David Korten Biography Quotes 31 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

David C. Korten emerged from mid-20th-century American affluence into a world reshaped by World War II, the Cold War, and the rapid spread of US-led development doctrine. Born in 1937, he came of age while television sold the promise of limitless growth and suburban stability, even as decolonization and proxy wars exposed the violence and inequality behind the era's triumphal narratives. That contrast - idealism at home, upheaval abroad - would become a psychological engine in his later writing: a persistent need to test official stories against lived experience.

From early on, Korten gravitated toward questions of systems rather than single villains, and toward moral accountability rather than technocratic management. He watched corporate power and national security logic harden into default assumptions, then saw the social costs of that hardening accelerate in the 1960s and 1970s: widening inequality, environmental degradation, and an increasingly managerial politics. His activism later carried the tone of someone who had learned, not in theory but by repeated confrontation, how easily institutions can normalize harm while declaring progress.

Education and Formative Influences

Korten trained as an economist and systems thinker, earning degrees at Stanford University and completing a PhD at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, an education that placed him near the intellectual center of postwar American confidence in markets, management, and modernization. Yet the very tools he acquired - analysis, planning, metrics, institutional design - became the instruments of his dissent, particularly as he began to see how development projects could generate impressive numbers while eroding community resilience, democratic control, and ecological stability.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Korten's worldview was forged through on-the-ground development work in Asia, including years in the Philippines, and through leadership roles in the international NGO sector; he served as president of the People-Centered Development Forum and was associated with organizations such as the Ford Foundation and the Harvard Business School's advisory world. The decisive turn came when he concluded that many mainstream aid and development programs, however well-intentioned, reinforced dependency and empowered local elites while exposing ordinary people to volatile global markets. He became a prominent critic of corporate globalization in the 1990s, writing When Corporations Rule the World (1995, updated later) as a synthesis of moral argument, political economy, and institutional critique; later works such as The Great Turning and Agenda for a New Economy widened the frame to a civilizational transition toward what he called "living economies" rooted in community, ecology, and democratic governance.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Korten writes as a converted insider: fluent in the language of economists and foundations, but increasingly unwilling to accept their moral evasions. The emotional core of his work is a refusal to treat social suffering as an externality or a mere "adjustment cost". He repeatedly returns to the psychic injury inflicted when people are told their insecurity is the price of progress. His critique is not nostalgic; it is diagnostic, aimed at revealing how concentrated economic power distorts both markets and democracy. "My claim is that we do not have a market economy, but a capitalist economy". For Korten, the distinction is ethical as much as technical: markets can be tools of mutual benefit under conditions of broad participation, while capitalism, as practiced, becomes an architecture of domination.

His themes are organized around instability, accountability, and re-localization. He frames globalization as a system that manufactures fragility by separating decision-makers from consequences and by elevating investor rights above community well-being. "So, there is enormous instability in the global economy with a shift of winners and losers". The sentence reads like reportage, but it also reveals his psychology: he is drawn to the moments when the system's promises collapse, because those moments expose what he believes is otherwise hidden - who bears risk, who captures reward, and who gets to define "success". At his most severe, he describes capitalism as a concentrating machine whose logic undermines both freedom and fairness: "Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way". Yet the practical side of his activism keeps the argument grounded in institutional alternatives: local enterprise, community banking, place-based food and energy systems, and rules that internalize ecological costs rather than exporting them to the future.

Legacy and Influence

Korten's enduring influence lies in how he helped translate scattered anti-globalization grievances into a coherent moral and institutional critique that could be read by policymakers, activists, and ordinary citizens alike. He became a key voice linking corporate power to democratic erosion and ecological overshoot, and his "living economy" framework anticipated later mainstream conversations about stakeholder governance, resilience, and regenerative economics. While critics fault him for broad generalizations, supporters credit him with making the structures of power legible and with insisting that economic design is a matter of values, not fate - a stance that continues to inform civic movements seeking to rebuild democratic control over money, enterprise, and the commons.