Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018)
Anand Giridharadas (1981)
288 pages
Despite being implicated in a dramatic rise in inequality that has led to increasingly dire economic and social disruptions, as well as in practices that have contributed to world-wide environmental degradation and hampered efforts to counter the existential crisis of climate change, free market capitalism has maintained an iron grip on the Western imagination as being the preeminent economic system.Certainly the argument has been made – perhaps most famously by Steven Pinker – that the ascendancy of free market capitalism has resulted in significant improvements in people’s lives over the past several centuries, reflected in improved standards of living and longer lifespans. According to this line of reasoning it has been a net benefit – despite its role in the current challenges and in the well-documented exploitation that accompanied colonization and empire, the destructive impacts of which continue to play out.
Whatever the final assessment of the historical benefits however, its apparent triumph over other economic systems has come to take on a kind of end-of-history aura in the past few decades, a conviction that the final summit in human economic development has been reached. So convincingly have its proponents inculcated recent generations with the belief in the supremacy of free market capitalism that questioning it often elicits the rote response, so, you prefer Soviet style communism?, as if that’s the only other option – shutting down even consideration of future alternatives.
Not surprisingly, the elite who have most benefited from the global expansion of this system have become the most passionate champions of its superiority. And, according to journalist Anand Giridharadas, their unshakable belief has recently led them to promote a self-serving form of market-based philanthropy. In his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, he presents a thorough and compelling examination of how the very people who have profited from the free market capitalist framework that has caused so many of the social, economic, and environmental problems that plague our societies now promote market approaches as the only viable path to solutions.Giridharadas labels this empire of believers convinced in the unique ability of business methods to solve social issues MarketWorld, which he describes as populated by
an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent motivations to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo … These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the system that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform. (30)Through an engaging combination of personal stories of people caught up in the MarketWorld philosophy – its champions as well as those conflicted by its contradictions – and big-picture descriptions of the MarketWorld milieu and ethos, he makes clear both the powerfully seductive nature of its beliefs and the strict requirements and constraints, in thought and deed, that it imposes on its disciples.
The origins of MarketWorld thinking, according to Giridharadas, can be found in the rise of “organized philanthropy” (156) as an expectation for the wealthy in the late 1800’s, a time of growing anger over the vast riches industrialists were amassing. Reminiscent of elite reaction in so many other similar episodes of agitation in American history – such as over working conditions, working hours or child labor – powerful business leaders found themselves unable to ignore the populist pressure, and so finally resolved to concede just enough of their advantage to reduce the boiling point.
In that vein, Andrew Carnegie wrote in 1889 what Giridharadas identifies as a pivotal essay, one that effectively brokered a deal between the masses and the wealthy elite. In it he argued that it is perfectly acceptable that those with the talent to make money not be constrained from doing so by government regulation or other limitation, but that in return they also had the responsibility to give back a part of their wealth for public works.
Thus the foundation was laid for the modern concept of philanthropy. However uncomfortable the wealthy came to feel about their largesse and the devastation caused in amassing it, they never-the-less held tightly to the advantages that had permitted their success. To assuage their guilt they embraced philanthropy – for many years expressed through privately funded infrastructure building, but now, according to Giridharadas, also through investment in (profitable) business solutions to social issues.
The consequence of the bargain Carnegie struck for the elite has been to unleash them to pursue ever more deregulation and tax reduction, which has undermined the government’s ability to resolve social and economic problems by weakening its authority and starving it of funds. And, having de-legitimized the government as an effective institution, the elite – the winners in the game of free market capitalism – have then argued that since government is so ineffective, society must needs turn to business people to fix its problems.
Not surprisingly, Giridharadas points out, the elite then pursue solutions consistent with their experience and personal goals – market-based, profit-making solutions. He notes that traditional social justice movements tend to pursue systemic changes that lead to a win-lose scenarios, such as workers getting more rights at the expense of business profits. MarketWorlders, on the other hand, pursue win-win scenarios, market-based solutions intended to help those impacted, but without changing the fundamental (and profitable) systems causing the original devastation, and allowing still (further) profit to be made.
