Daily Inspiration Quote by David Korten

“Global competition is about winners and losers” is a deliberately blunt unmasking of the feel-good language that often surrounds globalization. David Korten, an activist who has spent decades critiquing corporate power, isn’t describing an unfortunate side effect; he’s naming the operating system. The sentence works because it refuses the usual euphemisms - “efficiency,” “integration,” “free trade” - and replaces them with the oldest, least deniable vocabulary: victory and defeat.

The intent is diagnostic and accusatory. Korten is signaling that global markets don’t behave like neutral weather patterns; they are structured arenas with rules written by someone. “Competition” here is less a natural law than a political design choice, one that tends to reward scale, mobility, and financial leverage while punishing communities that can’t relocate, bargain, or absorb shocks. The subtext: if there are losers, then policymakers who celebrate the system without accounting for them are not merely naive; they are complicit.

Context matters because this line lands in the long argument over whether globalization is a positive-sum story or a redistribution machine with good PR. Korten’s broader work emerged alongside rising skepticism of the 1990s-2000s trade regime, when supply chains stretched across borders and the rhetoric of “competitiveness” became a civic religion. By framing the global economy as a scoreboard, he challenges the moral alibi that everyone benefits eventually. He’s asking the reader to look at who is being asked to “compete” - and who gets to declare themselves the winners.