Posted on 29th November
Post
Youth Korten
By J. SUZANNE McCOY and Carol Halebian for The New York Times
Dr. David Korten, 64, has become a leading figure in the antiglobalization
movement, the diverse groups who first grabbed the public's
attention in a
big way when they disrupted world trade talks in Seattle two
years ago. But
he is no bomb thrower. (In fact, during most of the Seattle
protest, he
said, he was ill in bed and never marched in the streets.) What
distinguishes him among the movement's thinkers, friends and
critics say,
is that he has an extensive background in how business is done
in the
developing world. For three decades, after receiving his M.B.A.
and a
doctoral degree in business from Stanford, he taught at Harvard
Business
School, trained business managers in Africa and Central America
and helped
dispense financial aid in Asia. His metamorphosis into a globalization
opponent, he said in an interview, came gradually. But even
he is startled
by the before-and-after contrast. At Stanford, he said, "I was
an active
Young Republican."
In spreading his antiglobalization message, David C. Korten
envisions a
world of locally and cooperatively owned businesses. Critics
call Dr.
Korten a misguided idealist whose view of how companies should
operate is
unfair and outdated. His 1995 book, "When Corporations Rule
the World,"
contends that multinational companies behave with little accountability
and
hold tyrannical power over the future of undeveloped countries.
The book
has become a bible of the movement — protesters at a World Bank
meeting in
Washington last year carried a banner urging people to read
it. More than
100,000 copies have been sold, and it is required reading in
many
college business and political economy courses.
Largely because of that book, Worth magazine listed Dr. Korten
in its
October 2001 issue as one of the "100 people who have changed
the way
Americans think about money." Dr. Korten now devotes much of
his time to
the International Forum on Globalization, a group that helped
to organize
the Seattle protest. He also founded two groups, the Positive
Futures
Network and the People-Centered Development Forum, that advocate
changes in
global trade policy and corporate conduct. Dr. Korten spoke
about his
proposals at a conference in New York's Rutgers Presbyterian
Church a few
weeks ago, as global trade talks were under way in Qatar.
As a psychology major at Stanford, Dr. Korten said the subject
of economics
interested him because it influenced people's behavior. As a
senior, he
enrolled in a seminar called "Modern Revolutions" and decided
that poverty,
not political ideology, caused rebellions. "I concluded that
the best thing
I could do was go to business school and bring the secrets of
modern
American management to the third world," he said. "And from
there unfolded
a compulsive need to ask questions."
He established a management school in Ethiopia while he earned
his Ph.D.,
then joined the Harvard Business School faculty to work at the
Harvard-backed Central American Management Institute in Nicaragua.
In 1978,
he and his wife, Frances F. Korten, whom he had met at Stanford,
moved to
Southeast Asia and administered aid programs for the Ford Foundation
and
the United States Agency for International Development. He said
the
aggressive expansion of American corporations into impoverished
countries,
going wherever labor was cheapest, increasingly troubled him.
He recalled
looking out his office window in Manila, where he worked from
1988 to 1992,
watching as enclaves of executives flew in helicopters and clogged
the
streets with cars while the air filled with diesel exhaust.
Outside that
same window, he could watch people living in shacks atop a garbage
dump.
Those disparities were the catalyst for a life change. In 1992,
he decided
to move to New York, where he thought he could more directly
influence
industry leaders. He devoted himself to writing his book, giving
speeches
and encouraging the nascent antiglobalization movement. His
speeches,
mostly to environmental groups and antiglobalization teach-ins,
drew
increasingly large audiences, including representatives of businesses.
After a speech in St. Louis in 1997, he was invited to visit
Monsanto, a
developer of genetically modified foods and a prime target of
globalization
critics. Dr. Korten began corresponding with Robert Shapiro,
then
Monsanto's chief executive. They even sent books to each other.
But the
friendship ended there.
Dr. Korten said that he still regarded Monsanto as "one of the
most evil
corporations" and that Mr. Shapiro, pressured for profits and
a strong
stock price, had deluded himself into thinking that genetically
modified
foods would help the world's poor. Asked for his opinion of
Dr. Korten, Mr.
Shapiro said in an e-mail message,
"I think he's a thoughtful man with fine intentions and values,
but I
continue to disagree with some of his premises and most of his
conclusions."
John Cavanagh, a friend of Dr. Korten's and director of the
Institute for
Policy Studies, a research center in Washington, said Dr. Korten
had helped
to blunt a major criticism of the movement — that it lacks a
clear analysis
of globalization's consequences. "Amongst economists the line
was,
`Globalization is inevitable, get with the program,' " Mr. Cavanagh
said.
"David has helped change the debate with the argument that this
version of
globalization isn't inevitable."
But many economists reject Dr. Korten's view that globalization
is
self-destructive and is incapable of paying attention to side
effects like
environmental damage. "People were talking in the early 19th
century about
the collapse of capitalism," Dr. Alice H. Amsden, professor
of political
economy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But during
these
periods, changes are made, institutional rules are amended and
new
organizations appear that, in a sense, strengthen capitalism
for the next
period of economic growth and development."
Dr. Korten describes his vision of the future as a network of
locally and
cooperatively owned businesses. The Kortens live on Bainbridge
Island,
Wash., a spot in the Puget Sound near Seattle that Dr. Korten
calls the
"land of ecotopia." He can practice some of his suggestions
here, he said,
like buying wine from producers he knows personally. He acknowledged
his
need for some accouterments of the American economy — flying
in airplanes
and using computers and e-mail. He thinks a scaled-down economy
won't be so
dependent on them. "I have no illusion about any of the change
process
being easy," he said.
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