Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

(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.)

It was an inspiring vision, notable for its appropriation of “collective action”—a term that traditionally connoted unions and movements and other forms of citizens making common cause in the public sphere. The vision reflected a bitter truth: 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.

She explained how, like so many American workers, she bore much of what was once properly considered a company’s risk. If the company was able to secure many massages for her, she could make $18 an hour or so, excluding tips. If the company didn’t get a lot of bookings, her pay dropped to minimum wage and her hours might be cut back—the way so many Americans were now employed. In some two-week pay periods, she had made $700; in others, she had made $90.

“Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function,” about how the thought of money can be psychologically damaging when you are poor. The study found that going up to poor people in a mall and asking them a hypothetical question about money, such as whether to make an expensive repair to an imaginary car, could drop their IQ on a subsequent test by 13 points relative to people of similar means not reminded of money, a plunge comparable to the effect of being an alcoholic or losing a night’s sleep.)

Yet there was no denying that as they chewed away, these technologists were also partly responsible for prying inequality as unsustainably wide as it had gotten. (It was no accident that the city they had adopted, San Francisco, had become perhaps the most cruelly unequal of American cities, with less and less space and chance for ordinary people to make a life.) Many of them had clamored for the dismantling of systems designed, among other things, to protect equality, such as labor unions, zoning regulations, or the laws that assured job security and benefits for workers.

“The way things are structured today are not going to be relevant to what the reality is going to be.” Longer lives for rich people were just something that happened to be coming down the pipe. Not so much a better health care system for all.

The characteristic that world-changers have in common, Pishevar said, is a willingness to fight for the truth. It had nothing to do with their being more luckily born than you, unburdened by racial and gender discrimination and with greater access to seed capital from family and friends. It was that they were braver, bolder than you—some might say ruthless—willing to take on power, no matter the cost. Citing Travis Kalanick of Uber and Elon Musk of Tesla, he said, “They are most comfortable in the uncomfortable places. What that means is, they’re very comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. And most of us want to just be kumbaya, everything’s great, I’m happy, you’re happy, we’re good, besties, BFFs—and it’s like, ‘No. Fuck that. Let’s challenge each other. What’s going on here? What is the truth?’ When things get uncomfortable, the reason it’s getting uncomfortable is because there’s a conflict between something that’s true and something that’s not true.

Here was a leading investor in a company, Uber, that had sought to shatter democratically enacted regulations and evade the unions that have a record of actually, and not just rhetorically, fighting for the little guy, and he was proudly portraying himself as the one who was truly fighting for the people against the corrupt power structure.

A group of drivers had sued Uber, as well as its rival Lyft, in federal court, seeking to be treated as employees under California’s labor laws. Their case was weakened by the fact that they had signed agreements to be contractors not subject to those laws. They had accepted the terms and conditions that cast each driver as an entrepreneur—a free agent choosing her hours, needing none of the regulatory infrastructure that others depended on. They had bought into one of the reigning fantasies of MarketWorld: that people were their own miniature corporations. Then some of the drivers realized that in fact they were simply working people who wanted the same protections that so many others did from power, exploitation, and the vicissitudes of circumstance.

The judge was suggesting that the various ways in which Uber monitored, tracked, controlled, and gave feedback on the service of its drivers amounted to the “functioning of power,” even if the familiar trappings of power—ownership of assets, control over an employee’s time—were missing. The drivers weren’t like factory workers employed and regimented by a plant, yet they weren’t independent contractors who could do whatever they pleased. They could be fired for small infractions. That is power.

Some in the Valley have become downright glib about the leveling bias of technology. “Thanks to Airbnb,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says, “now anyone with a house or apartment can offer a room for rent. Hence, income inequality reduced.” Investors like Andreessen, according to this view, are just like the Occupy movement, but with bigger houses and clearer results.

David Heinemeier Hansson is the cofounder of a Chicago-based software company called Basecamp, a successful but modest business that stayed relatively small and avoided the lure of Silicon Valley and of trying to swallow the world. “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.”

The new winners of the age might well have participated in the writing of a new social contract for a new age, a new vision of economic security for ordinary people in a globalized and digitized world. But as we’ve seen, they actually made the situation worse by seeking to bust unions and whatever other worker protections still lingered and to remake more and more of the society as an always-on labor market in which workers were downbidding one another for millions of little fleeting gigs.

