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.
Definitions
In the following review, I mean the same set of people when the following words are used:
- Elite
- 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.
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.
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 was unexpected.
