutions command an ever-greater concentration of economic and political power in an assault against markets, democracy, and life. It's a "suicide economy," says former Harvard Business School professor David Korten, that destroys the very foundations of its own existence. The original 1995 edition of When Corporations Rule the World helped launch a global resistance against corporate domination. In this 20th anniversary edition, Korten shares insights from his personal experience as a participant in the growing movement for a New Economy. A new introduction documents the further concentration of wealth and corporate power since 1995 and explores why our institutions resolutely resist even modest reform. A new conclusion chapter outlines high-leverage opportunities for breakthrough change.--From publisher description.

"We humans live by stories. This defining human quality distinguishes us from other intelligent species and gives us a capacity to rapidly change our individual and group behavior in response to changing circumstances. On the downside, when we get our story wrong, the consequences can be devastating. In this extraordinary work, David Korten identifies three cultural stories ways of understanding the world that have contributed to our current economic, political, and environmental crisis. Korten explains how these stories, however arguably well intentioned, have led us to value life by its market value, view nature as a commodity, and see ourselves as separate from our world. To find a path to a viable human future Korten offers a new story, one consonant with both modern science and spiritual traditions, that acknowledges the reality that we are living beings born of a living Earth that itself is born of a living universe. He shows how we can choose our actions and design our institutions based on this understanding"--Publisher's description.

Today's economic crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. However, as David Korten shows, the steps being taken to address it do nothing to deal with the reality of a failed economic system. Korten identifies the deeper sources: Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating "wealth" without producing anything of real value: phantom wealth. Our hope lies not with Wall Street, Korten argues, but with Main Street, which creates real wealth from real resources to meet real needs. He outlines an agenda to create a new economy--locally based, community oriented, and devoted to creating a better life for all, not simply increasing profits. It will require changes to how we measure economic success, organize our financial system, even the very way we create money.--From publisher description.