Why Monetary Reform is Essential to a Viable Human Future

By Dr. David C. Korten

We live in a time of profound challenge and opportunity that calls us to align together in support of the essential monetary reform advocated by the American Monetary Institute.  The signs of global human crisis are all around us – a mounting perfect storm of climate disruption, ecological degradation, war, and extreme and ever growing inequality.

The basics are both simple and obvious. Each of these potentially terminal human crises can be traced directly to our deeply dysfunctional financial system that allows private bankers to create and allocate money to grow the fortunes of predatory billionaires in disregard of the consequences for Earth and its people. Many of you here know and understand the details of this system far better than I do. I will not presume in this brief presentation to advance your understanding of these details.

My focus will be on what we called the “big picture” when I was getting my PhD at the Stanford Business School in the 1960s. I then taught it on the faculty of the Harvard Business School for 5 ½ in the early 1970s. If you confront a problem, identify and address the cause of the systemic failure that resulted in the problem.

In the present instance, we are dealing with a profound system failure that puts survival of the human species at risk. The failure traces to the profit maximizing private banking system on which we depend to create and allocate most of the global money supply. This banking system is devoted to growing its profits by serving the financial needs of the already richest among us—thus driving ever growing economic inequality.

Research confirms that unequal societies tend to have worse outcomes in nearly every aspect of human well-being, from health to social cohesion. Beyond a certain point, more wealth for the wealthy adds nothing to societal health and happiness. Rather it erodes the social fabric.

It is truly extraordinary that we have given money such power. Most money is just a number. It has no intrinsic value. And has no equivalent in nature. It is of value only because another human offers things of real value in exchange for it, such as food, water, a place to live, their labor, or a useful idea.

For most of the human experience people lived without money—making their living directly from the land with the help of other members of their family and tribe. We now live in a world in which living without money is impossible for most people. This gives enormous power to those who have the means to create the numbers we accept as money and to determine who gets it.

In our current global system, most money is created by private banks when they issue loans created from nothing on which they profit by charging interest. It is such an obvious scam that it is extraordinary that it is rarely discussed as an issue, which is why the work of the American Monetary Institute is so important.

If you want to rule the modern world, gain personal private control of the land, water and other essentials that people depend on for their means of living. Demand payment in money that you have the power to create.

This is essentially what a small group of billionaire private bankers have managed to do through the legal mechanism of the corporation, a legal device by which the few gain ownership control of the resources of the many. They warn us of the dangers of big government, hoping we will not notice that through their control of money they largely control the big government that they condemn.

Two money system reforms are essential to a viable human future.

1. Money creation must be a transparent public process managed to serve a truly public purpose.
2. Ownership of Earth’s commons must recognize the collective nature of the commons on which the wellbeing of all of living Earth’s people depends.

To the best of current scientific knowledge, life exists, can exist, only in communities of living beings that self-organize to create and maintain the conditions essential to their own existence. Take the example of the living organism with which we are each most familiar—the human body.

Each human body is comprised of literally tens of trillions of living cells, half of them microorganisms.  With no mechanism of central control, these organisms together self-organize to create and maintain each human body, the extraordinary vessel of our individual consciousness and the instrument of our individual agency.

Within our current understanding, Earth itself is a much larger and more complex living organism (Gaia) where rock, air, water, and living beings all co-evolve in a delicate self-organizing balance. Every aspect of Earth affects every other; what happens to any member of the Earth community ultimately affects the whole.The web of life is exactly that: a web, intricately interconnected. This insight carries profound responsibility: harm to any part of our Earth family is harm to all.

The human economy is a subsystem of Earth’s economy, not the other way around. We have been under the delusion that a growing GDP means we are getting better off. But as theologian Thomas Berry pointed out years ago, to glory in a rising GDP while Earth’s life-sustaining systems deteriorate is an economic absurdity. You cannot have a thriving human economy on a collapsing natural base.

Our human wellbeing depends on the well-being of Earth. Clean air, fresh water, healthy soil, a stable climate, the diversity of species – these are the foundations of true prosperity. The numbers we call money cannot substitute for the wealth of living systems, the true source of our sustenance.

The defining economic imperative of our time is not growing the numbers we call money. It is achieving their equitable distribution and aligning their use behind securing the health of Earth and all its people.  The goal is not total equality. Rather it is to ensure everyone has enough and that financial wealth serves the community, not just the profits of private bankers and their wealthiest clients.

Studies confirm what our hearts know: people who focus their lives on money and consumption suffer higher rates of anxiety and depression. Those who find meaning in relationships in service to others report greater happiness. We experience the fullness of life through our caring bonds with loved ones and community. Through the positive rush of helping a neighbor. And through our care for nature. We flourish when we are connected – when we belong to a community that cares for us and have work that allows us to contribute our own gifts in return.

