[Dialogue] Living Wealth: Better Than Money

Harry Wainwright h-wainwright at charter.net
Tue Aug 28 20:20:57 EDT 2007


Published on Tuesday, August 28, 2007 by Yes! Magazine
<http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1834>  

Living Wealth: Better Than Money
If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced
relationship with one another and the Earth. This requires building
economies with heart.

by David Korten

If we are to slow and ultimately reverse the social and environmental
disintegration we see around us, we must change the rules to curb the
pervasive abuse of corporate power that contributes so much to those
harms.Taming corporate power will slow the damage. It will not be
sufficient, however, to heal our relationships with one another and the
Earth and bring our troubled world into social and environmental balance.
Corporations are but instruments of a deeper social pathology revealed in a
familiar story our society tells about the nature of prosperity.

Empire Prosperity Story

The prevailing prosperity narrative has many variations, but these are among
its essential elements:

*	Economic growth fills our lives with material abundance, lifts the
poor from their misery, and creates the wealth needed to protect the
environment. 
*	Money is the measure of wealth and the proper arbiter of every
choice and relationship. 
*	Prosperity depends on freeing wealthy investors from taxes and
regulations that limit their incentive and capacity to invest in creating
the new jobs that enrich us all. 
*	Unregulated markets allocate resources to their most productive and
highest value use. 
*	The wealthy deserve their riches because we all get richer as the
benefits of the investments of those on top trickle down to those on the
bottom. 
*	Poverty is caused by welfare programs that strip the poor of
motivation to become productive members of society willing to work hard at
the jobs the market offers. 

This money-serving prosperity story is repeated endlessly by corporate media
and taught in economics, business, and public policy courses in our colleges
and universities almost as sacred writ. I call it the Empire prosperity
story.

Few notice the implications of its legitimation of the power and privilege
of for-profit corporations and an economic system designed to maximize
returns to money, that is, to make rich people richer. Furthermore, it
praises extreme individualism that, in other circumstances would be
condemned as sociopathic; values life only as a commodity; and diverts our
attention from the basic reality that destroying life to make money is an
act of collective insanity. In addition to destroying real wealth, it
threatens our very survival as a species.

Earth Community Prosperity Story

Consider these elements of a contrasting life-serving prosperity story that
looks to life, rather than money, as the true measure of wealth.

*	Healthy children, families, communities, and ecological systems are
the true measure of real wealth. 
*	Mutual caring and support are the primary currency of healthy
families and communities, and community is the key to economic security. 
*	Real wealth is created by investing in the human capital of
productive people, the social capital of caring relationships, and the
natural capital of healthy ecosystems. 
*	The end of poverty and the healing of the environment will come from
reallocating material resources from rich to poor and from life-destructive
to life-nurturing uses. 
*	Markets have a vital role, but democratically accountable
governments must secure community interests by assuring that everyone plays
by basic rules that internalize costs, maintain equity, and favor
human-scale local businesses that honor community values and serve community
needs. 
*	Economies must serve and be accountable to people, not the reverse. 

I call this the Earth Community prosperity story because it evokes a vision
of the possibility of creating life-serving economies grounded in
communities that respect the irreducible interdependence of people and
nature. Although rarely heard, this story is based on familiar notions of
generosity and fairness, and negates each of the claims of the imperial
prosperity story that currently shapes economic policy and practice.

The High Cost of Making Money

It took me many years in my work abroad as a member of the foreign aid
establishment to wake up to the fallacy of the Empire story-the idea that
advancing economic growth by maximizing returns to money is the key to
ending poverty and healing the environment. The epiphany came during a
conference in Asia at which nongovernmental organizations were presenting
case studies of the social and environmental consequences of large
aid-funded development projects undertaken to promote economic growth. In
case after case, the projects displaced poor people and disrupted essential
environmental processes to produce benefits for those already better off.

Eventually I came to realize that conventional economic growth indicators
rarely measure growth in human prosperity. Rather, they measure the rate at
which the rich are expropriating the living resources of the planet and
converting them to products destined for a garbage dump after a brief useful
life. The process generates profits for people who already have far more
money than they need while displacing people from the resources they need
for their modest livelihoods. In summary, the primary business of the global
financial system and the corporations that serve it is to increase the
wealth gap. It works well in the short-term for the privileged few, but it
is disastrous for the society.

We see the effects in the current state of the world. The market value of
global economic output has tripled since 1970. By conventional reckoning,
this means we humans have tripled our wealth and well-being.

Yet indicators of living capital, the aggregate of human, social and natural
capital, tell a very different story. The Living Planet Index, an indicator
of the health of the world's freshwater, ocean, and land-based ecosystems,
declined 30 percent since 1970. According to the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment, 15 of 24 ecosystem services examined "are being degraded or used
unsustainably, including fresh water, capture fisheries, air and water
purification, and the regulation of regional and local climate, natural
hazards, and pests."

Indicators of human capital-the skills, knowledge, psychological health,
capacity for critical thought, and moral responsibility characteristic of
the fully functioning person, and of social capital-the enduring
relationships of mutual trust and caring that are the foundation of healthy
families, communities and societies-point to equally unfavorable trends.

Even as living capital shrinks, the population that depends on it continues
to grow. Meanwhile, the growing concentration of money means a few people
are able to claim an ever-larger share of a shrinking pie of living capital
to the exclusion of everyone else. According to a recent United Nations
study, the richest 2 percent of the world's adults own 51 percent of all
global assets. The poorest 50 percent own only 1 percent. This distribution
of ownership is a measure of the global distribution of power-and the gap is
growing at an accelerating rate. The power imbalance allows the privileged
minority to change the rules to accelerate their expropriation of the
declining pool of real wealth, which increases the hardship and desperation
of those excluded. We are on a path to an increasingly violent
last-one-standing competition for the Earth's final tree, drop of drinkable
water, and breath of air.

