In July of 2015, writer and ex-McKinsey consultant Anand Giridharadas addressed a room full of elites and their good company in Aspen, Colorado. He was a fellow with The Aspen Institute, a centrist think-tank, which was hosting an “ideas festival.” Giridharadas’ talk took aim at what he dubbed the “Aspen Consensus,” an ideological paradigm in which elites “talk a lot about giving more” and not “about taking less.” He earnestly questioned the social change efforts and “win-win” do-goodery promulgated at the business-friendly get-together. In the speech, Giridharadas walked a thin line: both praising the Aspen community which “meant so much” to him and his wife while also laying into its culture and commandments. He dropped the mic: “We know that enlightened capital didn’t get rid of the slave trade,” and suggested that the “rich fought for policies that helped them stack up, protect and bequeath [their] money: resisting taxes on inheritances and financial transactions, fighting for carried interest to be taxed differently from income, insisting on a sacred right to conceal money in trusts, shell companies and weird islands.”
The talk received a standing ovation, though certainly ruffled some feathers as well. An attendee confided in Giridharadas that he was speaking to their central struggle in life and others gave him icy glares and called him an “asshole” at the bar. The conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the speech — which had hardly prescribed any policies — and clearly felt so threatened by it that his resulting column was titled “Two Cheers for Capitalism,” and attempted, albeit poorly, to nip any systemic critique of his favored economic system in the bud. But Brooks too realized that there would be a “coming debate about capitalism,” and his column prompted Giridharadas to post his talk online, stirring lots of debate — not quelching it.
Since then the debate has only gotten louder: from Bernie Sanders running as an open socialist on the Democratic ticket to a Gallup poll in August, which found that fewer than half of millennials view capitalism in a favorable light. Meanwhile, the elites whom Giridharadas addressed in Aspen three years ago have seen brutal blows to their centrist, pro-market worldview at the ballot in the form of both Brexit and Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016. Giridharadas’ talk was prescient in 2015, noting that “history may not be as kind to us as we hope it will,” adding that “in the final analysis our role in the inequities of our age may not be remembered well.” He was right. And the time couldn’t be more apt for a book-length treatment of his skewering critique of liberal-leaning, market-friendly philanthropy and the grand delusions used to justify and promote it.
In August Giridharadas released Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, which is a journalistic look at a culture of privatized change-making, where un-elected elites — unmarred by the messiness of democracy — try to tinker with problems they likely had a hand in causing. “There is no denying that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned in history,” Giridharadas writes in the book’s introduction. “But it is also, by the cold logic of the numbers, among the more predatory in history,” noting the profound dissonance that drives his project. He suggests that those peddling what he calls a “false dogma” as confining their thinking within a narrow framework where it’s acceptable to promote “actionable tweaks rather than structural change.”
Although Winners Take All aims at today’s upper-crust in a world where wealth has continued to calcify into stock dividends and plush inheritances of the global one-percent since the 2008 global financial crisis, this critique is hardly new. To the contrary, as Giridharadas points out, pointed rebuttals of philanthropy — and the economic conditions that make it possible — have been a staple of left-wing criticism since Andrew Carnegie penned his infamous “Gospel of Wealth,” the founding text of modern philanthropy (or plutocrat P.R., depending on your perspective). Where Carnegie saw vast inequality as a sign of progress, and maintained the paternalistic belief that him and his ilk were the best stewards of their vast wealth, instead of the toiling masses who would waste it “in the indulgence of appetite,” one critic found his “Gospel” — and worldview — to be “repugnant to the whole idea of democracy.” Martin Luther King Jr., likewise, suggested that “Philanthropy is commendable but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” (...)