As America’s level of inequality spread to ever more unmanageable levels, these MarketWorld winners might have helped out. Looking within their own communities would have told them what they needed to know. Doing everything to reduce their tax burdens, even when legal, stands in contradiction with their claims to do well by doing good.

As life expectancy declined among large subpopulations of Americans, winners possessed of a sense of having arrived might have chipped in. They might have taken an interest in the details of a health care system that was allowing the unusual phenomenon of a developed country regressing in this way, or in the persistence of easily preventable deaths in the developing world. They might not have thought of themselves at all, given how long they were likely to live because of their tremendous advantages. “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer,” Bill Gates has said.

We live in an era in which it is remarkably easy, by historical standards, to build a platform like Uber or Airbnb. Yet for all this ease, the big platforms tend to be owned by small cliques of investors like Shervin Pishevar and Chris Sacca, run for their benefit, and given to extracting as much value from workers as they can, at very low prices. If it is so easy to build platforms these days, Scholz wondered, why couldn’t workers and customers create their own platforms?

Drezner starts out by defining two distinct kinds of thinkers, who share in common a desire to develop important ideas and at the same time reach a broad audience. One of these types, the dying one, is the public intellectual, whom Drezner describes as a wide-ranging “critic” and a foe of power; she perhaps stays “aloof from the market, society, or the state,” and she proudly bears a duty “to point out when an emperor has no clothes.” The ascendant type is the thought leader, who is more congenial to the plutocrats who sponsor so much intellectual production today.

Cuddy was still Cuddy, was still a strong feminist, was still a scholar and dangerously equipped foe of sexism. She remained better qualified than most people on earth to explain why women weren’t born feeling powerless but had that feeling implanted in them. But she had pulled a punch in her talk, leaving out the critic-style utterances and making a pleasant, constructive, actionable, thought-leaderly case, and the world had rewarded her by listening.

Some years ago, another heavyweight of thought leadership, Malcolm Gladwell, who, like Duhigg (and unlike many thought leaders), had managed to retain social respectability, wrote a long “disclosure” note on his website grappling with the complications of wearing his “two hats” as a writer and a speaker.

The risk, which the thought leader may or may not acknowledge, is that you change the nature of the problem by that act of zooming. By framing it as a problem for their daughter, you shrink the issue. “There’s this problem where people don’t generalize beyond their daughter, because their daughter is different from other girls,” Cuddy said. “They call it subtyping.” It is the age-old phenomenon of the racist who says, “My black friend is different.”

It is no accident that thought leaders, whose speaking engagements are often paid for by MarketWorld, whose careers are made by MarketWorld, are encouraged to put things in that way. To name a problem involving a rich man’s daughter is to stir his ardor. To name a problem involving everyone’s daughter, a problem whose solution might involve the sacrifice of privilege and the expenditure of significant resources, may inspire a rich man to turn away.

What the thought leaders offer MarketWorld’s winners, wittingly or unwittingly, is the semblance of being on the right side of change. The kinds of changes favored by the public in an age of inequality, as reflected from time to time in some electoral platforms, are usually unacceptable to elites. Simple rejection of those types of changes can only invite greater hostility toward the elites. It is more useful for the elites to be seen as favoring change—their kind of change, of course. Take, for example, the question of educating poor children in a time of declining social mobility. A true critic might call for an end to funding schools by local property taxes and the creation, as in many advanced countries, of a common national pool that funds schools more or less equally. What a thought leader might offer MarketWorld and its winners is a kind of intellectual counteroffer—the idea, say, of using Big Data to better compensate star teachers and weed out bad ones.

One means of enforcement is the preference these days for thinkers who remind winners of their victorious selves, Giussani said. A critic in the traditional mold is often a loser figure—a thorn, an outside agitator, a rumpled cynic. The rising thought leaders, even though their product is ideas, are less like that and more like sidekicks of the powerful—buying parkas in the same Aspen stores, traveling the same conference circuit, reading the same Yuval Noah Harari books, getting paid from the same corporate coffers, accepting the same basic consensus, observing the same intellectual taboos.

