Lighting the Way to a New Economy by David Korten... http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/ligh...

Lighting the Way to a New Economy

The keynote address I delivered to the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies
(BALLE) in Charleston, NC on May 22, 2010 on the theme “Lighting the Way to a
New Economy.”
by David Korten
posted May 31, 2010

What a delight to be here in beautiful, sunny, historic Charleston

for this amazing BALLE conference Lighting the Way to a New Economy.

Congratulations to Michelle Long for putting together a fantastic new BALLE

leadership team with a clear plan to carry forward our mission to catalyze,
strengthen and connect networks of locally owned independent businesses dedicated
to building strong Local Living Economies. Our Conference theme, and my focus this
morning, is on the BALLE vision that our mission serves. Listen carefully. This is
serious. We seek:

Within a generation, a global system of human-scale, interconnected Local Living

Economies that function in harmony with local ecosystems, meet the basic needs of
all people, support just and democratic societies, and foster joyful community life.

You may notice that this is a bit different from the greed-driven, money-centered,
unjust, unsustainable, undemocratic, and predatory Wall Street ruled economic
system we now have, which is why I’m so proud of being part of this organization.

As you know from your own experience, the work we are doing together is incredibly
exciting and fun. It brings us into association with the world’s most thoughtful,
creative, loving, and generous people. Present company is a great example. It is also
serious work, because the institutions of the old economy threaten our viability as a
species. It is profoundly spiritual work, because it is about re-establishing our
connection to community and Earth.

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The actualization of our BALLE vision requires a profound transformation of cultural

values, institutional power, and our ways of living. We must shift the economic
system’s defining value from money to life, its locus of decision-making power from
global corporations and financial markets to local people and communities, and its
defining purpose from growing profligate consumption for the few to supporting
healthy, joyful living for everyone.

Our future depends on displacing this defective Old Economy system with a New
Economy that self organizes toward ecological balance, equitable distribution, and
living democracy.

Ours is not your standard Chamber of Commerce agenda. BALLE means business,
but we are business with a difference. We launched BALLE in 2001 around four big
ideas:

1. First, business exists to serve the community. We believe that a healthy

economy is comprised of living enterprises in the business of contributing to
the creation of living community wealth. A living enterprise treats profit as a
means and a reward—not a defining purpose.
2. Second, we believe that ownership matters. Ownership is power and the
self-defined interests of those who own the enterprise will determine its
purpose. Local owners who have a direct engagement in the enterprise as
employees, customers, suppliers, and members of the community it serves are
living owners who naturally seek a living return, which includes the benefits of
living in a vibrant caring community with a healthy ecosystem.
By contrast, absentee owners whose only gain from the enterprise is financial
generally have a very different perspective, which is why there is little, if any,
place for publicly traded corporations in a living economy—or in BALLE. Our
next speaker, Marjorie Kelly pointed out in her seminal book The Divine Right
of Capital the anomaly of the assumption that a publicly traded corporation
should be managed for the sole benefit of absentee owners who contribute
virtually nothing to its success.
3. Third, we believe the individual living enterprise is most likely to prosper and
contribute to community wealth building when it functions as part of a local
living economy comprised of like-minded living enterprises that function
together as a cooperative system.
4. Fourth, we believe economic transformation is best advanced through a
process of emergence and displacement—a concept from forest ecology. We are
building the new living economy from the bottom up through citizen action to
give people new choices as to where they shop, work, and invest that better
align with their true values, aspirations, and well-being. In so doing, we
unleash the creative life energy of the community and accelerate the
transition from old to new economic values and old to new economic
institutions and relationships. That is the theory, and we see it affirmed by
what is happening in BALLE communities everywhere every day.

The values and institutions of the Old Economy drive it to self-organize toward

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accelerating economic instability, environmental destruction, concentration of

wealth, and political corruption. Our future depends on displacing this defective Old
Economy system with a New Economy system defined by new values and institutions
that self organizes toward ecological balance, equitable distribution, and living
democracy.

To achieve Ecological Balance requires that we reduce aggregate human

consumption to bring our species into balance with Earth’s biosphere. To reduce
aggregate consumption while meeting the material needs of all the world’s people, we
need a more Equitable Distribution of Earth’s real living wealth, which in turn can
be achieved and maintained only through Living Democracy, a process of active
bottom up popular economic and political participation that goes far beyond the
ballot box.

It is clear that no single organization is going to achieve such an audaciously

ambitious agenda on its own. The good news is we are not alone. There are far more
organizations contributing to this agenda than I could possibly name. Those with
which BALLE is developing cooperative associations include the New Economy
Working Group, the New Economy Network, Transitions Towns, YES! Magazine,
Green America, the American Sustainable Business Council, B-Corp, the Institute for
Policy Studies, the New Rules Project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the
American Independent Business Association, and Business for Shared Prosperity.
Each of these organizations is making its distinctive contribution to the larger vision.

The larger change strategy to which we are all contributing has three primary
elements: first, change the cultural stories that frame our understanding of the
nature and purpose of the economy and its defining institutions. Second, create a
new economic reality from the bottom up. And third, change the rules of the game to
support ecological balance, equitable distribution, and living democracy rather than
environmental destruction, wealth concentration, and political corruption. Let’s
take each of these elements one at a time.

I give a lot of attention to changing cultural stories in my role as board chair of

YES! Magazine, because changing the culture’s defining stories is central to our
YES! mission. We have observed that every transformational social movement
begins with an idea that spreads through a conversation to challenge a prevailing
cultural story and ultimately displace it with a new story of unrealized possibility.
The civil rights movement changed the story on race. The environmental movement
changed the story about the human relationship to nature. The women’s movement
changed the story on gender. Economic transformation depends in part on changing
the prevailing stories about the nature of wealth, the purpose of the economy, and
the possibilities of our human nature.

Fix the Economy, Not Wall Street

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Why regulate a broken system when we can build a better one?

BALLE contributes to changing the economic story by creating a new economic

reality of bioregional living economies from the bottom up. Creating the new
reality is our primary work. Communities that sustain themselves within the means
of their regional ecosystems have no need for war to expropriate the resources of
their neighbors and have significant incentive to maintain the health and vitality of
their natural systems. The work includes reorienting land-use patterns and
transportation systems to reduce auto dependence by concentrating population in
walkable, energy-efficient, multi-strata communities; retrofitting buildings for
energy efficiency; and rebuilding local productive capacities based on closed-loop
production and consumption systems that reduce long-distance shipping, eliminate
waste, increase energy efficiency and build local self-reliance in the production of
food, energy, and other basic essentials.

As BALLE networks live the New Economy into being, we change the story in a very
material way, while simultaneously creating a political base to support the third
element of the strategy, changing the rules of the economic game.

Current law and public policies at local, national, and global levels consistently favor
the Wall Street economy over the Main Street economy. Changing the rules to favor
Main Street will require effective political mobilization, a process to which
responsible businesses contribute important moral authority. As BALLE, we so far
have studiously avoided political engagement for very good reasons that I support.
Our issues, however, are ultimately political issues relating to the distribution of
power between Wall Street and Main Street. Eventually we will have to come to
terms with that reality by engaging the politics of policy change. We must begin
informing ourselves on the defining New Economy policy issues.

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