Wealth & Money Quote by David Korten

Calling this view "radical" is Korten’s quiet indictment of how warped the default has become. In mainstream policy talk, an economy passes its exams by growing, staying competitive, keeping inflation tame. Korten flips the grading rubric: the point isn’t abstract expansion, it’s whether people can actually live decently. The line works because it smuggles a moral demand into a space that pretends to be neutral and technical.

The intent is corrective, almost prosecutorial. Korten isn’t merely proposing a kinder metric; he’s suggesting that the usual ones are evasions. If GDP can rise while wages stagnate, rents explode, and basic care becomes precarious, then growth isn’t a sign of health, it’s a statistic that’s learned to lie. By putting "everybody" at the center, he refuses the common political escape hatch: celebrating averages while treating hardship as collateral damage or personal failure.

The subtext is a challenge to power: if the test is "decent means of living", then policy has to answer for inequality, labor bargaining power, housing, healthcare, and the distribution of risk. It pushes against the idea that markets are self-justifying and that outcomes are simply what people "earned". "Decent" is also strategically elastic: it invites democratic argument about what dignity requires, rather than outsourcing values to spreadsheets.

Contextually, this sits in Korten’s broader activist critique of corporate-led globalization and shareholder primacy. It’s the kind of sentence designed to be repeated at a rally and footnoted in a policy memo: simple enough to travel, sharp enough to unsettle.