Wealth & Money Quote by David Korten

Korten is going after capitalism’s oldest PR trick: the moral halo placed over profit. The line turns on a small, loaded word - “thereby” - that exposes the sleight of hand. If making money automatically equals “contribution,” then wealth becomes its own alibi. Harm doesn’t need to be defended; it simply doesn’t register as harm inside the story the system tells about itself.

The intent is accusatory but also diagnostic. He isn’t saying a few bad actors spoil an otherwise clean market. He’s saying the market’s dominant rationale manufactures “rogue practices” the way a factory manufactures smoke: not as an exception, but as a predictable output. The subtext is that finance, especially, thrives on distance. When profit is the metric, and the social consequences are someone else’s spreadsheet or someone else’s neighborhood, the incentives reward extraction dressed up as efficiency.

Context matters: Korten’s activism has long targeted corporate power, deregulated finance, and the cultural theology of “shareholder value.” Read against the aftermath of repeated crises - from speculative bubbles to predatory lending to privatized gains and socialized losses - his point lands as a critique of legitimacy, not just policy. He’s warning that ethics campaigns and compliance seminars are cosmetic when the underlying moral logic remains unchanged. If society confuses price with value, then the most inventive forms of damage will keep arriving with immaculate paperwork and record quarterly returns.