Winners take all The elite charade of changing the world

Review by Choice Review

The subtitle of this book succinctly states its argument. According to Giridharadas (journalism, NYU, and a well-known speaker and author) today's ultra-rich elites present themselves as change makers, devising market solutions to pressing social and economic problems. They gather at places like the Aspen Institute and Davos to talk about social entrepreneurship and philanthropy. The effect, though, is to reinforce and solidify their own positions in a world of growing inequality. Giridaradas writes from the inside--he is himself an Aspen Institute fellow--drawing on extensive interviews with this elite business class. He is able to sympathize with the individuals he describes while remaining critical of the consequences of their strategies. This is a strength of the book but also its chief problem. For the most part, the wealthy, would-be do-gooders do not come across as scheming hypocrites, but as human beings who are at once well-meaning and self-serving. Giridharadas's core argument is that the world economy requires a fundamental structural change, but he does not lay out how this would happen. Though he has some ideas about changes he considers desirable--e.g., raising minimum wages--he offers no real program, only proclamations that the world power structure needs to be transformed in some way that will make it more egalitarian. Scholarly apparatus is sparse. Summing Up: Optional. Most appropriate for general readers, but also of interest to scholars and professionals. --Carl Leon Bankston, Tulane University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

WINNERS TAKE ALL: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giridharadas. (Knopf, $26.95.) Giridharadas examines the worlds of Davos and Aspen, where an elite intent on "changing the world" hang out, emerging with a quietly scathing report on how little they actually do to make a difference when it comes to the big structural problems. They are instead the enablers of the rich and powerful. NINETY-NINE GLIMPSES OF PRINCESS MARGARET, by Craig Brown. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) A sometimes fanciful, always gossipy portrait of Queen Elizabeth's younger sister, who loved to appear rebellious and bohemian but was also intensely devoted to the privileges that accompanied royal life. THE HUSBAND HUNTERS: American Heiresses Who Married Into the British Aristocracy, by Anne de Courcy. (St. Martin's, $27.99.) A glittering account of the Gilded Age-era young women whose fortunes rescued some of England's penurious peers. THE FIGHTERS: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, by C.J. Chivers. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) In Chivers's powerful narrative of America's recent wars, soldiers who began their military service in a blaze of patriotism after 9/11 end up cynical, betrayed and often disfigured or dead. THE TRAITOR'S NICHE, by Ismail Kadare. (Counterpoint, $25.) The quest for a rebel pasha's severed head becomes a grimly comic comment in John Hodgson's translation of this brilliant and laconic 1978 Albanian novel, an allegorical fable about 20th-century authoritarianism. IF YOU SEE ME, DON'T SAY HI, by Neel Patel. (Flatiron, $24.99.) The Indian-Americans in this debut story collection are less troubled by cultural clashes than they are by the unraveling of emotions. As friendships fester, marriages combust and families fall into civilized distemper, all the ties in Patel's world unravel according to their own precise logic: none at all. FLY GIRLS, by Keith O'Brien. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) The title honors the female aviators who were hindered by the deep gender inequities of the golden age of flying. These are women few of us have heard of before; as O'Brien explains of their forgotten histories, each woman "went missing in her own way." I WILL BE COMPLETE, by Glen David Gold. (Knopf, $29.95.) In Gold's ambitious and brave memoir (which takes us only to his early 30s), just about all of the unanticipated ramifications emanate from his complex, mysterious and manipulative mother. MIRROR, SHOULDER, SIGNAL, by Dorthe Nors. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) In her sparkling novel - shortlisted for the International Man Booker - Nors trains her gaze on a woman many people would look past, a middle-aged translator learning to drive. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Today's business elite are more involved than ever in solving social problems. From poverty and disease to working conditions in the gig economy, capitalism's winners use philanthropy and win-win business ventures to achieve what government programs used to address. But what if, Giridharadas (The True American, 2014) asks, these very elites have been and continue to be the sources of many of these problems? MarketWorld is the term used for the network of wealthy, educated, cosmopolitan elites who eschew politics for private, largely unaccountable efforts to change the world. This is a very difficult subject to tackle, but Giridharadas executes it brilliantly. Through extensive interviews and research from inside this network, he lays bare the problems with its approach. This must-have title will be of great interest to readers, from students to professionals and everyone in-between, interested in solutions to today's complex problems. An exciting book club pick, Winners Take All will be the starting point of conversations private and in groups on alternatives to the status quo and calls to action. An excellent book for troubled times.