from YES! Magazine:
The New Economy: Design for LifeCan we design a self-correcting society?by David Korten
posted May 02, 2011
I’m sometimes called an economist because I write and speak about economic issues. The discipline for which I received my academic training, however, is organizational systems design. I view the economy through an institutional design lens.
As a Harvard Business School professor in the early 1970s, I taught the art of structuring human relationships in corporations to maximize profit. Partly, that involves getting the incentives right; it also involves culture, authority, communication flows, and a host of other influences subject to management intervention.
....(snip)....
A focus on designing economic systems to maximize private financial return has given us the Wall Street dominated system that drives a violent competition for resources; a global race to the bottom on wages, benefits, environmental standards; flagrant excesses for the few, misery for the many; and insecurity for all.
Worst of all, this system has no built in capacity to self-correct. Its decision makers are insulated from the social and environmental consequences of their decisions. Concerns for unemployment, family and community breakdown, collapsing fisheries, and melting glaciers find no place in their decisions. Indeed, the system rewards the decision makers most generously when their actions inflate financial bubbles and thereby assure eventual system collapse. In
A Short History of Financial Euphoria, Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith documents this pattern playing out in finance capitalism’s repeated cycles of boom and bust over a period of more then 360 years. ............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/the-new-economy-design-for-life
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