Books/Winners Take All

Subtitle: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Author: Anand Giridharadas

About the Author

Anand Giridharadas is an American journalist of Indian origin. This is his third book.

Definitions

In the following review, I mean the same set of people when the following words are used:

• Elites
• Winners
• Rich
• Billionaires
• 1% or 0.1%

Premise

The age of extreme charity is also the age of extreme inequality. This book is an attempt to explore if there's a correlation between the two.

In the past 30 years, the number of people who own wealth equivalent to the bottom half of America went down from 300 to 8.

One of the best ways of ensuring that the unfair system that made the elites so rich and powerful is perpetuated is to control the ways in which it can be changed. It is an attempt to restrict "change" to only the things that do not significantly disturb the hoarded wealth (and thus power) of the elites. This is also an attempt to manufacture the public opinion that letting individuals amass massive fortunes at whatever cost to society and the planet, if they give back a minute fraction of their wealth to some cause unrelated to the damage their wealth accrual caused.

Many elites make predictions about how the future is going to be. Too often, these predictions are basically a vision of the ideal world where their company can make the most money. For example, a gig economy company founder might imagine a future full of solo-entrepreneurs. Notice the recasting of the precariat as solo-entrepreneurs. This kind of recasting is extremely common with all such visions. Elites can imagine a bold new world where their lifespans have been greatly elongated but find it impossible to imagine having a universal healthcare for all.

Win-Win

The idea of "doing well by doing good", which is derived from the concept of win-win interactions (see Stephen R. Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) has become prevalent among modern charities, so much so that any charitable activity which doesn't involve a monetary return on investment is looked down upon as a losing proposition.

Social entrepreneurship is one of the most common win-win strategy employed by elite do-gooders. Things like micro-finance fall under this category. Several such enterprises try to solve the symptoms of the problems caused by ruthless capitalism which ignores the human aspect in its relentless pursuit of efficiency and profit.

One example of a social enterprise discussed in this book is a startup called Even that charges $260 per year to stabilize the income of people working jobs which employ a technique called dynamic hours, employing and paying people only for the hours that they are required thus shifting the risk to the worker. One person discussed as a candidate for this struggles to pay her $90 credit-card bill a month. Dynamic hours cause undue stress to workers making it impossible to plan for anything in the future. This stress also causes a dramatic reduction in decision-making ability, the equivalent of a drop in 10 IQ points. This social enterprise does nothing to solve the systemic problem caused by some market efficiency maneuver. Instead, it normalizes the problem and creates a solution at a personal level. A good analogy I can think of is a social enterprise that sells medical insurance to provide band-aids for victims of skin cancer caused by an industry polluting their water supply. Capitalist solutions to problems caused by capitalism so that people's imagination is confined to the system instead of thinking about changing it. The startup discussed here while doing nothing to solve the problem also extracts more money from the victims. So much for win-win!

The winners want to keep their winnings. At the same time, they want to be the dominant change agents trying to change the unfair system. They use their significant resources to drown out voices arguing for real change while positioning themselves as the visionaries that are going to make the world better.

Charities

The earliest millionaires in America tried to justify charities as a way of giving back to society since the competitive world makes it a necessity for them to resort to unethical practices in their businesses.

The arguments from the elites for why such charities should exist imply that massive private fortunes should also exist as a pre-condition.

• The government doesn't have enough money to do all the things that are required. Well, because the elites have been lobbying for tax reductions for decades.

• The government is not efficient. This is taken from the perspective of market-world efficiency. Consultants like McKinsey are hired by charities (and now governments, following suit), who break down the problem into tiny pieces and offer piecemeal micro-optimizations without consideration about the big picture. This is how we ended up with the gig economy, dynamic work hours and all market risk shifted from the business to the worker.

One big difference between a charity and a government is that a charity is controlled by a rich person (like a king does) whereas a government is democratically elected by the people. Lots of do-gooder feudal lords? No, thanks.

The family that owns Purdue pharma, a company whose top drug played a major part in the opioid crisis in the US is a significant donor to various unrelated charities and public institutions. Such elites do not contribute to charities trying to undo the damage that they did because that would be the equivalent of confessing their sins.

Charities are a cheap way of spending one dollar in a cause that reinforces market capitalism while diverting attention from millions of dollars of damage caused to the world. It's like an oil company planting one tree (but they won't, they'll do something unrelated, like starting a micro-credit social enterprise for African women).

Public Intellectuals vs. Thought Leaders

This is where we get to the implicit "manufacturing consent" part of the charade. A public intellectual might research social problems and describe them in detail, but the win-win crowd isn't interested in that. They're basically looking for band-aids for cancer.

A feminist researcher did a near exhaustive research of all the problems that cause women to be treated unfairly in society. She had academic papers published in various journals but received no broader recognition. She was a public intellectual. All of that changed when she did a TED talk about a Wonder Woman power-pose for women to feel confident before any major interaction. This satisfies all the criteria for the elites - doesn't blame the patriarchy of which they are a part, the solution essentially changes nothing in society and it is a great distraction from the actual problems. Moreover, it now blames the victim for not learning about things like power-poses. Now the researcher is a thought leader. She gets international fame, gets invited to all kinds of events funded by the elites and gets paid a lot for her speeches. Another such thought leader in the feminist space who did more harm than good is Sheryl Sandberg, with her book "Lean In".

Thought Leaders are the market world's answer to the threats posed by public intellectuals. Many people who are simply good at marketing their ideas (irrespective of them being true or meaningful) find that being a thought leader is a very lucrative proposition. These people start by being non-fiction writers and then give paid speeches each costing in the range of $50,000 to $75,000 each! In my opinion, social media influencers belong in the same category, though not mentioned in the book.

Public intellectuals are usually critics while the market world's so-called thought leaders are basically like propagandists and snake-oil salesmen rolled into one.

The feminists wanted us to look at a vagina and zoom out to see congress. The thought leaders want us to look at a laid-off employee and zoom in to see the beauty of his feeling his vulnerability because at least he is alive. They want us to focus on his vulnerability, not his wage.

Critique

The author never once mentioned the word solidarity in the book. For a book that's essentially about criticism of charity and the motives behind it, this is unexpected. The book is mostly about investigating a particular problem in depth, so not proposing solutions is okay.

The book is extremely nuanced, discussing subtle ways in which the rich convince themselves of their own lies and the not so subtle ways in which public opinion is diverted using charities and social enterprises from the social evils unleashed by billionaires and their corporations.