--James Pekoll Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this provocative and passionate look at philanthropy, capitalism, and inequality, Giridharadas (The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas) criticizes market-based solutions to inequality devised by rich American do-gooders as ultimately counterproductive and self-serving. Giridharadas insists that "the idea that after-the-fact benevolence justifies anything-goes capitalism" is no excuse for "avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and a fairer distribution of power." He turns a gimlet eye on philanthropists who make the money they donate by underpaying employees; luxurious philanthropy getaways that focus more on making attendees feel good about themselves than on creating profound change; and tech companies such as Uber, which promises to empower the poor with earning opportunities, but has been accused of exploiting its workers. Giridharadas calls out billionaire venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar, who opines that "sharing is caring" but refers to labor unions as "cartels," and profiles Darren Walker, who came from modest beginnings to end up president of the Ford Foundation, where his entreaties to philanthropists to acknowledge structural inequality fall mostly on deaf ears. In the end, Giridharadas believes only democratic solutions can address problems of inequality. This damning portrait of contemporary American philanthropy is a must-read for anyone interested in "changing the world." (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Give a hungry man a fish, and you get to pat yourself on the backand take a tax deduction.It's a matter of some irony, John Steinbeck once observed of the robber barons of the Gilded Age, that they spent the first two-thirds of their lives looting the public only to spend the last third giving the money away. Now, writes political analyst and journalist Giridharadas (The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, 2014, etc.), the global financial elite has reinterpreted Andrew Carnegie's view that it's good for society for capitalists to give something back to a new formula: It's good for business to do so when the time is right, but not otherwise. Moreover, business has co-opted philanthropy, such that any "world-changing" efforts come with a proviso: "if you really want to change the world, you must rely on the techniques, resources, and personnel of capitalism." Philanthropic initiatives to effect social change are no longer the province of public life but instead are private and voluntary, in keeping with free market individualism. Naturally, there's a layer of consultants and in-house vice presidents to manage all this largess, which hinges on the premise that things aren't so bad and just need to be nudged along. The author memorably calls this process "Pinkering," after the ameliorist-minded psychologist Steven Pinker. "It beamed out so many thoughts about why the world was getting better in recent years," Giridharadas writes of one initiative, "that its antennae failed to detect all the incoming transmissions about all the people whose lives were not improving, who didn't care to be Pinkered because they knew what they were seeing." So what's so bad about private giving? Answers the author, when a society elects to help, it expresses democratic values with an eye to equality, while private giving is inherently unequal, a power relation between "the giver and the taker, the helper and the helped, the donor and the recipient."A provocative critique of the kind of modern, feel-good giving that addresses symptoms and not causes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Excerpted from WINNERS TAKE ALL : A successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement. America's machine is broken. When the fruits of change have fallen on the United States in recent decades, the very fortunate have basketed almost all of them. For instance, the average pretax income of the top tenth of Americans has doubled since 1980, that of the top 1 percent has more than tripled, and that of the top 0.001 percent has risen more than sevenfold--even as the average pretax income of the bottom half of Americans has stayed almost precisely the same. These familiar figures amount to three and a half decades' worth of wondrous, head-spinning change with zero impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans. Thus many millions of Americans, on the left and right, feel one thing in common: that the game is rigged against people like them. It is no wonder that the American voting public-- like other publics around the world--has turned more resentful and suspicious in recent years, embracing populist movements on the left and right, bringing socialism and nationalism into the center of political life in a way that once seemed unthinkable, and succumbing to all manner of conspiracy theory and fake news. There is a spreading recognition, on both sides of the ideological divide, that the system is broken and has to change. Some elites faced with this kind of gathering anger have hidden behind walls and gates and on landed estates, emerging only to try to seize even greater political power to protect themselves against the mob. But in recent years a great many fortunate people have also tried something else, something both laudable and self-serving: They have tried to help by taking ownership of the problem. All around us, the winners in our highly inequitable status quo declare themselves partisans of change. They know the problem, and they want to be part of the solution. Actually, they want to lead the search for solutions. They believe that their solutions deserve to be at the forefront of social change. They may join or support movements initiated by ordinary people looking to fix aspects of their society. More often, though, these elites start initiatives of their own, taking on social change as though it were just another stock in their portfolio or corporation to restructure. Because they are in charge of these attempts at social change, the attempts naturally reflect their biases. The initiatives mostly aren't democratic, nor do they reflect collective problem-solving or universal solutions. Rather, they favor the use of the private sector and its charitable spoils, the market way of looking at things, and the bypassing of government. They reflect a highly influential view that the winners of an unjust status quo-- and the tools and mentalities and values that helped them win--are the secret to redressing the injustices. Those at greatest risk of being resented in an age of inequality are thereby recast as our saviors from an age of inequality. Socially minded financiers at Goldman Sachs seek to change the world through "win-win" initiatives like "green bonds" and "impact investing." Tech companies like Uber and Airbnb cast themselves as empowering the poor by allowing them to chauffeur people around or rent out spare rooms. Management consultants and Wall Street brains seek to convince the social sector that they should guide its pursuit of greater equality by assuming board seats and leadership positions. Conferences and idea festivals sponsored by plutocrats and big business host panels on injustice and promote "thought leaders" who are willing to confine their thinking to improving lives within the faulty system rather than