Uploaded March 2011 | Updated September 2026, 25 minutes ago
A sweet Truckin from the Dead with a great solo from Jerry (5:14) at the Hollywood Palladium on 9/10/72...
A sweet Truckin from the Dead with a great solo from Jerry (5:14) at the Hollywood Palladium on 9/10/72...
![Capitalism & the Illusion of Money - David Korten
Former Harvard Business School Professor David Korten explains how the capitalist economic system is based on the illusion that money is real, when in truth its not. Actual capital exists within each of us, the things we create together; in families, cultures, communities and our direct relationship to the land around us.
David Korten is author of Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth https://www.amazon.com/Change-Story-Future-Living-Economy-ebook/dp/B00NJ2HI92
This videoo is an excerpt from: David Korten - Creating a Life-Centered Economics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N58anvKnU70
Partial video transcript:
The term capital is one of the major reasons were unable to have an intelligent conversation about the economy. I know at business school you use the [same] terms: resources, assets, and capital [interchangeably].
None of those tell you whether the person whose using the term is talking about a real resource like land, a building, technology or human skills. Anything necessary to a productive life. Or whether they are simply talking about money, which properly understood is nothing but an accounting chit.
You think about it, there is nothing outside the human mind that can recognize [money]. Its totally intangible. And the fascinating thing is we organize our economy around the idea that money is the ultimate constraint. Isnt that odd?
Because as we all see, if youre paying attention, the federal reserve can create it with a key stroke, trillions of dollars. Or the markets inflated and it goes away, trillions of dollars just disappear overnight. Real capital doesnt disappear, instantly...
THAT is part of a process, of reducing the whole of society, into a condition of slavery. You know, theres different levels of slavery, some is more tolerable than others, but it is essentially different forms of involuntary servitude.
And the kind of situation were in currently where people are desperate for any kind of job they can get in order to get money to be able to have access to the real assessts that corporations increasingly own...
Were told by the World Bank & IMF that the market system, capitalism, is eliminating global poverty. If you take that apart, the development process - the movement of capitalism (corporate control) into the economies of poor countries was a process of pushing people off the land, the means by which they created their livelihood, without money.
But many of them lived very well in terms of a healthy diet, strong families and communities, secure shelter. But they had no money. Well, some people claim they really werent poor, until development pushed them off of the farms, into the factories, into the itinerant [industrial] agricultural workforce and left them dependent on money.
And then the World Bank comes in and says look at this were ending poverty. We got people now earning more than a dollar and half a day. So theyre better off.
You begin to get into this framework and you see whats happening with the whole global [economic] system. So part of this regaining control is reducing our dependence on the market economy.
Youth going back to the land, growing their own food. Young couples going back and taking care of their young children, cooking their own meals. Things that we do as a family to reduce our dependence on money.
see also:
David Korten: Capitalisms Threat to Democracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWDn6vQJKE8
David Korten - Creating a Life-Centered Economics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N58anvKnU70
From the model of domination (and love of money) to the community of life (David Korten & Earth Charter) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvteeD_lsj8
Thom Hartmann: Conversations with Great Minds - David Korten, The Great Turning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWjK9xExeyI
Taking Back Our Lives from the Wall Street Mafia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BQeIDOX1lY Capitalism & the Illusion of Money - David Korten](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6f0Zhnf1T68/mqdefault.jpg)