The book amounts to a collection of vignettes that follow people, like both Giridharadas and Walker, who landed in this elite bubble — either by luck or circumstance — and had doubts about its worldview. A recent-college-grad-turned-McKinsey-consultant-turned-Obama-Foundation-staffer who questioned the market’s ability to create social justice; a billionaire heiress who felt guilty about her inheritance but wouldn’t take a position on whether the wealthy should be taxed more; a social psychologist from Harvard Business School who gave a Ted Talk in conflict with her more systems-driven feminist beliefs — suggesting that women should alter their body language to achieve power instead of challenging it; the guy who booked her on the Ted stage grappled with his organization’s role in the rise of authoritarianism, and on and on. All of these various characters find themselves in what Giridharadas dubs “MarketWorld,” a kind of Disneyfied cultural neoliberalism — an assessment gained by looking through the prism of how elites see themselves, rather than how left-leaning academics and millenial socialists see them — that subsists on cheap bromides about “changing the world” peddled by glib “thought leaders” on the monied conference circuit.
Giridharadas, fittingly a former New York Times op-ed columnist and two-time Ted Talker, is very fascinated by the intellectual climate that midwives the MarketWorld ideology. In the book’s acknowledgements he cites a passage by French economist Thomas Piketty that inspired Winners. “Whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification.” This apparatus of justification is undoubtedly, and admittedly, the book’s subject, casting a very large net on everything from Silicon Valley and consulting to “thought leadership” and philanthropy. (...)
The contempt for democracy in order to preserve elite power is the through line for today’s capitalist order. “This stemmed in part,” according to a reviewer of MacLean’s book, “from Calhoun onward, from a conviction that the polity could be cleft between ‘makers and takers,’ and that it was the ‘takers’ who, by employing state power to tax wealth and income, were doing the exploiting.” Such naked disdain for “takers” exists well within the bounds of MarketWorld today. Giridharadas interviews tech journalist Greg Ferenstein, who has given the old-hat pro-market, anti-poor people ideology a software update: calling it “Optimism.” The idea that government should be accountable to business and that people who are “unintelligent, poor, indigent, unmotivated…will be left behind” is hardly breaking any ground, though a striking example of the ideologies being espoused in Silicon Valley. But perhaps the greatest indication of this through line might be in how elites have eschewed the local in favor of “globalism.” Giridharadas chronicles how today’s elites are no longer accountable to the structures of democracy; they fancy themselves “global citizens” — unbound by place, laws, or any other pesky roadblocks, and thus no longer part of the demos. While this might seem a minor cultural shift, these changing allegiances are what allow MarkerWorlders to escape society — and remake it from above in their image.
by Will Meyer, Longreads | Read more:
Image:FPG / Getty, Collage by Katie Kosma
[ed. See also: The bad behavior of the richest: what I learned from wealth managers]
The talk received a standing ovation, though certainly ruffled some feathers as well. An attendee confided in Giridharadas that he was speaking to their central struggle in life and others gave him icy glares and called him an “asshole” at the bar. The conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the speech — which had hardly prescribed any policies — and clearly felt so threatened by it that his resulting column was titled “Two Cheers for Capitalism,” and attempted, albeit poorly, to nip any systemic critique of his favored economic system in the bud. But Brooks too realized that there would be a “coming debate about capitalism,” and his column prompted Giridharadas to post his talk online, stirring lots of debate — not quelching it.Since then the debate has only gotten louder: from Bernie Sanders running as an open socialist on the Democratic ticket to a Gallup poll in August, which found that fewer than half of millennials view capitalism in a favorable light. Meanwhile, the elites whom Giridharadas addressed in Aspen three years ago have seen brutal blows to their centrist, pro-market worldview at the ballot in the form of both Brexit and Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016. Giridharadas’ talk was prescient in 2015, noting that “history may not be as kind to us as we hope it will,” adding that “in the final analysis our role in the inequities of our age may not be remembered well.” He was right. And the time couldn’t be more apt for a book-length treatment of his skewering critique of liberal-leaning, market-friendly philanthropy and the grand delusions used to justify and promote it.