tackling the faults. Profitable companies built in questionable ways and employing reckless means engage in corporate social responsibility, and some rich people make a splash by "giving back"--regardless of the fact that they may have caused serious societal problems as they built their fortunes. Elite networking forums like the Aspen Institute and the Clinton Global Initiative groom the rich to be self-appointed leaders of social change, taking on the problems people like them have been instrumental in creating or sustaining. A new breed of community-minded so-called B Corporations has been born, reflecting a faith that more enlightened corporate self-interest--rather than, say, public regulation--is the surest guarantor of the public welfare. A pair of Silicon Valley billionaires fund an initiative to rethink the Democratic Party, and one of them can claim, without a hint of irony, that their goals are to amplify the voices of the powerless and reduce the political influence of rich people like them. The elites behind efforts like these often speak in a language of "changing the world" and "making the world a better place" more typically associated with barricades than ski resorts. Yet we are left with the inescapable fact that in the very era in which these elites have done so much to help, they have continued to hoard the overwhelming share of progress, the average American's life has scarcely improved, and virtually all of the nation's institutions, with the exception of the military, have lost the public's trust. Are we ready to hand over our future to the elite, one supposedly world-changing initiative at a time? Are we ready to call participatory democracy a failure, and to declare these other, private forms of change-making the new way forward? Is the decrepit state of American self-government an excuse to work around it and let it further atrophy? Or is meaningful democracy, in which we all potentially have a voice, worth fighting for? There is no denying that today's elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory in history. By refusing to risk its way of life, by rejecting the idea that the powerful might have to sacrifice for the common good, it clings to a set of social arrangements that allow it to monopolize progress and then give symbolic scraps to the forsaken--many of whom wouldn't need the scraps if the society were working right. This book is an attempt to understand the connection between these elites' social concern and predation, between the extraordinary helping and the extraordinary hoarding, between the milking--and perhaps abetting--of an unjust status quo and the attempts by the milkers to repair a small part of it. There are many ways to make sense of all this elite concern and predation. One is that the elites are doing the best they can. The world is what it is; the system is what it is; the forces of the age are bigger than anyone can resist; the most fortunate are helping. This view may allow that this helpfulness is just a drop in the bucket, but it is something. The slightly more critical view is that this elite-led change is well-meaning but inadequate. It treats symptoms, not root causes; it does not change the fundamentals of what ails us. According to this view, elites are shirking the duty of more meaningful reform. But there is still another, darker way of judging what goes on when elites put themselves in the vanguard of social change: that it not only fails to make things better, but also serves to keep things as they are. After all, it takes the edge off of some of the public's anger at being excluded from progress. It improves the image of the winners. With its private and voluntary half-measures, it crowds out public solutions that would solve problems for everyone. For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is--above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners. In an age defined by a chasm between those who have power and those who don't, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations. The society should be changed in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve. What is at stake is whether the reform of our common life is led by governments elected by and accountable to the people, or rather by wealthy elites claiming to know our best interests. We must decide whether, in the name of ascendant values such as efficiency and scale, we are willing to allow democratic purpose to be usurped by private actors who often genuinely aspire to improve things but, first things first, seek to protect themselves. Yes, government is dysfunctional at present. But that is all the more reason to treat its repair as our foremost national priority. Pursuing workarounds of our troubled democracy makes democracy even more troubled. We must ask ourselves why we have so easily lost faith in the engines of progress that got us where we are today--in the democratic efforts to outlaw slavery, end child labor, limit the workday, keep drugs safe, protect collective bargaining, create public schools, battle the Great Depression, electrify rural America, weave a nation together by road, pursue a Great Society free of poverty, extend civil and political rights to women and African Americans and other minorities, and give our fellow citizens health, security, and dignity in old age. This book offers a series of portraits of this elite-led, market- friendly, winner-safe social change. In these pages, you will meet people who ardently believe in this form of change and people who are beginning to question it. What these various figures have in common is that they are grappling with certain powerful myths--the myths that have fostered an age of extraordinary power concentration; that have allowed the elite's private, partial, and self-preservational deeds to pass for real change; that have let many decent winners convince themselves, and much of the world, that their plan to "do well by doing good" is an adequate answer to an age of exclusion; that put a gloss of selflessness on the protection of one's privileges; and that cast more meaningful change as wide-eyed, radical, and vague. It is my hope in writing what follows to reveal these myths to be exactly that. Much of what appears to be reform in our time is in fact the defense of stasis. When we see through the myths that foster this misperception, the path to genuine change will come into view. Excerpted from Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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