Globalisation and trade liberalisation were supposed to make us all better-off through the mechanism of trickledown economics,’ said the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E Stiglitz. ‘What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics.’
While this period has been arguably one of the most innovative in human history, wealth inequality has widened. In a much-disputed Oxfam report last year, it was argued that a trend of ‘widening inequality’ was continuing, as 82 per cent of money generated in 2017 went to the richest 1 per cent of the global population. The nine richest men on the planet have more wealth than the poorest 4 billion people, and wealth is more concentrated at a company level, too. (...)
People are not happy with the status quo, and the super-rich are to blame. For Anand Giridharadas, author of the controversial Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, philanthropists must shoulder a large chunk of this blame. He believes elites such as Zuckerberg who speak the grand language of changing the world for the better are, in effect, making things worse by reinforcing the unjust systems that allowed them to acquire their wealth in the first instance.
The Facebook founder is one of many in this ‘new gilded age’ who are guilty of what Giridharadas, a former McKinsey consultant and New York Times columnist, calls philanthropic ‘fake change’. It’s also expressed by the likes of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire who announced a $2 billion fund to support homelessness and education while presiding over a company where workers reportedly live in fear of ‘losing their jobs just because they needed the loo’.
‘The modest good that philanthropy does do is in certain cases part of abetting the active commission of harm that is actually causing these problems in the first place,’ the author tells Spear’s over a coffee in central London. ‘The people who won from this age of extraordinary innovation, built, maintained and operated, wittingly and unwittingly, systems that actually deprive most people of progress.’
The paradox, as he sees it, is that ‘we encourage people to become really successful and have money to give away by being slash-and-burn capitalists on the way up’.
Giridharadas characterises this as: ‘Pay people as little as you can, evade and lobby against regulation as much as you can, be as monopolistic as you can, asphyxiate competition as much as you can – and pay as little taxes as you can.’ As a result, he argues that philanthropy is an ‘after the fact way of being kind to people’, when in fact ‘the most important ways to be kind to people are what you do in your day job’. It’s a symptom of the faults in contemporary capitalism. For all of Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic pledges, Giridharadas would rather he not ‘urinate on our democracies’ with his company. (...)
At January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, similar arguments were relayed in front of an elite audience. ‘Stop talking about philanthropy, start talking about taxes,’ declared Rutger Bregman, the author of Utopia for Realists. Bregman added: ‘Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit.’ Quite some opponent, however: institutional philanthropy is global and formidable. According to a report from UBS last year, its global reach encompasses more than 260,000 foundations in 39 countries.
Assets exceed $1.5 trillion, and expenditures exceed $150 billion a year. The wealth transfer, says Giridharadas, must shift away from philanthropy to a new species – from ‘giving back to giving up’. He’s talking about giving away not only money, but power too. Governments will need to be ‘crowded in’ to a discussion of regulation if the economic system is to be reformed in a rigorous way that offers a meaningful resolution to grievances expressed from the have-nots.
While this period has been arguably one of the most innovative in human history, wealth inequality has widened. In a much-disputed Oxfam report last year, it was argued that a trend of ‘widening inequality’ was continuing, as 82 per cent of money generated in 2017 went to the richest 1 per cent of the global population. The nine richest men on the planet have more wealth than the poorest 4 billion people, and wealth is more concentrated at a company level, too. (...)
People are not happy with the status quo, and the super-rich are to blame. For Anand Giridharadas, author of the controversial Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, philanthropists must shoulder a large chunk of this blame. He believes elites such as Zuckerberg who speak the grand language of changing the world for the better are, in effect, making things worse by reinforcing the unjust systems that allowed them to acquire their wealth in the first instance.The Facebook founder is one of many in this ‘new gilded age’ who are guilty of what Giridharadas, a former McKinsey consultant and New York Times columnist, calls philanthropic ‘fake change’. It’s also expressed by the likes of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire who announced a $2 billion fund to support homelessness and education while presiding over a company where workers reportedly live in fear of ‘losing their jobs just because they needed the loo’.
‘The modest good that philanthropy does do is in certain cases part of abetting the active commission of harm that is actually causing these problems in the first place,’ the author tells Spear’s over a coffee in central London. ‘The people who won from this age of extraordinary innovation, built, maintained and operated, wittingly and unwittingly, systems that actually deprive most people of progress.’
The paradox, as he sees it, is that ‘we encourage people to become really successful and have money to give away by being slash-and-burn capitalists on the way up’.
Giridharadas characterises this as: ‘Pay people as little as you can, evade and lobby against regulation as much as you can, be as monopolistic as you can, asphyxiate competition as much as you can – and pay as little taxes as you can.’ As a result, he argues that philanthropy is an ‘after the fact way of being kind to people’, when in fact ‘the most important ways to be kind to people are what you do in your day job’. It’s a symptom of the faults in contemporary capitalism. For all of Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic pledges, Giridharadas would rather he not ‘urinate on our democracies’ with his company. (...)
At January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, similar arguments were relayed in front of an elite audience. ‘Stop talking about philanthropy, start talking about taxes,’ declared Rutger Bregman, the author of Utopia for Realists. Bregman added: ‘Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit.’ Quite some opponent, however: institutional philanthropy is global and formidable. According to a report from UBS last year, its global reach encompasses more than 260,000 foundations in 39 countries.
Assets exceed $1.5 trillion, and expenditures exceed $150 billion a year. The wealth transfer, says Giridharadas, must shift away from philanthropy to a new species – from ‘giving back to giving up’. He’s talking about giving away not only money, but power too. Governments will need to be ‘crowded in’ to a discussion of regulation if the economic system is to be reformed in a rigorous way that offers a meaningful resolution to grievances expressed from the have-nots.
by Arun Kakar, Spear's | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Top 3 lessons on how not to waste your career on things that don’t change the world (YouTube).]
[ed. See also: Top 3 lessons on how not to waste your career on things that don’t change the world (YouTube).]
