Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

For people to question this view is not to deny the good it is capable of doing, any more than to question monarchy is to say that kings always botch up the economy. It is to say that it does not matter what kind of a job the king is doing. It is to say that even the best he can do is not good enough, because of how it is done: the insulation, the chancing of everything on the king’s continued beneficence, the capacity of royal mistakes to alter lives they should not be touching. Similarly, to question the doing-well-by-doing-good globalists is not to doubt their intentions or results. Rather, it is to say that even when all those things are factored in, something is not quite right in believing they are the ones best positioned to effect meaningful change.

Through it all, Clinton saw truths in the anger bubbling up around him. He saw how MarketWorld-style change crowded out the habit of democracy. He genuinely worried about young people seeing social problems and, unlike in his activist-prone generation, confining their questioning to what socially minded business they could start up. He accepted that the comfortable had oversold their definition of progress in our globalizing, digitizing age. He had regrets that the winners from change had not invested enough in the losers.

“I am not a very effective activist,” Kassoy said, “and I know a lot of people who are, of whom I’m very supportive, but I’ve never been very good at it. I can’t tell you if that’s lack of courage, lack of an understanding of how to—like, I think being a really good activist requires some amount of manipulation, and I’m not that good at that.” It was peculiar, this idea of activism as manipulation; it sounded more like an excuse for not working on systems than a reason.

“For me, it is equivalent to have a master who denies people the right to freedom, and then, however, justifies that by saying, ‘I’m a benevolent master,’ ” she said. “So I actually support slavery, but once I have the slave, I really treat them well, and, actually, they live under great conditions.” One can counter that “if you have slavery, of course, it’s better to be a benevolent master than a non-benevolent master. That seems to be obvious,” Cordelli said. Yet when it comes to looking back on a system like slavery, most people would agree that the only reasonable course of action back then would have been to refuse to buy a slave, refuse to participate in slavery, refuse to go along. It is when considering the present that things get murkier.

Cordelli dismisses this fatalism about the system, this emotion of impotence regarding institutional change, as “absurd.” It is absurd, she says, because citizens of MarketWorld “live their life through a sense of themselves as entrepreneurs, as agents of change.” But this gung-ho attitude about bending the world to their will turns out to be rather temperamental. “When it comes to effecting change in a way that makes them feel good—when it comes to building a business, lobbying for certain things, effectively helping some people through philanthropy, then they are agents,” Cordelli said. “They powerfully and intentionally can exercise change.” However, she went on, “When it comes to paying more taxes, when it comes to trying to advocate for more just institutions, when it comes to actually trying to prevent injustices that are systemic or trying to advocate for less inequality and more redistribution, then they’re paralyzed. There is nothing they can do.

Businesspersons calling themselves “leaders” and naming themselves solvers of the most intractable social problems represent a worrisome way of erasing their role in causing them. Seen through Cordelli’s lens, it is indeed strange that the people with the most to lose from social reform are so often placed on the board of it. And MarketWorld’s private world-changing, for all the good it does, is also, for Cordelli, marred by its own “narcissism.” “It seems to me that these days everyone wants to change the world by themselves,” she said. “It’s about them; it’s about what they do. But there are other people around you, and you owe it to them to support institutions that can, in the name of everyone, including in their own name, secure certain conditions for a more decent life.”

This book is the work of a critic, but it is also the work of an insider-outsider to that which it takes on. There is almost no problem probed in this book, no myth, no cloud of self-serving justification that I haven’t found a way of being part of, whether because of naïveté, cynicism, rationalization, ignorance, or the necessity to make a living. I chose not to write about these things in a personal way because I didn’t want the book to be about me. But let me say here, while I am doing some acknowledging, that I once worked as an analyst at McKinsey, that I have given not one but two TED talks, that I earn a chunk of my income giving speeches, that I was attending conferences claiming to “change the world” long before I came to see them as a charade.