Everybody thinks the same way.” In his world, he said, that meant an unspoken consensus (widespread but not total) on certain ideas: Progressive views are preferable to conservative ones; globalization, though choppy, is ultimately a win-win-win-win; most long-term trends are positive for humanity, making many supposed short-term problems ultimately inconsequential; diversity and cosmopolitanism and the free flow of human beings are always better than the alternatives; markets are the most realistic way to get things done.

Of course, it wasn’t only curators and arbiters like him who protected their own worldview and shut out others. It was also the elite audiences who heard only what they wanted to hear. He gave the example of Steven Pinker’s popular TED talk on the decline of violence over the course of history, based on his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker is a respected professor of psychology at Harvard, and few would accuse him of pulling his punches or yielding to thought leadership’s temptations. Yet his talk became a cult favorite among hedge funders, Silicon Valley types, and other winners. It did so not only because it was interesting and fresh and well argued, but also because it contained a justification for keeping the social order largely as is.

Giussani had heard rich men do this kind of thing so often that he had invented a verb for the act: They were “Pinkering”—using the long-run direction of human history to minimize, to delegitimize the concerns of those without power. There was also economic Pinkering, which “is to tell people the global economy has been great because five hundred million Chinese have gone from poverty to the middle class. And, of course, that’s true,” Giussani said. “But if you tell that to the guy who has been fired from a factory in Manchester because his job was taken to China, he may have a different reaction. But we don’t care about the guy in Manchester. So there are many facets to this kind of ideology that have been used to justify the current situation.”

As the experts sank into red chairs around the leather-covered table, they turned their attention to the three wall-mounted television screens, from which beamed a tool that has proven essential to MarketWorld’s conquest of social problem-solving: Microsoft PowerPoint.

At McKinsey, he realized, he was expected to operate very differently. “Some months later,” he said, “I’m sitting next to the chief executive of a very significant business in Australia, and I’m expected to have a point of view and an opinion—a Day One hypothesis about this problem that we’re talking about.” Instead of listening, absorbing, trying to decipher slowly and respectfully the dynamics of the space one had entered, the high-flying, high-priced consultant was expected to jump in and know things. And even a consultant like Hinton, trained in music and expert in western Mongolian love songs, could be expected to do this, because of the protocols that McKinsey taught its consultants. They offered a powerful way of stepping into a world you didn’t know and reconstituting its reality so that the solution became more obvious to you than it was to the client’s native executives. The protocols allowed for a strange kind of earned presumptuousness. Equipped with a special way of chopping up problems, parsing data, and arriving at answers, the consultant constructed authority. His job was, as Hinton put it, “the bringing to bear and the championing of the religion of facts—incontrovertible, scientific, unemotional, unencumbered-by-people facts.”

Hinton learned the McKinsey vernacular of the protocols. In the book The McKinsey Mind, by Ethan Rasiel, the firm’s protocols are distilled: Consultants first find the “business need,” or the basic problem, based on evaluating the company and its industry. Then they “analyze.” This step requires “framing the problem: defining the boundaries of the problem and breaking it down into its component elements to allow the problem-solving team to come up with an initial hypothesis as to the solution.”

Even though Hinton could seem to be an archetype of what Ramdas was condemning, he would come to criticize the great business conquest that he acknowledged being part of and at the same time wanted to escape. He called it “the Trying-to-Solve-the-Problem-with-the-Tools-That-Caused-It issue.” The spread of these protocols was, he said, a “continuation of the colonial, imperial arrogance of the enlightened white man with money and science, and noble and benevolent intentions, who will solve these problems.”

“The capitalist system is under siege,” Porter and Kramer wrote, in a fair impression of a nineteenth-century manifesto. Business was being “criticized as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems.” Companies were “widely thought to be prospering at the expense of their communities.” And who was to blame? “A big part of the problem lies with companies themselves,” they wrote. And what they blamed in the companies was “an outdated, narrow approach to value creation.” Companies had become too focused on “optimizing short-term financial performance.”

