It’s strange to think that not too long ago, pundits buzzed over the possibility that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg might run for president. Listening tours in Iowa will spark those kinds of rumors. But more than this, the talk of “Zuck 2020" was a political reflection of a broader ethos emanating from the nation’s centers of entrepreneurialism, one that assumed that business leaders, adopting business tactics, were best equipped to solve our most pressing problems.
It’s a concept captured by the term philanthrocapitalism, one first introduced as the title and central concept of a 2008 book by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green. Its message was nicely summed up by its subtitle: How the Rich Can Save the World.
The authors’ timing seemed less than propitious — the book came out in the midst of the Great Recession, when the rich, who had pushed the global financial system to the brink of ruin, hardly seemed like saviors. Yet it quickly became one of philanthropy’s most influential tomes because it captured one of the defining ideals of early 21st-century public life.
We don’t hear much about Zuckerberg’s presidential prospects these days; he has his hands full addressing concerns that Facebook helped spread disinformation propagated by Russian troll farms as part of an effort to sway the 2018 election.
In fact, his diminished public stature registers the eroding foundations of philanthrocapitalism more generally. An anti-establishment upsurge, wide-scale apprehensions about inequality, swelling grass-roots social movements, and the high-profile fumbling and failings of the economic elite themselves have all conspired to tamp down the inclination to turn to the rich to save the world.
For those who still might be tempted to do so, there’s an important new book by journalist Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. It levels a devastating attack on philanthrocapitalism. There isn’t much left standing after his assault — and that’s both his book’s strongest point and its main shortcoming.
Power and Status
Philanthrocapitalism has two strains, though they often converge: the impersonal and the personal. In the impersonal version of philanthrocapitalism, the market is held up as the dominant force in the promotion of social good. This ideal, the animating spirit of much social entrepreneurship, has been deflated a bit in recent years as investments in microfinance, social-impact bonds, and impact investing have fallen short of the initial hype.
But despite such disappointments, there are still many exciting developments in the both the nonprofit and for-profit realms, and within broad swaths of the nonprofit world, it’s widely held that capitalism is a powerful tool that should be harnessed toward philanthropic ends.
Giridharadas pushes back against this impersonal market-focused ideal, though it’s not where he spends most of his rhetorical energy. He picks some low-hanging fruit of philanthrocapitalist schemes for which the spread between philanthropic posturing and real-world impact seems especially wide, but he doesn’t really take on the most celebrated efforts, such as campaigns to encourage the production of cheaper lifesaving drugs in the developing world.
Instead, his main target is really the personal variant of philanthrocapitalism.
Giridharadas is interested in power and status in the arena of social change. He challenges the idea that success in the realm of business and fluency with its dominant modes of discourse should serve as a badge that grants the holder entry into nonprofit boardrooms, the op-ed pages of major dailies, and TED talk stages. Instead, he argues that this idea has done real damage in the world.
“There is no denying that today’s American elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history,” Giridharadas writes. “But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory in history.” Winners Take All is “an attempt to understand the connection between these elites’ social concern and predation, between the extraordinary helping and the extraordinary hoarding.”
The linkage between helping and hoarding is both an old idea and a new one. It tends to be strengthened in periods when massive concentrated wealth needs legitimizing. It was, for instance, a key tenet of Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 tract “The Gospel of Wealth,” in which the steel magnate and philanthropist justified inequality but insisted that those who made personal fortunes should direct the skills honed through accumulation toward the redistribution of that wealth for the public good.
Yet as recently as a half century ago, there was little evidence of this principle at work. When Waldemar Nielsen, a former Ford Foundation official who was one of the keenest observers of modern philanthropy, surveyed the field in the 1970s and ’80s, he noted that most business leaders showed little interest or capacity for philanthropic endeavors. “In moving from the profit-making to the not-for-profit sphere,” Nielsen remarked, “they with few exceptions forgot their accumulated organizational skills entirely.”
Changes in Wealth and Politics
Something has changed over the last several decades, and it’s this change that Giridharadas seeks to understand — and to interrogate. It involved a confluence of forces: the accumulation of massive fortunes, the neo-liberal turn that favored the privatization of public goods, and the related declining faith in government as an agent of social betterment. It also involved the development and increasingly sophisticated promotion of corporate social responsibility, the commercialization of much nonprofit activity, the rise of path-breaking institutions and individuals that aggressively pursued the incorporation of business practices into the charitable realm, and more. We still don’t have a comprehensive, critical history of philanthrocapitalism, and we could use one.