It should be self-evident that a functional financial system should serve people and planet. Financial speculation and the private creation of derivatives, crypto currencies and other artificial financial assets enrich a few at the expense of the whole.

They need to be curbed. Society’s banking institutions should prioritize financing the real economy of beneficial jobs and production.

It is not only about the banking system. We must rein in corporate power in every aspect of the economy.Through stronger antitrust enforcement to break up monopolies. Through laws that hold corporations accountable for environmental and social harm. And through restoring the principle that corporations should be chartered only to serve a public purpose. Needless to say, growing the fortunes of billionaires is NOT a public purpose.

None of these ideas are radical. They are common sense measures with historical precedents and broad public support. What often blocks them is the entrenched influence of elites benefiting from the status quo. But that influence can be suppressed when people organize in great numbers behind a unifying moral vision many of us call an Ecological Civilization grounded in the principles of the Earth Charter—humanity’s defining consensus document.

At the community level, each of us can help build the new economy of an Ecological Civilization that organizes from the bottom up. Local food movements, cooperatives, community banks, community-owned energy projects, and participatory budgeting in cities – these are ways people are creating the new systems in the shell of the old. Every time a neighborhood starts an urban garden or a city sets up a public solar utility, or a community bank, a piece of the life-centered society comes to life. The grip of billionaire power is loosened a bit more and others are inspired. Success stories spread and scale up through networks of communities learning from each other.

Every community needs local family businesses. Many communities also need larger businesses that can produce economies of scale beneficial to the community. This brings us to worker/community cooperative ownership, the proper purpose of which is to mobilize labor in the service of community wellbeing.

Government will have an essential role in assuring the commitment of business to community service. Appropriate action will include taxing excess profits, limiting executive compensation, and acquiring and restructuring businesses that are not fulfilling a truly beneficial public purpose.

One of the world’s most advanced models of worker/ community ownership is in the Basque region of Spain. The region’s cooperative businesses include the worker-owned Mondragon Corporation and its subsidiary worker cooperatives employing some 70,000 people engaged in finance, industry, retail, and knowledge. With a population of some 2.2 million people, the region exemplifies three characteristics of an Ecological Civilization:

1. Peaceful Resolution of Conflict: The people of the region resolved a major armed conflict and achieved disarmament and reconciliation through negotiation.

2. Equitable Distribution of Assets: Mondragon and related businesses eliminated poverty and achieved significant equality free of disruptive concentrations of wealth and power.

3. Environmental Health: The region maintains a healthy environment and is a leader in environmental care.

In the Mondragon cooperative, each worker—including those with management responsibilities—owns just one share and each share comes with one vote. That share can only be sold back to the cooperatively-owned corporation for purchase by a new worker-owner. Every owner thus shares in the corporation’s costs and benefits. Because shares are not available for public sale, control is rooted in the Basque community. There is no risk of takeover by private equity predators. We need far more worker and community owned businesses for which Mondragon offers an attractive model.

We do not know every step of the path ahead, but the direction is clear. As the Earth Charter reminds us “We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future.”

If we choose life – if we choose love, community, and reverence – we can avoid self-extinction of the human species and usher in an attractive and mutually beneficial future—an Ecological Civilization—of immeasurable promise. Among other essential priorities, success requires standing together to replace a money system devoted to consuming life to grow fortunes of billionaires with a money system devoted to securing the wellbeing of the living Earth and all its people.

We will prosper together in our care for life, or we will perish together in our exploitation of life to make money for the already morbidly rich. The choice is ours. That is why work of the American Monetary Institution in creating a life serving global financial system is so vitally important. Thank you.

Source

Text of presentation by Dr. David Korten at the Annual Monetary Reform Conference of the American Monetary Institute, delivered on September 19, 2025 on the AMI zoom platform. The video of the presentation can be watched here.

Selected bibliography

Korten, David C. 1995.When Corporations Rule the World. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. (Excerpt)

—–, —–. 1999. The Post-corporate World: Life after Capitalism. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

—–, —–. 2007. The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

—–, —–. 2010. Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. (Excerpt)

—–, —–. 2021. “Ecological Civilization: From Emergency to Emergence.” Winterthur, Switzerland: The Club of Rome.

—–, —–. 2024. “Eco-nomics for an Ecological Civilization”. Winterthur, Switzerland: The Club of Rome.

—–, —–. 2025. “The Federal Debt Trap: Only Public Money Can Set Us Free”. David Korten Web Site, 6 May 2025.