Michael

“Generosity is not a substitute for justice, but here, as so often in MarketWorld, it was allowed to stand in. The institutions that benefited from the Sacklers’ largesse have shown little interest in demanding that they atone for any role they might have played in fomenting a national crisis”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“If you want to know the ultimate truth of life, rites and rituals are a huge obstacle. But if you are interested in social stability and harmony, as Confucius was, truth is often a liability, whereas rites and rituals are among your best allies.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“When elites solve public problems privately, they can do so in ways that contribute to democracy, and they can do so in ways that disrupt it. The former occurs when elite help “contributes to and enlarges the public goods provided by the state, and attends to interests not readily provided for by the state.” But the same elite help, backed by the same noble intentions, can instead “disrupt” democracy when it “replaces the public sphere with all manner of private initiatives for special public purposes.” These latter works don’t simply do what government cannot do. They “crowd out the public sector, further reducing both its legitimacy and its efficacy, and replace civic goals with narrower concerns about efficiency and markets.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“There were many things that business traditionally did to support the community, from training people to whole sets of other activities that they sort of took responsibility for, which we call investing in the commons,” Porter said. By commons he meant the shared assets of a place—things such as public schools that both industry and average people benefit from. “As people got disconnected from locations, business stopped really reinvesting in that. They thought their job was globalizing.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World