But Giridharadas provides an important service in fleshing out some of its ideological underpinnings. His strategy is often to let MarketWorld figures do the talking — he performs a sort of caricature by way of stenography, featuring long citations of buzzword-laden panel discussions from elite confabs.
The pomposity and lack of self-awareness on display can be cringe-inducing, yet some of the book’s most affecting passages involve young men and women who began with noble intentions but who were drawn into the postgraduation maw of Goldman Sachs or McKinsey. Giridharadas treats their desperate self-rationalizations humanely, perhaps because he knows the attractions of philanthrocapitalism firsthand — having once worked as a management consultant himself.
He’s defined his field of interest as MarketWorld, the realm called into being by the exclusive gatherings of the financial elite (Davos, Aspen, TechCrunch’s Summit), by management-consultant prospectuses, by venture-capitalist ambition, and by the TED-friendly ruminations of a growing contingent of “thought leaders.” Those committed to MarketWorld share a set of deeply held tenets, which Giridharadas not-so-gently unpacks.
First is that core principle of personal philanthrocapitalism, that “economic winners” should place themselves at the forefront of efforts at social change.
But Giridharadas makes an astute observation: These “change-agents” only pursue change of a particular sort. They resist social transformation that entails any sacrifice of status on their part or that calls out their own complicity in the social ills that they claim exceptional talents in addressing. This is the Elite Charade of Changing the World of the book’s subtitle. It’s a similar critique to the one that was directed at Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” more than a century ago, that it represented a “belated gospel,” delivered only after economic inequality was entrenched.
The first principle leads to the second: a commitment to the “win-win” — to “chang[ing] the world while also profiting from the status quo.” In MarketWorld, what benefits the economic elite also benefits the 99 percent. There are no real policy trade-offs, no class conflict. In fact, some of the most perceptive parts of Giridharadas’s book demonstrate the PowerPoint alchemy by which MarketWorld transforms complex social problems into those amenable to “scrupulously depoliticized, perpetrator-free,” technocratic solutions.
Which leads to the third tenet: cosmopolitanism. MarketWorld has a strong bias for the global (markets, institutions, causes) over the local.
These beliefs fit into the larger intellectual framework Giridharadas maps out not merely because globalization counts as one of those forces that MarketWorld denizens insist on regarding as a win-win but also because he considers MarketWorld’s “preference for distant needs and transnational problem-solving,” its concern for “universal challenges like climate change or the woes of faraway places like Rwandan coffee plantations” as a means of avoiding responsibility for the poverty and social distress within their own backyards.
This last point — though it’s open to challenge both because plenty of “economic winners” direct their philanthropic attentions to domestic causes and because there are legitimate ethical reasons, such as those raised by the effective-altruism movement, that might justify a focus on the global poor — highlights why Giridharadas thinks we shouldn’t be duped by the elite charade of changing the world.
Their philanthropic posturing and tinkering obscures the root causes that lie behind many of our most pressing problems: the excesses of “winners take all” global capitalism and the inequities of power and resources that it engenders. Their after-the-fact self-congratulatory do-goodism allows them to ignore the misdeeds and rapaciousness of the corporations they run.
But it’s not just a matter of analysis; it’s also a matter of tactics. The more MarketWorld leaders assume the status of philanthropic saviors, the more alternative approaches, ones that require mass political mobilization and not market interventions, get muscled aside. We end up talking about poverty and not about inequality. We devote ourselves to encouraging entrepreneurship instead of compelling corporations to pay living wages.
In fact, there’s a section in the book, especially poignant in light of recent events, in which Emmett Carson, the former head of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, admits that he stopped using the phrase “social justice” because the tech leaders he was seeking to recruit as donors interpreted it to mean “taking from the rich and giving to the poor.” But that, Giridharadas suggests, is precisely what is required of the present moment.
He cites favorably the analogy presented by the political philosopher Chiara Cordelli; Elites, she argues, are like the owner of a painting who discovers it had been stolen. That owner has a responsibility to return it to its original owner. “To do a modest bit of good while doing nothing about the larger system is to keep the painting.”
Yet there is an ambiguity in Winners Take All about how economic winners might pursue this sort of restitution, one that reflects a strain of uncertainty that has long defined writing on the relationship between philanthropy and social justice. Are they allies? Antagonists? Something of both?
