Wealth & Money Quote by David Korten

Enormous instability is doing double duty here: it names the jitters people feel in their paychecks and pensions, but it also indicts the system that produces those jitters on schedule. David Korten, an activist who has spent decades criticizing corporate-led globalization, isn’t treating volatility as a freak accident or a temporary downturn. He’s framing it as a feature: a global economy designed to move value upward and pain outward, fast enough that no one can get their hands around it.

The phrase “shift of winners and losers” sounds almost neutral, like sports commentary, and that’s the point. It exposes how policy debates often launder moral choices into technical outcomes. Winners and losers aren’t weather patterns; they’re the result of rules about trade, labor mobility, capital flows, debt, and whose governments are allowed to intervene. By using a simple binary, Korten compresses a sprawling story - offshoring, financialization, austerity, supply-chain fragility - into a moral map: someone is gaining, someone is paying.

Subtext: the “instability” isn’t evenly distributed. It lands hardest on workers and communities that can’t diversify their risk the way corporations and investors can. Context matters too: this kind of language surged after repeated shocks (the 2008 crisis, pandemic disruptions, inflation spikes), when ordinary people noticed that markets recover faster than lives do. Korten’s intent is to redirect the question from “How do we manage volatility?” to “Who built an economy that requires it?”