People knew the old ways of doing business weren’t working. People wanted new ways. “So it’s a question of articulating what’s the ‘should’ rather than what’s the ‘not,’ ” he said. This reluctance toward the “not” was understandable for a man still very much of MarketWorld. But Porter’s ideas on the “not” seemed of greater import, because if it was obvious to millions outside MarketWorld that the business protocols of the last generation had caused so many of the problems the world now confronted, it was, willfully, one suspects, not yet obvious to many within it. Perhaps hearing it from Michael Porter would undercut the plausibility of their denial.

“One of the fundamental challenges of private equity is so much of what they are about is efficiency and extracting value from their portfolio companies. And what that translates into is generating more productivity with less expense. So, basically, firing people, laying people off,” he said. “We know the productivity of the last twenty years has been not to the benefit of workers. Workers’ income is flat.” Those resources were “extracted,” he said, and now show up as returns for firms like KKR. Some of that money will end up in charity, soothing the wounds it helped to cut.

“We were told by his nurses and office staff that the best way to capture his attention and develop our relationship was through junk food,” the drug reps noted in a memo disclosed by STAT. The reps were swift to act on the advice. An Abbott rep showed up the following week, according to STAT, bearing a box of donuts and other treats. The sweets had been specially arrayed to spell the word “OxyContin.” This time, the reps got the ear of the doctor. “Every week after that, the Abbott sales personnel visited the doctor to ask him to switch at least three patients to OxyContin from other painkillers,” STAT reported.

Indeed, as CGI developed, it brought together a growing number of people interested in “commandeering the role of government”: investors, entrepreneurs, social innovators, activists, entertainers, philanthropists, nonprofit executives, protocol-equipped consultants, and others, who came to brainstorm new double-bottom-line funds, plot against malaria, and also, since they were in town and so was everyone else, cut their own deals. And with every passing year, their growing presence seemed to shift the center of gravity of UN Week.

Clinton had as a young man gone to Yale Law School, and for decades afterward he pursued the improvement of the world through the instrument of politics and the law. He had embraced a liberalism that was, in the words of the writer Nathan Heller, a “systems-building philosophy,” whose revelation was “that society, left alone, tended toward entropy and extremes, not because people were inherently awful but because they thought locally.” Private individuals couldn’t be relied on to see the big picture of their society, Heller writes, but “a larger entity such as government could.” When he started in public office, Clinton believed public problems were best solved through public service and collective action. During his White House years, though, and even more decisively afterward, he had been won over by the theory that it was preferable to solve problems through markets and partnerships among entities private and public, which would find areas of common cause and work together on win-win solutions.

If you worked for a consumer products company and committed to making water filters available to millions, or a foundation that committed to restore some hearing to hundreds of thousands, you might be invited to come up to the CGI stage. There Bill Clinton would stand beside you and read your commitment to the room and praise you. This moment would become, among the doing-well-by-doing-good set, the coveted capstone to a career: People who were influential and/or rich but relatively unknown would bask in the celebrity-like glow. It was also a good way to get your face before a lot of rich and powerful people if, say, you were seeking investors for your new fund. If you owned a plane and had a lot more money where that charitable commitment came from, as the Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra did, you could soon find yourself trotting the planet with Bill Clinton as your door-opener and bro. You would help him with his foundation, and he might let you into his inner circle, and being in his inner circle might benefit you the next time you bid on a mining project.

This general approach to change jibed with what Clinton had stood for while in power: the championing of globalization, the embrace of markets, compassion, the declared end of labor/capital conflict, the promise of the rich and poor rising together—the insistence that loosened regulations good for Wall Street would also be good for Main Street; the marketing of trade deals craved by large corporations as being ideal for workers. The country was two months away from a referendum on Clintonism.

Hillary Clinton had beaten Bernie Sanders, who spoke of putting the “billionaire class” in their place in order to make the working class thrive, whereas Clinton had spoken of wanting everyone to do better. Now she found herself up against the ultimate win-losey opponent, though this time of the race-baiting, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist sort. Donald Trump had harnessed an intuition that those people who believed you could crusade for justice and get super-rich and save lives and be very powerful and give a lot back, that you could have it all and then some, were phonies. He had harnessed these feelings, to the bafflement of many, despite embodying the pseudo-concern he decried.

