Wealth & Money Quote by David Korten

Korten is smuggling a moral diagnosis into a technical-sounding proposal. “Not exclusively” is a strategic softener, a preemptive nod to practicality that keeps him from sounding like a cranky autarkist. Then he lands the real claim: the “bulk” of daily economic life should be denominated locally because money is not just a neutral medium, it’s a feedback system. When currency circulates close to where value is created and spent, prices, wages, and supply respond to lived conditions. When it’s globalized, Korten argues, money becomes abstracted into a speculative instrument that “loses connection with reality.”

That phrase does a lot of work. “Reality” here isn’t philosophical; it’s the price of milk, the fragility of a small business, the rent check that clears or doesn’t. He’s implicitly contrasting two economies: one of markets as human-scale exchange, another of markets as a global casino where capital can exit a town faster than any town can recover. The subtext is democratic: local currency is a way to re-embed economic power in communities, making extraction harder and accountability easier.

Contextually, this sits in the post-neoliberal critique Korten has championed for decades: globalization as a system that optimizes for liquidity and investor returns while offloading social costs onto places. Local currencies become a symbol and a tool - not a silver bullet, but a constraint that forces money to behave like a neighbor instead of a tourist. The efficiency he’s selling is less about frictionless trade than about reducing the mismatch between financial signals and human needs.