Journalist Anand Giridharadas’s book Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World hit shelves a year ago. It has, in so many ways, changed the national, and even the international, conversation about social change.
Over the past year, nonprofit board meetings have been filled with buzz of his thesis that the superrich have taken over the world-fixing function in a time of anemic democracy. Every time a headline hit that correlated with his bold argument, Giridharadas was there to break it down for his fans on Twitter. With his coaching, the do-gooder billionaire schadenfreude hit a fever pitch.
I am so grateful to Giridharadas for amplifying a conversation to an un-ignorable volume that too many people were having in frustrated whispers around water coolers and at social-entrepreneurship conferences. As he told Krista Tippett in “On Being,” he became a “confession booth” for decent people who are part of “indecent systems.” So many are indebted to him for publicly naming their private moral crisis.
I co-hosted a dinner conversation about Giridharadas’s book when it launched, moderated a panel with him, and later interviewed him for the popular San Francisco series City Arts & Lectures. In other words, I’ve spent a lot of time with his provocation, and a bit of time with him personally. And as such, I feel called to ask: Where do we go after this important catharsis?
Giridharadas likes to point people — both nonprofit leaders and “do well by doing good"-type corporate executives — to government as the rightful center of social change.
I share his excitement about putting “common” back in common good. The decline of public institutions and public trust is a central reason that MarketWorld — his phrase for the subculture that the superrich have built around their conviction that the market will solve all social ills — has been able to take such hold. Rich people interested in becoming philanthropists have been led to believe that their money will be misspent by bloated and uninventive bureaucracies. Better to donate to a charter school or a fresh young Harvard grad with an idea of how to disrupt something than to grapple with the complexity of government.
And the truth is, these rich people aren’t wrong. Making change within public institutions is typically slow, hard work. It often requires untangling layers and layers of protocol and policy to get to the heart of the problem. Public servants, many of whom are underpaid and burned out, have to be re-energized and honored in the process. This kind of change is often dependent on elusive norm shifts among voters. Look at the sea change in criminal-justice policy we’ve seen over the past few years, made possible in no small part because of a critical mass of documentaries (13th) and books (Just Mercy) and celebrity attention (John Legend).
This is a worthwhile work, the work of our times, but it’s not for the weary. Democracy is not easy. It’s not supposed to be. But neither is anything truly meaningful in life. So by all means, if you’re a young, energetic do-gooder with a verve for being a part of legacy-building, paradigm-shifting change, apprentice with one of the myriad great efforts underway to improve government (Code for America, One Degree, or Apolitical, to name a few), or by all means, go become a public servant and make change from the inside out. But either way, don’t go expecting an easy ride.
And just as government is not morally pure, philanthropy is not all bad. Some individuals and foundations make their grantees feel respected and effective; others make their grantees feel patronized and strung along.
We need to shine a light on the best, most dignifying practices within philanthropy and inspire those who were affected by Giridharadas’s thesis to start adopting them. If you’re wondering where to start, sign up for Funder Feedback, check out Resource Generation, Justice Funders, and Solidaire, and read Nonprofit AF, Vu Le’s funny, merciless blog.
Maybe we need to think even bigger — have social entrepreneurs raise money in rounds like for-profit entrepreneurs (something Nancy Lublin of Crisis Text Line has experimented with). That way those making the change could raise money in a concentrated moment and then spend the majority of their time actually making change (not just selling it). Many philanthropic big bets were born with this spirit, though none have inverted the power dynamics that Giridharadas smartly critiques. The rich, no matter how inexperienced, are still the ones making decisions. What if it were the donors who had to apply to give to nonprofits and not the other way around?
Moral Complexity
I can promise you this much: Philanthropy will only be as effective, ethical, and imaginative as the people involved. And those people have to be able to juggle a lot of moral complexity. They have to be the kind of people who love to think about how power flows through systems, or gets stopped up. They have to be obsessive about justice, not just in a big, abstract way but in small, procedural ways: Where and how do we meet grantees? What kinds of questions do we ask them? What sorts of metrics actually matter — to them and to us?
If Winners Take All made you want to burn the whole obscene mansion down, you are just the kind of person the nonprofit world needs. Get in there and make people wildly uncomfortable in meetings. Ask the inconvenient questions about power and privilege and expertise. Don’t let anyone rest on their do-gooder laurels.
And here is another key point that I fear has been missing from the year of foment: The superrich do not have a monopoly on complicity. Yes, the scale of their hypocrisy is far greater, the risk of their harm far wider and deeper, but if you are the kind of person who has read Winners Take All, the sort of person who has ever found yourself at TED or the Aspen Institute, or even wanted to, you also have some self-examination to do.
Among the questions to pose:
- How do you use your access to these kinds of networks and institutions for others who don’t have it?
- Where is your money invested and how much do you give away?
- Where do you live, and how much do you understand and invest in the history of your neighborhood and its affordable future?
- Where do you send your kids to school?
- How much have you thought about your own racial identity (especially if you are white) and whether you are not just being well-intentioned but truly anti-racist?
- What can you give up (money, speaking, and leadership opportunities, etc.) so that others can have more?
- Who are your friends, and do they give you honest feedback about your relationship to power? How do you take that feedback? How do you give it?
As Giridharadas and I chatted on the stage at the beautiful Sydney Goldstein Theater in front of an audience of Bay Area movers and shakers, many of whom I’m guessing think of themselves as upper middle class, I experienced a sort of moral curdling in the pit of my stomach. They loved it. They were laughing uproariously at Giridharadas’s quips about private jets and “leaning in” and all of his other favorite symbols of wrongheaded rich people. The billionaires were the buffoons, and the rest of us were sufficiently entertained.
It’s not that I don’t think we talked about important and interesting things that evening or that the audience failed to learn something that might change the way they do their work or — even better — live their lives. It’s just that I’m suspicious of any intervention that makes the moral complexity of our times seem like a burden exclusive to those with endless zeros in their offshore bank accounts. We are all implicated. It’s not just “them.” Likewise, if we walk away from this year of good conversation thinking that a simple road to social change lies in one sphere versus another, I think we will have missed the point.
It’s going to take all of us. It’s going to take a damn long time. And it’s not going to always feel good. And yet at the end of our days, being entangled in that effort, being humble and self-examining, experimenting with giving some things up will feel like the kind of good that’s born of doing what’s right.
Courtney E. Martin is the author of “Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists,” among other books, and the co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network.
