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David Korten is an economist, author, activist, and prominent critic of corporate globalization. He is perhaps best known for his bestselling 1995 book, When Corporations Rule the World – an examination of market libertarians’ twisting of famed economist Adam Smith’s teachings and a vision of an alternative sustainable economy based on small-scale, localized cooperative enterprises. He was named an Utne Reader visionary in 2011. His publications are required reading in university courses around the world.
Korten is also the cofounder and chair of YES! Magazine, a nonprofit publication focused on sustainability, alternative economics and peace. It won Utne Magazine’s Alternate Press Award for best cultural coverage in 2001 and was nominated for best political coverage in 2004.
In 1990 Korten founded the People-Centered Development Forum, which became the Living Economies Forum. It is dedicated to communicating ideas for a new, sustainable economy based on “life's extraordinary capacity for cooperative self-organization.”
He also sits on the board of directors for the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), is an associate of the International Forum on Globalization, and a member of the Club of Rome, a global think-tank on international politics. He is co-chair of the New Economy Working Group formed in 2008 to formulate and advance a new economy agenda.
Korten spent three decades setting up and running business schools and helping administer U.S. aid in poor countries overseas. At the time he hoped that creating a new class of professional business entrepreneurs would catalyze the end of poverty. But he came to realize that the crises of deepening poverty, inequality, environmental devastation and social disintegration were created by the policies that the United States was promoting at home and abroad. He has since been devoted to changing the nature of his home country and sparking the growth of a new, sustainable, localized economy.
Early Years
Korten was born in Longview, Washington in 1937. He graduated from R.A. Long High in 1955 and later earned his MBA and PhD degrees at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, studying organizational theory, business strategy, and economics. While at Stanford he married Frances Fisher Korten, with whom he now lives on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, Washington. He served during the Vietnam War as a captain in the United States Air Force, teaching stateside.
Korten spent five-and-a-half years as a visiting associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Business, where he taught in the middle management, MBA and doctoral programs. He also served as the Harvard Business adviser to the Nicaragua-based Central American Institute of Business Administration, and later worked for the Harvard Institute for International Development. In this role he directed a Ford Foundation-funded project to strengthen the organization and management of national family-planning programs.
In the late 1970s Korten worked in Southeast Asia as a Ford Foundation project specialist, and later as the Asian regional adviser on development management to USAID. It was there that Korten grew worried that the economic models embraced by official aid agencies were increasing poverty and environmental destruction, rather than reducing them. He observed that these agencies were in fact change resistant by design.
It was then that Korten left the government aid industry and started a five-year stint working for Asian nongovernmental organizations. He returned to the U.S. in 1992 and has worked tirelessly as an educator, raising awareness of the political and institutional consequences of economic globalization and the expansion of corporate power at the expense of democracy, equity and environment.
Korten strongly believes that societal change must happen in three ways: 1) change the defining stories of mainstream culture, 2) create a new economic reality from the bottom up and 3) change the rules to support the values and institutions of the emergent new reality.
Books
Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009
The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007
When Corporations Rule the World, Kumarian Press, 1995 and 2001
The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2000
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