By David C. Korten

Today's economic crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. However, as David Korten shows, the steps being taken to address it (including pouring trillions of dollars into bailouts for the Wall Street institutions that created the mess) do nothing to deal with the reality of a failed economic system.

It's like treating cancer with a bandage.

Korten identifies the deeper sources of the failure: Wall Street institutions that have perfected the art of creating "wealth" without producing anything of real value: phantom wealth.

Our hope does not lie with Wall Street, but with Main Street, which creates real wealth from real resources to meet real needs.

Korten outlines an agenda to give birth to a new economy: locally based, community oriented, and devoted to creating a better life for all, not simply increasing profits.

It will require courageous and imaginative changes to how we measure economic success, organize our financial system, even the very way we create money.

209 pages. Softcover. 2009.

IBK

0911