Anand Giridharadas says a lot of do-gooders are phonies.
He first made this charge three years ago at an Aspen Institute gathering of “entrepreneurial leaders” taking on “the world’s most intractable challenges,” as the think tank put it. In truth, Giridharadas said, almost all of the people in the room — including him — were fooling themselves. They might be doing noble work, but they were ducking society’s real problems.
If that speech was the equivalent of a prosecutor filing charges, Giridharadas has now, three years later, delivered his full indictment. His new book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, is a condemnation of the monied elites who he says dictate the terms of modern philanthropy — terms that much of the charity world has embraced or at least silently acquiesced to.
Their preferred solutions to today’s historic inequalities are balm and Band-Aids, not the radical, government-directed surgery that’s needed, he argues. That’s because elites are, consciously or unconsciously, using philanthropy to shore up the very status quo that has made them economic winners.
Giridharadas, a journalist who was educated in exclusive private universities (Harvard and Oxford) and briefly worked as a McKinsey consultant, counts himself as an elite do-gooder. And his book features profiles of individuals who, like him, are conflicted by the notion that their good works do more harm than good. The Ford Foundation’s Darren Walker and former President Clinton are among those whose inner turmoil is mined.
These sympathetic, if pointed, portraits contrast with Giridharadas’s denunciation of “swashbuckling” billionaire philanthropists who present themselves as society’s saviors yet fight the taxes, regulation, and government efforts that would fix the economy’s structural issues — and hurt their bank accounts. “Today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned in history,” he writes. “But it is also … among the more predatory in history.”
Giridharadas spoke with the Chronicle about his book. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Who are the elite you’re writing about?
The elite is the 1 percent, or the .01 percent or the .001 percent, who have thrived in what has been for perhaps the majority of Americans a bruising generation. This has been a period in which multiple, often uncorrelated things all hit at the same time.
We have lived through intense globalization. The rise of India and China, with like 2 or 3 billion people who weren’t really competing before suddenly competing for everything. The rise of women in this country and what that means for men. The rise of a service-oriented economy that has changed the structure of male employment. Demographic change. Technology that’s changed everything. All that to say: This has been a generation of like eight tsunamis.
Any one of these things happening over a 30-year or 40-year period would be a pretty remarkable development for a society to bear. But we’ve had all of them. And in that same period, the winners of market capitalism pushed for a vision in which government would do less and less and private actors would do more and more.
The government pulled back. That’s Ronald Reagan saying, “Government is not the solution; it’s the problem.” But it’s also Bill Clinton saying, “The era of big government is over.”
So you ended up with an elite that managed to profit from this generation of changes and capitalize on all that. And capitalize fabulously.
That didn’t happen naturally. The economy was set up in a way to benefit the elite through tax policies that were fought for, through regulatory policies that were fought for, through labor and wage policies that were fought for. It was set up to ensure that when progress rained on America, the very fortunate would harvest most of the rainwater.
You coined the term “MarketWorld” for the worldview that believes that government is inept, that change will result only from market forces and business ideas.
MarketWorld is a broad class of the winners of our age who seek to both do well and do good, but it also has an interwoven set of institutions — from Goldman Sachs and McKinsey to the Clinton Foundation to George Soros’s foundation to Silicon Valley tech companies — that say they’re changing the world. It is anyone who is endeavoring to make the world a better place while protecting their opportunity to make a killing. Anyone who is seeking to change the world while also keeping it the same enough to keep themselves on top.
Do the denizens of MarketWorld intentionally pursue pseudo-change? Or are some of them so influenced by MarketWorld thinking that they don’t realize how little good they’re doing.
I have met both the naive and the shrewd. Let’s play stereotypes for a second. In general, when I meet Wall Street finance types who are engaging in giving back through a Robin Hood Foundation gala or things like that, that’s the shrewd side. I think they are generally motivated by money. I think they are heavily into making more money. I think they understand that a certain amount of giving lubricates the machinery that allows them to keep doing what they’re doing.
On the other hand, go to the other coast. My sense of Mark Zuckerberg is that he’s not building Facebook to make a lot of money. I may be wrong, but I think he truly believes that every hour he spends building Facebook instead of being regulated by the government or worrying about compliance is better for the world because he can liberate humanity faster and more effectively at a greater scale.
He is naive because he is blind to the ways in which he is creating a power concentration that is not good for American democracy
Of those two — the naive and the shrewd — I’m more worried about the naive. With some very prominent exceptions, our society’s fairly well equipped to handle greedy people who are trying to make a buck and who give back a little to deflect from that. We regulate finance pretty heavily; we know what those guys are doing.