Indeed, other public-private world-changing events in its mold, if not remotely at its scale, had sprouted across the city, growing more numerous every year: a meeting called Make a Difference, Invest with Impact; the GODAN Summit, inviting you to “Join the Open Data Revolution to end global hunger”; another called Leveraging the SDGs for Inclusive Growth at George Soros’s foundations (the SDGs being the new Sustainable Development Goals); a meeting on “sustainable finance” at HSBC; the Concordia Summit, where “thought leaders and innovators” meet to “examine the world’s most pressing challenges and identify avenues for collaboration,” sponsored by Coca-Cola and J.P. Morgan; and, courtesy of sponsors Citi, Mars, and SABMiller, an event called Business Collaborating to Deliver the SDGs; the Africa Alternative Investment Intensive Forum; Catalyzing Climate Change Innovation Through Charitable and Impact Investment; a networking event called Scaling the Clean Economy, hosted at the international law firm of Baker McKenzie; the U.S.-Africa Business Forum, convened by Bloomberg Philanthropies; and the Every Woman Every Child Private Sector-Innovation high-level luncheon.

The Social Good Summit was another of these private world-changing conclaves, a two-day conference bringing together “a dynamic community of global leaders and grassroots activists to discuss solutions to the greatest challenges of our time.” Held at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, it promised that its attendees would “unite to unlock the potential of technology to make the world a better place.” The mingling of public and private was everywhere at this event, as at so many others. The summit was sponsored by Target, Nike, and the Taco Bell Foundation, but the M&M’s found in the Digital Media Lounge were emblazoned with little icons representing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals—a major theme of UN Week that year. Before things got under way, there was a brief moment of silence to reflect on Alan Kurdi, a drowned Syrian boy who had seized the world’s attention: a spur to recall the refugee crisis. Then there was a flurry of business-speak: “In order to reach the world that we want by 2030, collaboration and co-design are key.” One also learned that “the Taco Bell Foundation believes that young people need to dream big.”

MarketWorlders were waking up to the anger. The events of 2016 had made it “the global elite’s annus horribilis,” in the words of Niall Ferguson, a Harvard historian, a preeminent and lavishly paid thought leader, and an esteemed member of the globalist tribe. He wrote in the Boston Globe of how he and his peers had laughed at Donald Trump in January in Davos, only to see him claim the Republican nomination; and then, some months later, ricocheting among Aspen, Lake Como, and Martha’s Vineyard, had failed to take seriously the campaign to sever Britain from the European Union, only to see it succeed. The world’s elites were being revolted against, and the revolts perhaps had something to do with how disconnected they were from the realities of others. Ferguson argued that his tribe of “rootless cosmopolitans” had no choice but to agree with this comment from the German finance minister: “More and more, people don’t trust their elites.”

In New York in the run-up to UN Week, this mistrust had hung over a number of dinners, salons, panel discussions, and board meetings in preparation for the upcoming confabs. At these occasions, the question being asked was: Why do they hate us? The “they” were the rootless cosmopolitans’ less-rarefied fellow citizens, who in one place after another were gravitating to nationalism, demagogy, and resentful exclusion—and rejecting some of the elites’ most cherished beliefs: borderlessness, market cures for all diseases, inevitable technological progress, benign technocratic stewardship. Some of the elites believed that their beautiful dream had to be reexplained to the people. The vision of One World, open borders, technological progress, rule by data, MarketWorld supremacy—this was all part of the right vision wrongly sold. They hadn’t marketed globalization and open borders and trade with enough passion. They hadn’t properly sanded the rough edges of change, with things like job retraining for those displaced.

But when it came to Clinton’s solution, it sounded a lot like the model to which he was already committed: “The only answer is to build an aggressive, creative partnership involving all levels of government, the private sector, and non-government organizations to make it better.” In other words, the only answer is to pursue social change outside of traditional public forums, with the political representatives of mankind as one input among several, and corporations having the big say in whether they would sponsor a given initiative or not. The swelling populist anger, of course, was directed in part at the very elites he had sought to convene, on whom he had gambled his theory of post-political problem-solving, who had lost the trust of so many millions of people, making them feel betrayed, uncared for, and scorned. What people were rejecting in the United States, Britain, Hungary, and elsewhere was, in their view, rule by global elites who put the pursuit of profit above the needs of their neighbors and fellow citizens. These were elites who seemed more loyal to one another than to their own communities; elites who often showed greater interest in distant humanitarian causes than in the pain of people ten miles to the east or west. 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 slip...