Support for Social Movements
It’s clear that Giridharadas is not especially sympathetic to efforts to work within the system; he chose the famous line from Audre Lorde, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” as the heading of one of his chapters, and it might have served as one for the whole book.
Yet he also recognizes that some of the social movements that are fighting to change the system can do so only with philanthropic funding that comes from the system itself. Citing a founder of a cooperative online cleaning service that had accepted funding from the Wall Street-backed Robin Hood Foundation, Giridharadas explains that it is “hard to escape [MarketWorld] even when you are rejecting it.” So he ends Winners Take All with a call for the economic elite to adopt an ethic of plutocratic self-sacrifice, thereby transforming themselves into true change agents. But Giridharadas does not offer a full vision of what this should look like in practice.
Take, for instance, his treatment of Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, whose essay on a “New Gospel of Wealth,” calling for the economic elite to take seriously their own complicity in the problems they seek to solve, anticipated many of the themes of Winners Take All. Giridharadas is certainly a fan, though he includes a scene of Walker speaking to the staff of the private-equity firm KKR, which seems to underscore the futility of the exercise, and he doesn’t seem particularly impressed by Walker’s decision to serve on the board of PepsiCo., to bring his perspective as a social-justice leader into the corporation’s boardroom.
Of course, Walker is not just a prophet wandering the wilderness of Wall Street. He’s also the head of a major grant-making institution, channeling the profits of American capitalism toward philanthropic ends. But though Walker gets his pages, there’s little about Ford’s approach to that project in the book.
In fact, Ford has recently reoriented its mission to challenge inequality — not poverty — in all its forms. This has meant directing grants to groups working to unionize low-income workers and pushing for criminal-justice overhaul and for voting rights. It’s involved a commitment to large-scale, multiyear general operating support to grass-roots organizations, as well as one to impact investing.
Ford might not be using the tools of the master to dismantle the master’s house — Walker has written eloquently about how the foundation’s efforts to curb inequality are meant not to overthrow capitalism but to save it from its excesses. But its approach represents an intriguing alternative to unrestrained philanthrocapitalism, one that combines a respect for the power of market mechanisms and business-based approaches with an appreciation of their limits. Significantly, Walker understands the foundation’s own privileged position, based on the concentration of philanthropic capital derived from a family fortune, not merely as an opportunity but as a social problem. If Ford is seeking to save the world, it’s one in which mega-philanthropy is meant to play a less central role.
Are similar ideas catching on among a new generation of entrepreneurs and living donors? There’s no movement equivalent in its dominance to philanthrocapitalism on the horizon, but there seems to be a significant surge in interest in checking inequality, in supporting grass-roots social-justice organizations, in empowering beneficiaries, and in attending to class and racial privilege. And there are inchoate movements afoot, like the one for reforming corporate governance, that could use some philanthropic muscle to push it more firmly onto the political agenda. Each of these approaches entertains the possibility of real sacrifice on the part of the elite; and the flagging cachet of philanthrocapitalism might give them more room to take root.
Let’s hope they do so soon, and not just because the crises of the moment seem especially urgent.
Sometime in the not-too-distant future, the world’s richest individual, Jeff Bezos, will unveil his plans to give away a good chunk of the money he’s made from Amazon. The announcement will generate enormous media attention and will also put enormous strains on the ethic of philanthrocapitalism. This is because there is no philanthropic program Bezos could inaugurate that could justify the immensity of his private fortune, no entrepreneurial talent he could wield and no cause he could champion that could obscure the fact that, in the words of the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey, a "$150 billion fortune is a policy failure.”
The folly of “a system that perpetuates vast differences in privilege and then tasks the privileged with improving the system,” in Walker’s words, will be on full display. It will become clearer than ever that we cannot rely on the rich to lead the project of social transformation toward a more just and equitable society.
That sort of change will come, if it comes at all, from collective action and from shared democratic institutions, as Giridharadas powerfully argues.
But this does not mean that the economic elite cannot play a role. And so whenever Bezos does make his announcement, it will be especially important that there are models of philanthropy on hand that actively cede power to those without it and look to regrade the social and political terrain on which massive wealth inequality has been established. This sort of philanthropy will not by itself save the world. But it can help, and it would be equal folly not to welcome it.
Benjamin Soskis is co-editor of HistPhil and a research associate at the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute.