When MarketWorlders develop such win-win solutions for solving social, economic, and environmental issues, they tend to build off of techniques and processes originally developed to address business problems and improve business efficiency. These types of protocols, writes Giridharadas, result in solutions that typically focus on dealing with the impact of problems at the scope of individuals, as opposed to correcting them at the systemic issues at a community level.
Giridharadas goes on to point out a broader predicament for society that arises from these protocols, referencing a 2011 essay by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and his colleague Mark Kramer:
“The capitalist system is under siege.” … “A big part of the problem lies with companies themselves,” [which] had become too focused on “optimizing short-term financial performance.” … Again and again, companies that employed droves of brilliant people and had high-priced outside advisers were making decisions that ignored “the well-being of their customers, the depletion of natural resources vital to their businesses, the viability of suppliers, and the economic distress of the communities in which they produce and sell.” Porter and Kramer were critiquing a culture that had overtaken the business world: the culture wrought by the atomizing protocols that obscured context. (144)And this business culture, Giridharadas argues, with the limitations and destructive consequences identified by Porter and Kramer, is nonetheless now promoted as the solution to the very same societal issues it has created.
Outside of the direct control exercised by the business community over what constitute viable approaches to solving social problems, Giridharadas notes that the MarketWorld ecosystem also leverages its monetary largesse to subtlety but effectively co-opt many of those who might otherwise pursue social justice movements focused on systemic change through governmental action – that is, who might put in jeopardy the profitable economic climate that currently exists for MarketWorlders.
He points out, for example, that college students in recent decades have
come of age [in] an era in which capitalism has no ideological opponent of similar stature and influence, and in which it is hard to escape the market’s vocabulary, values, and assumptions, even when pondering a topic such as social change. (17)In this environment, idealistic students who want to make a difference are naturally guided toward the idea of market-based solutions, rather than systemic change, as being most appropriate. Such thinking diverts them from government and non-profits, leading them instead to pursue business and management degrees, and eventually take jobs at consulting firms, having come to believe that such a path is the only viable one through which to make an impact.
The other group that MarketWorld quite effectively pulls into its orbit according to Giridharadas, are politicians, professors and others actively working on identifying and addressing systemic social issues. Using the experience of one professor in particular, but also providing examples of public intellectuals in other disciplines, he effectively ‘follows the money’ that leads such critics into the embrace of the MarketWorld firmament as so called thought leaders.
Those who successfully navigate this transition to becoming thought leaders are rewarded financially with on-going speaking engagements and involvement at MarketWorld events. In exchange they tone down their message and shift away from pointing out the systemic wrongs being perpetrated, instead focusing on “helpful solutions” (92) for the victims of these now anonymously-caused wrongs. Successful thought leaders quickly learn to not implicate and antagonize MarketWorlders as the source of these problems, and to not promote the kind of systemic solutions that are of a win-lose nature.
Giridharadas pulls together his main themes in an extended examination of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), a conference held yearly from 2005-2016, and for which Bill Clinton defined the goal as “require[ing] the rich and powerful people it brought together to commit, as a condition of showing up, to tangible projects for the global good.” (203) Focusing on the last of these conferences, which occurred in 2016 in the atmosphere of rising populism that led to the successful vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, Giridharadas demonstrates how the conference panels kept ‘on-message’ with MarketWorld thinking.
