Daily Inspiration Quote by David Korten

Korten’s line is less a complaint about math than an indictment of the way math gets used as public relations. By flagging that “statistics can be deceiving,” he’s not claiming numbers are fake; he’s pointing at the political trick of treating a single metric - job growth - as a stand-in for broad well-being. The intent is to puncture the victory-lap story of the 1990s economy, a decade often remembered for boom times, low unemployment, and the glow of “end of history” optimism. He’s asking: whose boom?

The subtext is classed and moral. “Part-time,” “no benefits,” “low pay” are not just descriptors; they’re the architecture of insecurity. Korten is naming what prosperity looks like when it’s filtered through employers’ desire for flexibility and governments’ desire for flattering headlines. If the celebrated employment gains are disproportionately contingent work, the win is real on paper and hollow in lived experience - a labor market that expands while stability shrinks.

There’s also a quiet jab at the language of technocracy. “Growth of jobs” sounds neutral, even benevolent, but Korten forces the listener to confront job quality as the missing variable. The broader context is his activist critique of corporate globalization and neoliberal policy: deregulation, weakened unions, and the normalization of work without a social safety net attached. It’s a reminder that the politics of measurement decides what counts as “success,” and that convenient aggregates can erase the people doing the most precarious counting.