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 continued 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 charade 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.

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 enterprises like micro-loans belong to 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 with income instability caused by their work using an optimization called dynamic hours. 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 problems 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. They want to have their cake and eat it too, because not eating the cake would be win-lose proposition and we can't have that.

Charities

The family behind Purdue pharma that was responsible for the opioid crisis in the US is a significant donor to various charities and public institutions. They did nothing for the victims of the opioid crisis because that would be akin to confessing their sins.

There are arguments from the elites for why such charities should exist, which implies 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 risk shifted from the company 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.

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).

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.