Referencing a session entitled Partnerships for Global Prosperity, for example, he writes that “[though] the panelists represented the left and the right … everybody onstage was part of the globalist, cosmopolitan, technocratic, win-win consensus, promoted and sponsored by MarketWorld.” (215) Similarly, he summarizes another panel as one “that could be counted on to provide the right amount of stimulation while worrying absolutely no one.” (228) Giridharadas concludes that these conferences demonstrated how Clinton, who “when he started public office … believed public problems were best solved through public service and collective action,” had completed the transition already begun during his time in office, to a belief in “the theory that it was preferable to solve problems through markets ... [with] win-win solutions.” (205)
Throughout his book Giridharadas’ examples focus on US leadership in the promulgation of the MarketWorld thinking. In that sense, his descriptions of the unshakable belief of MarketWorlders in the market as the solution to social issues, and also of the almost mystical status they give to applying the latest technologies to these problems – there’s an app for that – resonates all too well with author Kurt Andersen’s conception of the U.S. as Fantasyland. In Andersen’s eponymous book, subtitled How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History, he notes that
America was the dreamworld creation of fantasists, some religious and some out to get rich quick, all with a feverish appetite for the amazing. … Mix the Protestant impulse to find the meaning and purpose in everything with the Enlightenment’s empiricism, and you get our American mania for connecting all the dots, irrationality in rationalist drag. (427-428, Fantasyland)
MarketWorlders, with their credulous – fantasist – belief in the supremacy of technology-centric, market-based solutions, could be considered to fit in comfortably as citizens of Andersen’s Fantasyland empire. (My review of Andresen’s book at right.)Despite their success, MarketWorlders have faced push-back in recent years in the form of populist uprisings. Giridharadas notes that suddenly, “the world’s elites were being revolted against, and the revolts perhaps had something to do with how disconnected they were from the realities of others.” (210) To describe how MarketWorld elites have come to be viewed, he borrows historian Niall Ferguson’s term rootless cosmopolitans, a term that hearkens back to a damning observation by writer Bill Kauffman in Utne Reader in 2000:
For almost 60 years, the placeless have waged war on the rooted, stealing their children, devastating their neighborhoods, wiping out local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. What we have is class war – though this war has never been acknowledged because the casualties are places and attachments and sentiments; nothings, really; everythings, in fact – waged by the mobile against the immobile, by the cosmopolitan against the rooted, and the winners are he professionals, people so depraved that they would actually move to a different place for mere money. How bizarre.
It could well be, however, that these rootless cosmopolitans – Kaufmann’s depraved – will finally have the last laugh, beyond the current period of populist revolt. The historian Noah Yuval Harari, in his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, extrapolates forward current trends in the development of information technology (“info-tech”) such as artificial intelligence driven automation and data analysis, and biological technology (“bio-tech”) such as medical treatments and genetic enhancement, toward a potential future in which the elite create a self-reinforcing benefit-structure that allows them to extend their existing advantages over the rest of the population to ever more extreme levels, ultimately allowing them to live in entirely self-sufficient, isolated communities. Unless we develop paths that avoid this dystopian future, Harari argues, the masses will become “expendable” to an extent not seen before:
The two processes together – bioengineering coupled with the rise of AI – might therefore result in the separation of humankind into a small class of superhumans and a massive underclass of useless Homo sapiens. To make an already ominous situation even worse, as the masses lose their economic importance and political power, the state might lose at least some of the incentive to invest in their health, education, and welfare. It’s very dangerous to be redundant. The future of the masses will then depend on the goodwill of a small elite. Maybe there is goodwill for a few decades. But in a time of crisis – like climate catastrophe – it would be very tempting and easy to toss the superfluous people overboard.
In countries such as France and New Zealand, with a long tradition of liberal beliefs and welfare-state practices, perhaps the elite will go on taking care of the masses even when it doesn’t need them. In the more capitalist United States, however, the elite might use the first opportunity to dismantle what’s left of the American welfare state.” (75, Harari; my review of his book linked to at right.)
Certainly the shifting emphasis toward addressing social issues through market-based solutions that focus on making a profit (and that are simply given up on if they don’t) subverts governments’ ability to prevent, or at least ameliorate the worst impacts of the bleak future Harari imagines possible.
The question, finally, is will populist unrest sufficiently threaten the elite’s hold on power to an extent that forces them to back down from the MarketWorld ideology and to allow governments to lead systemic change? Or have we as a civilization already passed the point of no return toward Harari’s dystopic vision of a future with an isolated elite and “redundant … superfluous” masses?
