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Summary
Summary
The New York Times bestselling, groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve. An essential read for understanding some of the egregious abuses of power that dominate today's news.
Former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can--except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; how they lavishly reward "thought leaders" who redefine "change" in winner-friendly ways; and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss; witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors; and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity.
Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.
Author Notes
Anand Giridharadas is a writer, teacher, political analyst, and speaker, based in Brooklyn, New York. His career includes foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times (2005-2016), has written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker, an Aspen Institute fellow, on-air political analyst for MSNBC, former McKinsey analyst, and teaches journalism at New York University. He is the author of The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking, and Winner Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this provocative and passionate look at philanthropy, capitalism, and inequality, Giridharadas (The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas) criticizes market-based solutions to inequality devised by rich American do-gooders as ultimately counterproductive and self-serving. Giridharadas insists that "the idea that after-the-fact benevolence justifies anything-goes capitalism" is no excuse for "avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and a fairer distribution of power." He turns a gimlet eye on philanthropists who make the money they donate by underpaying employees; luxurious philanthropy getaways that focus more on making attendees feel good about themselves than on creating profound change; and tech companies such as Uber, which promises to empower the poor with earning opportunities, but has been accused of exploiting its workers. Giridharadas calls out billionaire venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, who opines that "sharing is caring" but refers to labor unions as "cartels," and profiles Darren Walker, who came from modest beginnings to end up president of the Ford Foundation, where his entreaties to philanthropists to acknowledge structural inequality fall mostly on deaf ears. In the end, Giridharadas believes only democratic solutions can address problems of inequality. This damning portrait of contemporary American philanthropy is a must-read for anyone interested in "changing the world." (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Today's business elite are more involved than ever in solving social problems. From poverty and disease to working conditions in the gig economy, capitalism's winners use philanthropy and win-win business ventures to achieve what government programs used to address. But what if, Giridharadas (The True American, 2014) asks, these very elites have been and continue to be the sources of many of these problems? MarketWorld is the term used for the network of wealthy, educated, cosmopolitan elites who eschew politics for private, largely unaccountable efforts to change the world. This is a very difficult subject to tackle, but Giridharadas executes it brilliantly. Through extensive interviews and research from inside this network, he lays bare the problems with its approach. This must-have title will be of great interest to readers, from students to professionals and everyone in-between, interested in solutions to today's complex problems. An exciting book club pick, Winners Take All will be the starting point of conversations private and in groups on alternatives to the status quo and calls to action. An excellent book for troubled times.--James Pekoll Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WINNERS TAKE ALL: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giridharadas. (Knopf, $26.95.) Giridharadas examines the worlds of Davos and Aspen, where an elite intent on "changing the world" hang out, emerging with a quietly scathing report on how little they actually do to make a difference when it comes to the big structural problems. They are instead the enablers of the rich and powerful. NINETY-NINE GLIMPSES OF PRINCESS MARGARET, by Craig Brown. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) A sometimes fanciful, always gossipy portrait of Queen Elizabeth's younger sister, who loved to appear rebellious and bohemian but was also intensely devoted to the privileges that accompanied royal life. THE HUSBAND HUNTERS: American Heiresses Who Married Into the British Aristocracy, by Anne de Courcy. (St. Martin's, $27.99.) A glittering account of the Gilded Age-era young women whose fortunes rescued some of England's penurious peers. THE FIGHTERS: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, by C.J. Chivers. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) In Chivers's powerful narrative of America's recent wars, soldiers who began their military service in a blaze of patriotism after 9/11 end up cynical, betrayed and often disfigured or dead. THE TRAITOR'S NICHE, by Ismail Kadare. (Counterpoint, $25.) The quest for a rebel pasha's severed head becomes a grimly comic comment in John Hodgson's translation of this brilliant and laconic 1978 Albanian novel, an allegorical fable about 20th-century authoritarianism. IF YOU SEE ME, DON'T SAY HI, by Neel Patel. (Flatiron, $24.99.) The Indian-Americans in this debut story collection are less troubled by cultural clashes than they are by the unraveling of emotions. As friendships fester, marriages combust and families fall into civilized distemper, all the ties in Patel's world unravel according to their own precise logic: none at all. FLY GIRLS, by Keith O'Brien. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) The title honors the female aviators who were hindered by the deep gender inequities of the golden age of flying. These are women few of us have heard of before; as O'Brien explains of their forgotten histories, each woman "went missing in her own way." I WILL BE COMPLETE, by Glen David Gold. (Knopf, $29.95.) In Gold's ambitious and brave memoir (which takes us only to his early 30s), just about all of the unanticipated ramifications emanate from his complex, mysterious and manipulative mother. MIRROR, SHOULDER, SIGNAL, by Dorthe Nors. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) In her sparkling novel - shortlisted for the International Man Booker - Nors trains her gaze on a woman many people would look past, a middle-aged translator learning to drive. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Choice Review
The subtitle of this book succinctly states its argument. According to Giridharadas (journalism, NYU, and a well-known speaker and author) today's ultra-rich elites present themselves as change makers, devising market solutions to pressing social and economic problems. They gather at places like the Aspen Institute and Davos to talk about social entrepreneurship and philanthropy. The effect, though, is to reinforce and solidify their own positions in a world of growing inequality. Giridaradas writes from the inside--he is himself an Aspen Institute fellow--drawing on extensive interviews with this elite business class. He is able to sympathize with the individuals he describes while remaining critical of the consequences of their strategies. This is a strength of the book but also its chief problem. For the most part, the wealthy, would-be do-gooders do not come across as scheming hypocrites, but as human beings who are at once well-meaning and self-serving. Giridharadas's core argument is that the world economy requires a fundamental structural change, but he does not lay out how this would happen. Though he has some ideas about changes he considers desirable--e.g., raising minimum wages--he offers no real program, only proclamations that the world power structure needs to be transformed in some way that will make it more egalitarian. Scholarly apparatus is sparse. Summing Up: Optional. Most appropriate for general readers, but also of interest to scholars and professionals. --Carl Leon Bankston, Tulane University
Guardian Review
The hubris and hypocrisy of the super-rich who believe they are helping the world makes for superb hate-reading Davos is no place for fighting. It is where chief executives fly to in private jets to discuss the dire consequences of climate change, where hot-money speculators deliver homilies on responsible investing, and the world's media receive every falling cliche with unctuous warmth. Yet last month it was here in Switzerland, amid the sharp shooters and roadblocks, that a very revealing skirmish broke out. At a panel devoted to "making digital globalization inclusive" (for Davos is mainly a hollow-eyed human re-enactment of the drabbest Economist editorials), computer tycoon Michael Dell was asked what he thought about a 70% tax on earnings of more than $10m a year. The very idea provoked speakers and audience to peals of laughter. What a joke, to take money away from these deserving multimillionaires! Dell, the 39th richest person in the world, replied that he and his wife already give to charity: "I feel much more comfortable with our ability ... to allocate those funds than I do giving them to the government." Who needs the imprecise squall of democracy when a man worth $33bn can decide what the masses need? He went on: "I don't think it will help the growth of the US economy. Name a country where that's worked - ever." Fervent agreement followed until economist Erik Brynjolfsson butted in, citing one country that had had such high tax rates: "The United States ... from about the 1930s to the 1960s ... and those were pretty good years for growth." Brynjolfsson is not known for his socialism and his intervention was far milder than that made two days later by historian Rutger Bregman ("Taxes, taxes, taxes ... all the rest is bullshit"), but still, the aromatic consensus had been broken. Were I Anand Giridharadas's publisher, I would broadcast that exchange as an advertisement for his latest book, in which he takes aim at his favourite targets. The elevation of business people to "leaders", whose views somehow soar above self-interest; the nose-wrinkling dismissal of messy politics; the blimpish disregard for even recent history - all are present and shown as incorrect in Winners Take All . As reporting assignments go, this calls not so much for a flak jacket as a sick bag The big questions animating this book are the ones central to western politics today: why is the state of affairs made nonsense by the economic crisis still in place? What explains both the governing class's lack of serious response to 2008's banking crash, and the vast inequality that continues in its wake? Rather than economic or political analysis, Winners Take All is a study of the alibis and strategies used by Dell and his kind to justify inertia. Giridharadas takes us inside charitable foundations and back-slapping summits to meet management consultants, greying politicians and a few of the most important names in philanthropy. His is the view from the