But I think our defenses as a society are much less sophisticated against people like Mark Zuckerberg. And today, if you look at the threat that Goldman Sachs poses versus Facebook, I would argue the Facebook threat is much more severe. It’s a portal into more than a billion minds. As a company, it has admitted that it could hugely influence elections simply by telling people from one side of the aisle that their friends voted.
A century ago, our society wrung its hands over oil and steel monopolies, but that worries me so much less than a monopoly over what is for many people their only source of information and the entire governance of their social network.
Are today’s elites more predatory than the robber barons of the Gilded Age?
The elites a century ago were nation builders. Yes, they were ruthless and predatory, but they also built the stuff that built America. Because of the industrial revolution, standards of living went up for all kinds of people.
Today, people have made $1 billion on Instagram. A lot of fortunes today are built on this money swilling around within the investor class and start-ups that make people like you and me have marginally easier lives while providing zero opportunity to average people. The robber barons of today are not nation builders.
Does that mean each individual is a predator? No, but it means that the institutions that you support and that act in your name are organized in ways that ensure that the future does not rain on everybody equally or even remotely fairly.
You write that the phoniness of social-change efforts led by elites contributed to Donald Trump’s election. Explain.
You cannot understand the rise of Trump without understanding the elite conquest and privatization of social change-making. I think a lot of rich Democrats laid the groundwork for Donald Trump in a couple of ways. By promulgating pseudo-change, they created space for him. All the nonsolutions to real problems meant that those problems festered over 30 or 40 years.
What is it that you want philanthropists to support?
I would urge them to think about making the shift from giving back to giving something up. Let me explain.
When you go to TED or Davos or those kinds of events, you hear a lot about: How do we raise more money for Africa? Well, that’s giving back. Giving something up would be supporting the idea of a global capital tax, which a lot of people have pushed.
If you are a rich person who is truly giving something up as opposed to giving back, you should fund research and efforts to find out: How would we do that? How would we implement it? You would find ways to provide air time for that idea, to give it some lift.
The Rockefellers and others funded research at the University of Iowa Child Welfare Research Station in the 1940s that tried to show that it was children’s home environment, not their heredity, that determines their success. They proved that if you changed the environment around children — gave them better toys, better ways to play, and such — that you have better outcomes. That was controversial proof that you could intervene in a poor child’s life, that their poverty was not a determinative factor.
Perhaps the government wouldn’t have funded that research; it was controversial. Yet it became the seed of Head Start. That is what a lot of philanthropists don’t understand: Use your power to do what outsiders are best at doing, which is playing in the mud and figuring something out. But don’t pursue it privately in ways that undercut government and work around it and allow it to continue atrophying and being dysfunctional. Use it to make government better.
Then let’s consider giving to charter schools. Giving to a charter school is “giving back,” it’s noble. But’s it’s solving a problem outside the channel of government. In fact, for the philanthropist, it’s taking public money to divert it to a private institution that you control. Government does not get stronger as a result of that. It doesn’t get more competent as a result of that.
Who is pursuing structural change in the way you’re suggesting?
The Ford Foundation under Darren Walker is looking at the structural causes of things as opposed to treating symptoms. Also, some philanthropists are focused on the census. They know that we undercount people and that we undercount minorities and poor people in ways that have enormous structural consequences. So they give to private organizations and NGOs that do research and submit addresses of people who may be uncounted or undercounted. Then the federal government checks those addresses and validates them.
This is a way to help the federal government fulfill its proper role and be better at it. If you find 2 million people more than would have been found otherwise, what is the net effect? The people who are found are presumably net recipients of government spending, and the philanthropists as a result presumably either get less in government resources or pay higher taxes.
How do leaders of charities who rely on MarketWorld philanthropists react to your thesis?
While I was writing, a lot of people who run those kind of charities wouldn’t talk to me. But as soon as the book was a wrap, they all came to me and said, “You have no idea. This is not even the half of it.” People tell me that they essentially feel hushed and silenced by receiving that help. I’ve had people tell me that after they got funding from a major institution, it was made clear to them that in their tweets they should not use the word “inequality” anymore. They should only talk about “opportunity.”
It’s a very happy, humbling experience to realize that almost everything I write about in this book is the inner monologue of almost everybody who works in this field. But they can’t afford to tell me this on the record. They can’t afford to say this on Twitter. They can’t afford to talk back to their donors.
MarketWorld sees government as ineffective and dysfunctional. Yet you argue that social change must be achieved through politics and law.
Government has been tremendously “othered” over the last generation. It’s been made to seem like some foreign entity that is invading our space and taking our guns and confiscating our money. But to quote political philosopher Chiara Cordelli, whom I close the book with: “The government is us.” So if your government’s dysfunctional, fix it.
Correction: A previous version of this article said that the research at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station occurred in the 1900s instead of the 1940s.
