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Agenda For A New Economy: From Phantom Wealth To Real Wealth (2009)

by David C. Korten(Favorite Author)

3.9 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1605092894 (ISBN13: 9781605092898)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Berrett-Koehler Publishers

review 1: there have always been things i never quite got about the financial industry- like how a company could post $10 billion in earnings, but its stock prices would go down because it didn't make the $12 billion that had been predicted. it seemed more about whims than realities. or how inflation could be said to be only a few percent year after year, wages stayed low, and yet the cost of a movie ticket or a gallon of milk went up 300-400% in the same time. or what the value of money really was since it actually isn't tied to anything since coming off the gold standard. the book validated me in realizing that there wasn't anything i didn't "get." it fundamentally just doesn't make sense. what i liked about this book were the ideas of decentralizing banking/lending into loca... morel communities and generally bringing more control into communities. it is important to think about things like paying local businesses with cash so they can avoid large bank fees, shopping locally, and generally not living wastefully. i can also get behind ideas of universal health care and education, etc. though i did appreciate some historical views of the beginnings of imperialist industry and how that has carried forward to today, i admit that i skimmed through this in favor of getting to-- ok, and what do we do about it now. what i didn't like about this book is that it is too utopian for me. i don't think making all these changes is going to mean we live in a problem-free society, let's be realistic. also, i can't fully get behind what he was saying about intellectual property rights, caps on salaries (or a 90 percent tax over a certain salary), or extending retirement age (unless this is seriously balanced out with far increased vacation from what we have now!!). it did remind me to up my political activity and look again into investing in microlending, etc., so i got some good take aways from this.
review 2: The author seems very qualified, the writing was vibrant and colorful, and I think I agree with his primary argument. But I think I wanted a book that would explain how to rebuild the American economy on rational principles. This book read more like a very long op-ed piece on why to restructure the economy. I think that the author could have made a strong argument that a "Main Street economy" (while supporting human values instead of shareholder profit) is the most financially sound approach the current economic crisis. This was implied in the book, but the focus was on the ideal society a Main Street economy would support. So instead of reading like an informative book on rethinking economic principles, it read like a financial version of Ecotopia. Which is probably what the author meant to do, but wasn't what I was looking for. less

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