panel discussion, the venture capitalist's boardroom and the fundraiser with its bespoke canapes. As reporting assignments go, this calls not so much for a flak jacket as a sick bag. In a Manhattan crammed with visiting dignitaries for UN week, Bill Clinton convenes a conference at which the audience is told: "Empowering girls and women is the hot new branding thing!" David Miliband gazes on as the boss of Western Union chides the prime minister of Sweden: "One of the issues in the politicians, with all due respect, Mr Prime Minister, is that you guys are voted by local people, but you're responsible for global issues." Never mind that Mr Western Union is beholden to his shareholders, it's the nation state that's parochial. Giridharadas boards a cruise ship bound for the Bahamas, doubling as a floating conference for entrepreneurs apparently hungry for social justice. Into this arena is beamed Edward Snowden, whose exposing of the US's surveillance regime led to his exile in Moscow. He talks to the assembled cruisers about the necessity of heretical thinking, before the Silicon Valley moneyman interviewing him breaks in: "So I invest in founders for a living. And I gotta tell you ... I smell a founder here ... there's probably investors waiting for you here." Witnessing such hubris and hypocrisy must have been hard on the stomach; it does, however, make superb hate-reading. Through these vignettes, Giridharadas depicts an elite he dubs MarketWorld, an international nexus of consultants and business people and centrist politicians who want "to change the world while also profiting from the status quo". Its hubs include Silicon Valley and Wall Street, its feeding stations Davos and all the other expensive talking shops. Its denizens have access to political power and millions to buy wider influence, through donating to universities and museums. In his bemused defensiveness over higher taxes, Dell was the embodiment of MarketWorld. The billionaires in this book prefer markets to governments, policies to politics, and love solutions that are win-win - which is another way of saying that they should never lose. Theirs is conservatism camouflaged in radical adjectives; change you can't believe in. In this exotic land, Giridharadas is an insider-outsider. Having spent half a chapter beating up McKinsey management consultants, he later reveals that he worked there. Pages are spent laying into TED talks, even though the author has delivered two. His wife is Priya Parker, who describes her business as helping "activists, elected officials, corporate executives, educators, and philanthropists create transformative gatherings" of precisely the kind her husband skewers in this book. As for networking, Giridharadas admits to mingling with "the ultra-rich in antler-decorated mansions overlooking the Roaring Fork Valley". Fair enough: a man's got to eat - and he might as well eat devilled eggs. Power has been put in the hands of a group that believes trade unions are merely cartels and hell is other people voting That background allows him precious access and imbues the text with a catty intimacy that is hugely enjoyable. His one-liners and storytelling zest make Giridharadas the guy who you want to hang out with on the sidelines of that earnest cocktail party. But his analysis could do with some deepening. The ugly vanity of MarketWorld may be eye-catching, but what makes it unfair is that it is bankrolled by the rest of us, through lower wages and low taxes on wealth. Simply put, we pay the billionaires to tell us what to do. What gives their demands such amplification isn't just their money, vital though that is, it is that they and their friends in government have razed many of the countervailing institutions, whether organised labour or local government. Winners Take All doesn't name it, but what it's really describing is an institutional crisis in which the political landscape has been cleared of its forces for representation and reformation. Instead, power has been put in the hands of a group that believes trade unions are merely cartels, thinkers are far inferior to "thought leaders" and hell is other people voting. Giridharadas's answer to all this is simple: a bigger and more powerful state. "The government is us," he quotes Italian philosopher Chiara Cordelli approvingly. And he is right that it is high time politics took back the ground it has lost to policy. But barely more than a line is spent acknowledging that there are plenty of times the government is not us - when it is taking away our benefits, when it is displacing us from our homes, or when it is cutting taxes for corporations while closing children's centres. Arguments aside, this is a good book whose most subtle and powerful moments come when Giridharadas finds other insiders with a hankering to be on the outside, agents of change who know that the system they work within only shortchanges us. People such as Darren Walker, the sharp-minded African American head of the Ford Foundation charity, who knows the root problem goes deeper than poverty and bad luck; it is inequality. Riding his black limousine into "the belly of the beast", a private equity firm, Walker plans how he will broach that argument, but finds himself in front of an impassive audience and resorts to a familiar vaudeville act of telling his harsh life story: born in a hospital run by a charity, raised single-handedly by his mum, working as a busboy aged 12 ... The executives respond by asking how he motivates staff. In this way, banal humiliation is heaped on a good and relatively powerful man trying to reform a system that, on all the available evidence, may not be reformable.
