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She added that it was probably better to be a rabbi known to have passed through McKinsey.
So successful is the belief in business as the universal access card for making progress, helping people, and changing the world that even the White House, with its pick of the nation’s talent, under Republicans and Democrats alike, grew dependent on the special talents of consultants and financiers in making decisions about how to run the nation.
What threads through these various ideas is a promise of painlessness.
the claim of a harmony of interests is hope masquerading as description.
That question hovered over Jane Leibrock as
like so many American workers, she bore much of what was once properly considered a company’s risk.
The more these entrepreneurs waxed about changing the world, the more those facts got in their way, mocking their grandiose and self-serving claims.
advocacy that disguised itself as prophecy,
When your leader still wears the beret from his days in the rebel army, you should be afraid.
their love of the easy idea that goes down like gelato, an idea that gives hope while challenging nothing.
You analyzed the data, and then you went where the opportunity was; it didn’t matter if that chase severed you from your own community and your obligations to it.
This approach, he said, “just fails to recognize that we are attempting to solve these problems with the very tools and the very minds that constructed the problems in the first place.”
Inspire the rich to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm; inspire them to give back, but never, ever tell them to take less; inspire them to join the solution, but never, ever accuse them of being part of the problem.
Leave us alone in the competitive marketplace, and we will tend to you after the winnings are won.
that generosity is a substitute for and a means of avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and a fairer distribution of power.
Wealthy individuals needed to ask themselves, “Is the playing field on which I accumulated my wealth level and fair? Does the system privilege people like me in ways that compound my advantages?” Were the rich, as Carnegie had presented them, the transitory guardians of progress’s fruits, or were they hereditary hoarders of that progress?
When private actors move into the solution of public problems, it becomes less and less of the public’s business.
The trouble was that the world was still governed by place, and so elites whose loyalties and projects focused on the global level were essentially pulling away from democracy itself.
Frustrated citizens felt they possessed no power over the spreadsheet- and PowerPoint-wielding elites commensurate with the power these elites had gained over them—whether in switching around their hours or automating their plant or quietly slipping into law a new billionaire-made curriculum for their children’s school.
The people setting themselves the task of understanding the anger around them were precommitted to the idea that the anger had no possible basis in reason or conscious choice. They could not process people who saw the world fundamentally differently than MarketWorlders did and, misguided or not, wanted to be heard.
it allows them to avoid the duty they might otherwise feel to interact with their fellow citizens across divides, to learn about the problems facing their own communities, which might implicate them, their choices, and their privileges—as opposed to universal challenges like climate change or the woes of faraway places like Rwandan coffee plantations. In such cases, diffuseness or distance can spare one the feeling of having a finger jabbed in one’s face.
These elites were, she said, like the owner of a painting who later finds out it had been stolen.
