Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

their approaches were less about what they wanted to take down or challenge and more about the ventures they wanted to start up, she said. Many of them believed there was more power in building up what was good than in challenging what was bad.

her fellow consultants’ workaholism was out of step with that dullness. They worked as though they were solving the urgent problems they had been pitched on fixing but weren’t.

many domains lack confidence in their own methodologies and are often desperate to inject business thinking into their work. 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.

To take on a problem is to make it your own, and to gain the right to decide what it is not and how it doesn’t need to be solved.

If you think of the world as an engineering problem, a dashboard of dials you can turn and switches you can toggle and thereby make everything optimal, then you don’t always register the voices of people who see a different world—one of people and systems that guard what is theirs and lock others out.

(It goes without saying, for example, that if hedge funders hadn’t been enormously creative in dodging taxes, the income available for foreign aid would have been greater.)

all are about groups of people working together. And so we were, like, if we really could build a universal piece of software that could make everyone in the world who’s trying to do positive things 5 percent faster, right?—I guess we’ll also make terrorists 5 percent faster—but on the whole, we think that that’s going to be really, really net-positive.”

America doesn’t have a problem of lagging productivity so much as a problem of the gains from productivity being captured by elites.

Very few people are willing to make a big financial sacrifice to do good,” he said. “Look at millennials. The majority of millennials want to have a job with meaning, but they’re not willing to sacrifice having a good income for it. I do not blame them. I might feel the same way; it’s very easy to feel that way.

Often, when people set out to do the thing they are already doing and love to do and know how to do, and they promise grand civilizational benefits as a spillover effect, the solution is oriented around the solver’s needs more than the world’s—the win-wins, purporting to be about others, are really about you.

A more sinister interpretation is that business deserves to benefit from any attempt to better the condition of the world.

There are still winners and losers, the powerful and the powerless, and the claim that everyone is in it together is an eraser of the inconvenient realities of others.

When your leader still wears the beret from his days in the rebel army, you should be afraid.

“Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe,” he has written. “No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.”

America is more interested than ever in the problem of inequality and social fracture—and more dependent than ever on explainers who happen to be in good odor with billionaires.

“In the face of injustice, thinking about the perpetrator fuels anger and aggression,” he wrote. “Shifting your attention to the victim makes you more empathetic, increasing the chances that you’ll channel your anger in a constructive direction. Instead of trying to punish the people who caused harm, you’ll be more likely to help the people who were harmed.”

help the public see problems as personal and individual dramas rather than collective and systemic ones.

things that happened in the quiet of personal life, and yet happened over and over again at the scale of the system, and happened because of forces that no individual was powerful enough to counteract alone—that these things had to be seen as and acted on politically, grandly, holistically, and, above all, in the places where the power was.

The feminists wanted us to look at a vagina and zoom out to see Congress.

“Somehow in being efficient and being clever and being productive, people thought they had the license to just stop thinking about the human beings and the well-being of everybody else in the system.”

Justice demands universal participation. Thus, while social action may involve the provision of goods and services in some form, its primary concern must be to build capacity within a given population to participate in creating a better world. Social change is not a project that one group of people carries out for the benefit of another.

Walker had broken what in his circles were important taboos: 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.

There was a time, as the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy has observed, when we loved “public” enough to place our most elevated hopes in republics, and when “private” reminded us of its cousins “privation” and “deprived.” An achievement of modernity has been its gradual persuasion of citizens to expand the circle of their concern beyond family and tribe, to encompass the fellow citizen.

“Many progressives still believe in a role for government that is pretty fundamental, but they have lost their faith in the capacity to achieve it, and they’ve in many cases lost the language for talking about it.”