Kirkus Review
Give a hungry man a fish, and you get to pat yourself on the backand take a tax deduction.It's a matter of some irony, John Steinbeck once observed of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, that they spent the first two-thirds of their lives looting the public only to spend the last third giving the money away. Now, writes political analyst and journalist Giridharadas (The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, 2014, etc.), the global financial elite has reinterpreted Andrew Carnegie's view that it's good for society for capitalists to give something back to a new formula: It's good for business to do so when the time is right, but not otherwise. Moreover, business has co-opted philanthropy, such that any "world-changing" efforts come with a proviso: "if you really want to change the world, you must rely on the techniques, resources, and personnel of capitalism." Philanthropic initiatives to effect social change are no longer the province of public life but instead are private and voluntary, in keeping with free market individualism. Naturally, there's a layer of consultants and in-house vice presidents to manage all this largess, which hinges on the premise that things aren't so bad and just need to be nudged along. The author memorably calls this process "Pinkering," after the ameliorist-minded psychologist Steven Pinker. "It beamed out so many thoughts about why the world was getting better in recent years," Giridharadas writes of one initiative, "that its antennae failed to detect all the incoming transmissions about all the people whose lives were not improving, who didn't care to be Pinkered because they knew what they were seeing." So what's so bad about private giving? Answers the author, when a society elects to help, it expresses democratic values with an eye to equality, while private giving is inherently unequal, a power relation between "the giver and the taker, the helper and the helped, the donor and the recipient."A provocative critique of the kind of modern, feel-good giving that addresses symptoms and not causes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Excerpted from WINNERS TAKE ALL : A successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement. America's machine is broken. When the fruits of change have fallen on the United States in recent decades, the very fortunate have basketed almost all of them. For instance, the average pretax income of the top tenth of Americans has doubled since 1980, that of the top 1 percent has more than tripled, and that of the top 0.001 percent has risen more than sevenfold--even as the average pretax income of the bottom half of Americans has stayed almost precisely the same. These familiar figures amount to three and a half decades' worth of wondrous, head-spinning change with zero impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans. Thus many millions of Americans, on the left and right, feel one thing in common: that the game is rigged against people like them. It is no wonder that the American voting public-- like other publics around the world--has turned more resentful and suspicious in recent years, embracing populist movements on the left and right, bringing socialism and nationalism into the center of political life in a way that once seemed unthinkable, and succumbing to all manner of conspiracy theory and fake news. There is a spreading recognition, on both sides of the ideological divide, that the system is broken and has to change. Some elites faced with this kind of gathering anger have hidden behind walls and gates and on landed estates, emerging only to try to seize even greater political power to protect themselves against the mob. But in recent years a great many fortunate people have also tried something else, something both laudable and self-serving: They have tried to help by taking ownership of the problem. All around us, the winners in our highly inequitable status quo declare themselves partisans of change. They know the problem, and they want to be part of the solution. Actually, they want to lead the search for solutions. They believe that their solutions deserve to be at the forefront of social change. They may join or support movements initiated by ordinary people looking to fix aspects of their society. More often, though, these elites start initiatives of their own, taking on social change as though it were just another stock in their portfolio or corporation to restructure. Because they are in charge of these attempts at social change, the attempts naturally reflect their biases. The initiatives mostly aren't democratic, nor do they reflect collective problem-solving or universal solutions. Rather, they favor the use of the private sector and its charitable spoils, the market way of looking at things, and the bypassing of government. They reflect a highly influential view that the winners of an unjust status quo-- and the tools and mentalities and values that helped them win--are the secret to redressing the injustices. Those at greatest risk of being resented in an age of inequality are thereby recast as our saviors from an age of inequality. Socially minded financiers at Goldman Sachs seek to change the world through "win-win" initiatives like "green bonds" and "impact investing." Tech companies like Uber and Airbnb cast themselves as empowering the poor by allowing them to chauffeur people around or rent out spare rooms. Management consultants and Wall Street brains seek to convince the social sector that they should guide its pursuit of greater equality by assuming board seats and leadership positions. Conferences and idea festivals sponsored by plutocrats and big business host panels on injustice and promote "thought leaders" who are willing to confine their thinking to improving lives within the faulty system rather than tackling the faults. Profitable companies built in questionable ways and employing reckless means engage in corporate social responsibility, and some rich people make a splash by "giving back"--regardless of the fact that they may have caused serious societal problems as they built their fortunes. Elite networking