In August Giridharadas released Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, which is a journalistic look at a culture of privatized change-making, where un-elected elites — unmarred by the messiness of democracy — try to tinker with problems they likely had a hand in causing. “There is no denying that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned in history,” Giridharadas writes in the book’s introduction. “But it is also, by the cold logic of the numbers, among the more predatory in history,” noting the profound dissonance that drives his project. He suggests that those peddling what he calls a “false dogma” as confining their thinking within a narrow framework where it’s acceptable to promote “actionable tweaks rather than structural change.”
Although Winners Take All aims at today’s upper-crust in a world where wealth has continued to calcify into stock dividends and plush inheritances of the global one-percent since the 2008 global financial crisis, this critique is hardly new. To the contrary, as Giridharadas points out, pointed rebuttals of philanthropy — and the economic conditions that make it possible — have been a staple of left-wing criticism since Andrew Carnegie penned his infamous “Gospel of Wealth,” the founding text of modern philanthropy (or plutocrat P.R., depending on your perspective). Where Carnegie saw vast inequality as a sign of progress, and maintained the paternalistic belief that him and his ilk were the best stewards of their vast wealth, instead of the toiling masses who would waste it “in the indulgence of appetite,” one critic found his “Gospel” — and worldview — to be “repugnant to the whole idea of democracy.” Martin Luther King Jr., likewise, suggested that “Philanthropy is commendable but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.” (...)
The book amounts to a collection of vignettes that follow people, like both Giridharadas and Walker, who landed in this elite bubble — either by luck or circumstance — and had doubts about its worldview. A recent-college-grad-turned-McKinsey-consultant-turned-Obama-Foundation-staffer who questioned the market’s ability to create social justice; a billionaire heiress who felt guilty about her inheritance but wouldn’t take a position on whether the wealthy should be taxed more; a social psychologist from Harvard Business School who gave a Ted Talk in conflict with her more systems-driven feminist beliefs — suggesting that women should alter their body language to achieve power instead of challenging it; the guy who booked her on the Ted stage grappled with his organization’s role in the rise of authoritarianism, and on and on. All of these various characters find themselves in what Giridharadas dubs “MarketWorld,” a kind of Disneyfied cultural neoliberalism — an assessment gained by looking through the prism of how elites see themselves, rather than how left-leaning academics and millenial socialists see them — that subsists on cheap bromides about “changing the world” peddled by glib “thought leaders” on the monied conference circuit.
Giridharadas, fittingly a former New York Times op-ed columnist and two-time Ted Talker, is very fascinated by the intellectual climate that midwives the MarketWorld ideology. In the book’s acknowledgements he cites a passage by French economist Thomas Piketty that inspired Winners. “Whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification.” This apparatus of justification is undoubtedly, and admittedly, the book’s subject, casting a very large net on everything from Silicon Valley and consulting to “thought leadership” and philanthropy. (...)
The contempt for democracy in order to preserve elite power is the through line for today’s capitalist order. “This stemmed in part,” according to a reviewer of MacLean’s book, “from Calhoun onward, from a conviction that the polity could be cleft between ‘makers and takers,’ and that it was the ‘takers’ who, by employing state power to tax wealth and income, were doing the exploiting.” Such naked disdain for “takers” exists well within the bounds of MarketWorld today. Giridharadas interviews tech journalist Greg Ferenstein, who has given the old-hat pro-market, anti-poor people ideology a software update: calling it “Optimism.” The idea that government should be accountable to business and that people who are “unintelligent, poor, indigent, unmotivated…will be left behind” is hardly breaking any ground, though a striking example of the ideologies being espoused in Silicon Valley. But perhaps the greatest indication of this through line might be in how elites have eschewed the local in favor of “globalism.” Giridharadas chronicles how today’s elites are no longer accountable to the structures of democracy; they fancy themselves “global citizens” — unbound by place, laws, or any other pesky roadblocks, and thus no longer part of the demos. While this might seem a minor cultural shift, these changing allegiances are what allow MarkerWorlders to escape society — and remake it from above in their image.
by Will Meyer, Longreads | Read more:
Image:FPG / Getty, Collage by Katie Kosma
[ed. See also: The bad behavior of the richest: what I learned from wealth managers]
