In its literal meaning, capitalism means rule by capital, more specifically rule by the owners of capital for their exclusive private benefit. - David Korten

Success requires leadership from all levels of society, including from people everywhere working to grow community-facilitating cultural values, institutions, and infrastructure in the places where they live. Together we need to achieve four conditions critical to the transition... 1. Earth balance. We must reduce humanity’s total environmental burden to bring us into sustainable balance with the capacity of Earth’s generative systems. This requires immediate action... 2. Equitable distribution. We must achieve an equitable distribution of wealth and power. Immediate action is required to stop the further concentration of wealth while advancing equitable cooperative ownership... 3. Life-serving technologies. We must advance technologies that strengthen rather than impair life’s regenerative capacity. Immediate action is required to roll back use of harmful technologies, including the use of toxic chemicals in agriculture and our dependence on carbon and nuclear energy.... 4. Living communities. We must rebuild relationships of people to one another and to nature to create strong, healthy, deeply democratic living communities. This will involve reducing dependence on money while encouraging sharing and mutual self-help in the places where people live... It is time to unite as families, communities, and nations in our common identity as members of an ecological civilization, with a commitment to creating the possible world of our shared human dream.

I call the next system economy a “living” economy, because its underlying design principles come from our understanding of healthy living systems.

The current system failure is thousands of years in the making and touches on every aspect of society. There is no magic-bullet solution. Nor will marginal adjustments to the current self-destructive system suffice. We must reinvent our culture and our institutions from the bottom up. The observations I share in this report are the product of my life experience, much of it living and working in Africa, Asia, and Latin America...