forums like the Aspen Institute and the Clinton Global Initiative groom the rich to be self-appointed leaders of social change, taking on the problems people like them have been instrumental in creating or sustaining. A new breed of community-minded so-called B Corporations has been born, reflecting a faith that more enlightened corporate self-interest--rather than, say, public regulation--is the surest guarantor of the public welfare. A pair of Silicon Valley billionaires fund an initiative to rethink the Democratic Party, and one of them can claim, without a hint of irony, that their goals are to amplify the voices of the powerless and reduce the political influence of rich people like them. The elites behind efforts like these often speak in a language of "changing the world" and "making the world a better place" more typically associated with barricades than ski resorts. Yet we are left with the inescapable fact that in the very era in which these elites have done so much to help, they have continued to hoard the overwhelming share of progress, the average American's life has scarcely improved, and virtually all of the nation's institutions, with the exception of the military, have lost the public's trust. Are we ready to hand over our future to the elite, one supposedly world-changing initiative at a time? Are we ready to call participatory democracy a failure, and to declare these other, private forms of change-making the new way forward? Is the decrepit state of American self-government an excuse to work around it and let it further atrophy? Or is meaningful democracy, in which we all potentially have a voice, worth fighting for? There is no denying that today's elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory in history. By refusing to risk its way of life, by rejecting the idea that the powerful might have to sacrifice for the common good, it clings to a set of social arrangements that allow it to monopolize progress and then give symbolic scraps to the forsaken--many of whom wouldn't need the scraps if the society were working right. This book is an attempt to understand the connection between these elites' social concern and predation, between the extraordinary helping and the extraordinary hoarding, between the milking--and perhaps abetting--of an unjust status quo and the attempts by the milkers to repair a small part of it. There are many ways to make sense of all this elite concern and predation. One is that the elites are doing the best they can. The world is what it is; the system is what it is; the forces of the age are bigger than anyone can resist; the most fortunate are helping. This view may allow that this helpfulness is just a drop in the bucket, but it is something. The slightly more critical view is that this elite-led change is well-meaning but inadequate. It treats symptoms, not root causes; it does not change the fundamentals of what ails us. According to this view, elites are shirking the duty of more meaningful reform. But there is still another, darker way of judging what goes on when elites put themselves in the vanguard of social change: that it not only fails to make things better, but also serves to keep things as they are. After all, it takes the edge off of some of the public's anger at being excluded from progress. It improves the image of the winners. With its private and voluntary half-measures, it crowds out public solutions that would solve problems for everyone. For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is--above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners. In an age defined by a chasm between those who have power and those who don't, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations. The society should be changed in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve. What is at stake is whether the reform of our common life is led by governments elected by and accountable to the people, or rather by wealthy elites claiming to know our best interests. We must decide whether, in the name of ascendant values such as efficiency and scale, we are willing to allow democratic purpose to be usurped by private actors who often genuinely aspire to improve things but, first things first, seek to protect themselves. Yes, government is dysfunctional at present. But that is all the more reason to treat its repair as our foremost national priority. Pursuing workarounds of our troubled democracy makes democracy even more troubled. We must ask ourselves why we have so easily lost faith in the engines of progress that got us where we are today--in the democratic efforts to outlaw slavery, end child labor, limit the workday, keep drugs safe, protect collective bargaining, create public schools, battle the Great Depression, electrify rural America, weave a nation together by road, pursue a Great Society free of poverty, extend civil and political rights to women and African Americans and other minorities, and give our fellow citizens health, security, and dignity in old age. This book offers a series of portraits of this elite-led, market- friendly, winner-safe social change. In these pages, you will meet people who ardently believe in this form of change and people who are beginning to question it. What these various figures have in common is that they are grappling with certain powerful myths--the myths that have fostered an age of extraordinary power concentration; that have allowed the elite's private, partial, and self-preservational deeds to pass for real change; that have let many decent winners convince themselves, and much of the world, that their plan to "do well by doing good" is an adequate answer to an age of exclusion; that put a gloss of selflessness on the protection of one's privileges; and that cast more meaningful change as wide-eyed, radical, and vague. It is my hope in writing what follows to reveal these myths to be exactly that. Much of what appears to be reform in our time is in fact the defense of stasis. When we see through the myths that foster this misperception, the path to genuine change will come into view. Excerpted from Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.