By our measures of financial capital, we humans are on a path to limitless
prosperity. By the measures of living capital, we are on a suicidal path to
increasing deprivation and ultimate self-extinction.

Putting Life First

If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced
relationship with one another and the Earth. This requires turning existing
economic priorities and models on their head and making the values of the
Earth Community story the foundation of our economy. We must:

1.	Turn from money to life as the defining value, from growing
financial capital to growing living capital, and from short-term to
long-term investing; 
2.	Shift the priority from advancing the private interests of the few
to advancing the individual and community interests of all; and 
3.	Reallocate resources from supporting institutions of domination to
meeting the needs of people, community, and nature. 

We have enormous potential to improve the lives of all by reallocating
resources from military to health care and environmental regeneration, from
automobiles to public transportation, from investing in suburban sprawl to
investing in compact communities, from advertising to education, from
financial speculation to productive investment in local entrepreneurship,
and from providing extravagant luxuries for the very wealthy to providing
basic essentials for everyone.

The champions of Empire dismiss any such reordering of priorities on the
ground that it will bring economic disaster and unbearable hardship. They
ignore the simple fact that those results are already the lot of roughly
half our fellow humans. The proposed reordering can avoid the spread of
hardship and begin to alleviate the existing suffering.

Economic reallocation and democratization are no longer simply moral issues.
They are imperatives of human survival and must replace economic growth and
the pursuit of financial gain as the defining purpose of economic life.

The work of bringing forth a new economy devoted to serving the needs of our
children, families, communities, and natural environments begins with
building public awareness that there is an Earth Community prosperity story
that offers a vision of hope and possibility for a positive future. Although
a story so contrary to the prevailing Empire story is likely to be greeted
with initial skepticism, the Earth Community prosperity story enjoys the
ultimate advantage because it expresses the truth most of us recognize in
our hearts: if our children, families, communities, and natural systems are
healthy, we are prosperous. Whether conventional financial indicators like
GDP or the Dow Jones stock index rise or fall is irrelevant.

Rules for Conserving and Sharing

To get from where we are to where we need to go we must recognize that the
market is an essential and beneficial institution for allocating resources
in response to individual choices. But it is beneficial only so long as it
operates by rules that maintain equity and competition and require players
to internalize the social and environmental costs of their choices. And it
is not sacred. Without responsible governmental oversight, the market can
lead to highly destructive social pathology.

By its nature, the market creates winners and losers. Furthermore, the
winners are often those most skilled in finding ways to pass social and
environmental costs onto others. The winners increase their share of the
resource pie, which increases their economic and political power to shape
markets and rules to improve their future prospects. The result is a
self-reinforcing spiral of increasing concentration of wealth and power.
This supports the unjust hoarding and profligate consumption of resources by
a privileged class. In an increasingly environmentally constrained world,
learning to conserve and share resources is an essential requirement of
social order and well-being.

Even with adequate regulation to minimize social and environmental abuse,
the health of a market system also requires public intervention to recycle
financial capital continuously from winners to losers. In the absence of
such recycling, financial wealth and power accumulate in perpetuity,
increasing the fortunes of a few family dynasties at the expense of
democracy, justice, and social stability.

Recycling financial wealth to maintain a democratic allocation of access to
real resources is, of course, totally contrary to the self-serving logic of
corporate capitalism. Yet it is essential to democracy and social health,
both of which depend on an equitable distribution of power, and an essential
function of democratic government.

Community-based Economics

>From a system-design perspective, a healthy society must either eliminate
profit, interest, and for-profit corporations altogether, or use the taxing
and regulatory powers of publicly accountable democratic governments to
strictly limit concentrations of economic power and prevent the winners from
passing the costs of their success onto the losers. This creates yet another
system design issue. As government becomes larger and more powerful, it
almost inevitably becomes less accountable and more prone to corruption.

Paul Hawken has correctly observed that big business creates the need for
big government to constrain excesses and clean up the messes. To maintain
equity and secure the internalization of costs, democratically accountable
government power must exceed the power of exclusive private economic
interests. The smaller the concentrations of economic power, the smaller
government can be and still maintain essential balance and integrity in the
society.

There will be less need for a strong governmental hand to the extent that we
are successful in eliminating sociopathic institutional forms, making
community-based economies the norm, and creating a public consensus that
predatory economic behavior now taken for granted as "just human nature" is
actually aberrant and immoral. Responsible citizenship may then become the
expected business norm. There will always be a need, however, for rules and
governmental oversight to deal with what hopefully will be a declining
number of sociopathic individuals and institutions who seek to profit at
public expense.

Equalizing economic power and rooting it locally shifts power to people and
community from distant financial markets, global corporations, and national
governments. It serves to shift rewards from economic predators to economic
producers, strengthens community, encourages individual responsibility, and
allows for greater expression of individual choice and creativity.

The Essential Choice

The human species has reached a defining moment of choice between moving
ahead on a path to collective self-destruction or joining together in a
cooperative effort to navigate a dramatic turn to a new human era. The
profound cultural and institutional transformation that is needed goes up
against the short-term interests of the world's most powerful people and
institutions. The barriers to what we humans must now achieve are daunting.
By any rational calculation, the needed transformation is not politically
feasible. Yet it is essential to human survival and prosperity, which means
we must set ourselves to the task of figuring out how to make the impossible
into the inevitable.

David Korten is co-founder and board chair of YES!
<http://www.yesmagazine.org>  His latest book is The Great Turning: From
Empire to Earth Community
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1887208070?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=1887208070&adid=168QSXNMAE131M4E3QC4&> .

C 2007 YES! Magazine

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/28/3455/

 

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