Michael

“In a bygone era government was solely responsible for addressing the Nation’s biggest problems, from building the interstate highway system to the New Deal social programs. However, today’s challenges are more complicated and interconnected than ever before and cannot be solved by a single actor or solution. That is why government has an opportunity to engage with the actors in the Impact Economy from non-profits to businesses.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by my own mind. Learning this is the first step toward ceasing to generate more suffering.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“There is tremendous pressure to turn thoughts into commodities—into tiny, usable takeaways, into Monday morning insights for the CEO, into ideas that are profitable rather than compelling for their own sake.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“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