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Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the Worldby Anand Giridharadas
This made me rethink the "Doing Good by Doing Well" movement and my role in it, and how to help the public sector take back what was seceded to the free market and wealthy philanthropists. Below are some notable quotes: “MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo….MarketWorld is a network and community, but it is also a culture and state of mind…. 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 systems 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 quota reform.” “Under the new theory, entrepreneurship can become synonymous with humanitarianism - and humanitarianism the greases the wheels of entrepreneurship…..Nowhere is this idea of entrepreneurship as humanitarianism more entrenched than Silicon Valley, where company founders regularly speak of themselves as liberators of mankind and of their technologies as intrinsically utopian.” “It is not inevitable that what passes for progress in our age involves the concentration of power into a small number of hands and the issuance of stories about the powerful being fighters for the little guy.” “The new win-win-ism is arguably a far more radical theory than the “invisible hand.” That old idea merely implied the capitalists should not be excessively regulated, lest the happy byproducts of their greed not reach the poor. The new idea goes further, in suggesting that capitalists are more capable than any government could ever be of solving the underdogs’ problems.” “It was curious to see the US government, arguably the most powerful institution in human history, reduced to being “a single actor” among actors, and one inadequate to modern problems. Building a continental highway network or waging a new deal was easy, according to this view. But today's problems were too hard for the government. They had therefore to be solved through partnerships among rich donors, and NGOs, and the public sector. There was no mention of the fact that this method, by putting the moneyed into a leadership position on public problem-solving, gave them the power to thwart solutions that threaten them.” |