“Argentina, as you know, President, has suffered decades of populism,” Macri began. He framed the victory of his pro-business campaign as a collective decision that Argentines “deserve to live better. We wanted to be part of the world. We wanted to cut with isolism.” He knew his audience was interested in making the world a better place, so he decided to focus his remarks on his plan to reduce poverty in Argentina. Even so, he came nowhere near the concepts of equality and justice and power; he didn’t broach a topic like land reform or the concentration of wealth in a handful of families. Instead, he spoke of making it easier to do business. “We know—we all know—that to cut poverty, you have to create good jobs, quality jobs,” he said. “And for that you need to create an environment of trust, of confidence. You have to assure the investors you will be attached to the rule of law, that you will be reliable.”

“Chances are there are more people addressing the Big Problems of slum dwellers in Calcutta, Kibera or Rio, than are tackling the big problems of hardpressed folks in say, West Virginia, Mississippi or Louisiana,” she wrote. This preference for distant needs and transnational problem-solving can deepen the feeling that all those globalists are in cahoots with one another and not attentive to their compatriots. This feeling is puffed up by a vast and cynical complex that produces conspiracy theories and fraudulent news to this effect. The feeling is also given air by very real changes in the world over the last generation that have meant more decisions that affect people’s lives being made in nations not their own, more of their children’s toys being made in cities whose names they cannot pronounce, more of the decisions about what they read being made by algorithms whose creators stay invisible.

Verveer’s panelists on women’s equality were Bob Collymore, chief executive of Safaricom, a Kenyan mobile phone provider; David Nabarro, a special adviser to the UN secretary-general on sustainable development and climate change; Carolyn Tastad, who was in charge of North America for Procter & Gamble; and Jane Wurwand, the founder of Dermalogica, which sells skin products. They made opening speeches, and before long the conversation had pulled into the port where so many of them eventually dock—the idea that the solution to the problem (in this case, women’s equality) was entrepreneurship. “For me, it’s all about jobs,” said Wurwand. She noted that the beauty industry generates a disproportionate number of jobs for women. The best way to empower women, the thing it was “all about,” was getting them jobs in the beauty industry and helping them own salons. What would most liberate women happened to be the growth of Dermalogica’s own sector.

Women’s equality, it was now said, was a $28 trillion opportunity. This had become a near-constant refrain in MarketWorld—some permutation of the words “women,” “equality,” and “trillion.” If the logic of our time had applied to the facts of an earlier age, someone would have put out a report suggesting that ending slavery was great for reducing the trade deficit. “Of course, you should do it because it’s the right thing to do, but there’s a strong business case,” Collymore, of Safaricom, now said. In other words, of course you should do it because morality is enough, but since we all know that morality isn’t actually enough, you should know that the business case is fantastic.

Was this the only way of framing the choices? Was there a case to be made for communities wanting to resist the globosphere—a case that deserved to be heard on its own terms, and not emptily smeared as favoring resentment and difference? Clinton’s globalist dream was admirable, but it was also intolerant of other dreams. It sought to make hard choices seem inevitable and uncomplicated. It sought to blur what happened to be good for the plutocrats in the room with what was good for ordinary people. It promulgated another inspiring vision of changing the world that left the underlying systems untouched. Clinton was right that his philosophy was meeting resistance, but he did not take much responsibility for why it was being resisted. The win-win doctrine upon which he had built his foundation was more than unfashionable. It was among the things inspiring the revolt by making so many people feel barred from decision-making about the future of their own world.

“If you want to get them to do less harm, it requires innovation, because they still have to make money, especially for publicly held companies,” Clinton said. This was, quite literally, the bottom line. The needs of the market came first. Even a man who had spent his lifetime in politics felt a duty to be solicitous of the businessperson’s concerns. Rather than insist that the companies stop shaving years off of children’s lives, especially poor ones’, we had to make sure they had a better business model waiting on deck to replace the current, noxious one.