Daily Inspiration Quote by David Korten

Korten’s line lands like a grenade lobbed into a seminar room: economics isn’t merely “biased,” it’s been professionalized into a kind of moral anesthesia. The word choice matters. “Professional study” targets not casual punditry but credentialed authority - departments, journals, central banks, the whole pipeline that turns assumptions into common sense. Calling it “ideological brainwashing” is less an empirical claim than a strategic accusation: it frames mainstream economics as propaganda with equations, a worldview that trains students to mistake market outcomes for natural law.

The subtext is a fight over what counts as neutrality. Economics often sells itself as descriptive - incentives, trade-offs, efficiency - while quietly smuggling in value judgments about what humans are (rational maximizers), what society is (a collection of transactions), and what counts as success (growth). Korten is pressing on the discipline’s power to define the terms of realism: if you can make capitalism feel synonymous with “the economy,” then alternatives become childish or utopian by default.

“Defense of the excesses” is the rhetorical pivot. He’s not saying economics defends capitalism in the abstract; he’s saying it defends the ugly parts: inequality justified as merit, environmental damage priced as an externality, precarious labor reframed as flexibility. In context, Korten’s activism is aimed at systems change, so the intent isn’t to refine economics at the margins - it’s to delegitimize the reigning framework and make space for other moral vocabularies: ecology, democracy, care, limits.