Similar to Harari, Giridharadas argues that the social, economic and environmental crises we face must be addressed through a restoration of our “shared democratic institutions,” which represent all of us as “free and equal citizens.” Instead of allowing the denizens for MarketWorld – the “winners” in the current system – to continue denigrating and delegitimize governments in order to further their own profitability under the pretense of beneficence, he calls for a strengthening of our “common institutions,” noting that “when a society solves a problem politically and systemically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen.” (262) Only in this way, he argues, can we have the opportunity to achieve a more successful, sustainable and socially just society.
In the Acknowledgements at the end of the book, Giridharadas concedes his own flirtation with becoming a MarketWorld thought leader, a path that eventually led him to question the fundamental assumptions behind its approach to solving social and economic issues, and finally to write a book on what he had learned. This insider view, as he points out, not only gave him access to the people that inhabit MarketWorld, but also a direct understanding of the seductive nature of its promises and the well-defined limits of what it consents to consider.
The result is an engrossing and convincing critique of the MarketWorld ethos. Giridharadas himself views his book as a step on the path to weakening its orthodoxy, describing his text as “a letter to the public, urging them to reclaim world-changing from those who have co-opted it.” (268) He bluntly calls out the status quo, writing:
if anyone thinks that the MarketWorld complex of people and institutions and ideas that failed to prevent this mess even as it harped on making a difference, and whose neglect fueled populism’s flames, is also the solution, wake them up by tapping them, gently, with this book. For the inescapable answer to the overwhelming question – Where do we go from here? – is: somewhere other than where we have been going, led by people other than the people who have been leading us. (246)
Other notes and information:
Read quotes from this book
Michael Porter’s conclusion as summarized above from Giridharadas’ book – that the “capitalist system is under siege” – has been suggested by a growing number of authors in recent years. While some, like Porter in the quotes included above, imply that the problems lie in the current practices of capitalism, others go farther, arguing that the capitalist system is, in fact, fundamentally unsustainable.
This latter point has been made, for example, by Martin Hägglund in his book This Life, in which he discusses what he refers to as the immanent contradictions in the capitalist system, which he argues originate from the fact that “under capitalism, all questions of what we need, what we want, and what is durable, must be subordinated to the question of what is profitable.” (250) Distinguishing between “socially necessary labor time” as the time we work to survive (to secure food and shelter), and “socially available free time” as the time we work on the things that bring meaning to our lives, Hägglund states that
The very calculation of value under capitalism, then, is inimical to the actualization of freedom. Indeed, the deepest contradiction of capitalism resides in its own measure of value. Capitalism employs the measure of value that is operative in the realm of necessity [necessary labor time] and treats it as though it were a measure of freedom [available free time]. Capitalism is therefore bound to increase the realm of necessity and decrease the realm of freedom. (258)
Through references to the work of Martin Luther King Jr., Hägglund make his ideas concrete:
the problem of value becomes specially manifest in the replacement of living labor time with nonliving, automated production time. In his speeches and books, King keeps returning to automation as a double-edged phenomenon. The automation of previously necessary labor should be emancipatory, since it liberates us from the need to expend our lifetime on tedious forms of work. Yet, under capitalism, automation does not lead to the emancipation of workers but rather to their unemployment, which makes them available for further exploitation in temporary jobs and with lower wages. “As machines replace men, we must again question whether the depth of our social thinking matches the growth of our technological creativity,” King emphasizes in a [1962] speech. (343)
And, to be clear, for Hägglund the immanent contradictions of capitalism as a sustainable system are not at all tied to a few greedy profiteers:
The privileging of the profit motive is not a moral failure of individuals under capitalism but expresses what we are collectively committed to in being committed to capitalism and its necessary requirement of an annual growth of value. (250)
Given this inherent goal of the system, he argues that ‘fixing’ capitalism is therefore not a viable option.Hägglund’s critique of capitalism forms just one part of a fascinating exploration of what it means to find value in one’s life. My review of his book is linked to at right.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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