Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  The widespread faith in win-wins is part of why Hilary Cohen had ended up at McKinsey. It was at work every time one bought a pair of cloth shoes and took comfort in knowing that another pair of shoes would soon be slipped onto a poor person’s feet. It could be detected in a poster on a college campus: “Research shows that giving makes you happier. Be selfish & give.” It could be seen in the buzzy idea of the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid,” promoted by the late management scholar C. K. Prahalad, who promised big business “a win-win situation: not only do corporations tap into a vibrant market, but by treating the poor as consumers they are no longer treated with indignity; they become empowered customers.” It could be, for a World Bank adviser on refugee issues, a vital selling point for what once might have been advocated purely on compassionate grounds: “Getting Syrians back to work—a win-win for host countries and the refugees.” To gain cachet in a world conquered by market thinking, one of the great humanitarian disasters since the Second World War needed to be marketed as an opportunity for the helpers, too.

  What threads through these various ideas is a promise of painlessness. What is good for me will be good for you. And it is understandable that Asher had been drawn into this way of thinking. You could help people in ways that let you keep living your life as is, while shedding some of your guilt.

  As Asher’s example shows, there were many genuine win-wins awaiting discovery. But some amount of skepticism was warranted as well. When winners like Asher stepped in to solve a problem as they assessed it, using the tools they had and knew how to use, they often overlooked the roots of the problem and their involvement in it.

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  Justin Rosenstein seemed to agonize far more than Asher had about the best way to help people. Although he was largely unknown to the broader world, he was a star in Silicon Valley, instrumental in inventing several of its seminal technologies. A programming and product design phenom, he helped start Google Drive and was the coinventor of Gmail chat. Then he moved to Facebook, where he was the coinventor of Pages and the “like” button. More than a billion people were regularly using tools that Rosenstein crafted. He had been rewarded with stock said to be worth tens of millions of dollars. He wasn’t yet thirty.

  Rosenstein now faced a dilemma not uncommon among young entrepreneurs who have found early success: what to do with his money and his remaining decades on earth. He lived very modestly. He owned an iPhone that was several years out of date, drove a Honda Civic, and lived in a shared cooperative home in San Francisco with more than a dozen other people, many of whom worked in fields like art, activism, and counseling and couldn’t fathom his level of resources. When he had the option to upgrade from coach to business class, he wondered how many lives could be saved by investing the extra cost in malaria nets. He wanted to give most of his money away to philanthropic causes.

  Rosenstein considers himself to be deeply spiritual, which made him determined to serve others. “I think we’re all in this together in a really deep sense,” he said late one afternoon in San Francisco. “Somewhere deep down, we all actually share the same soul that we’re basically just—I avoid the word God generally, but like consciousness—because we have basically one consciousness looking out through many different people.” Rosenstein didn’t believe in an abstract, external God so much as in other people: “It feels as though the deeper I go into the nature of my being, I come to a place where we all connect.”

  Guided by MarketWorld’s win-win values, Rosenstein decided to improve the world by starting a company, Asana, which sold work collaboration software to companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Dropbox. Like Asher, he was eager to help, but it was hard to step outside of the realm of his assumptions and tools. He believed that Asana’s software could be his most forceful way of improving the human condition. “When you think about the nature of human progress,” he said, “when you think about the nature of, like, whether it’s improving health care or improving government or making art or doing biotechnology or doing traditional philanthropy—whatever it is, all the things that can move the human condition forward, or maybe the world condition forward, all are about groups of people working together. And so we were, like, if we really could build a universal piece of software that could make everyone in the world who’s trying to do positive things 5 percent faster, right?—I guess we’ll also make terrorists 5 percent faster—but on the whole, we think that that’s going to be really, really net-positive.”

  Rosenstein’s desire to improve people’s lives by making everyone a little more productive was noble. But one of the central economic challenges now facing his country is the remarkable stagnation in wages for half of Americans despite the remarkable growth in productivity. As the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, puts it in a paper, “Since 1973, hourly compensation of the vast majority of American workers has not risen in line with economy-wide productivity. In fact, hourly compensation has almost stopped rising at all.” The institute observes that the average American worker grew 72 percent more productive between 1973 and 2014, but the median worker’s pay rose only about 9 percent in this time. In short, America doesn’t have a problem of lagging productivity so much as a problem of the gains from productivity being captured by elites. The increasingly extractive financial sector is in part responsible. That sector could be arranged in other ways, including tighter regulations on trading, higher taxes on financiers, stronger labor protections to protect workers from layoffs and pension raiding by private equity owners, and incentives favoring job-creating investment over mere speculation. Such measures could help to solve the underlying problem by preventing the capture of the gains from growing productivity. Absent such measures, an initiative like Rosenstein’s wouldn’t bring the change it promised. It would serve to further increase an abundant thing likely to be hoarded by elites (productivity), instead of a scarce thing that millions need more of (wages).

  The almost religious faith in the win-win helped to explain choices like Rosenstein’s. “What’s amazing about tech—and there’s other industries like this, but I think it’s something that is particularly common in tech—is that there are so many opportunities to have your cake and eat it, too, right?” he said. “There’s a stereotype that you have to choose in life between doing good and making money. I think for a lot of people that’s a real choice. They don’t happen to have the skill set where there’s a nice intersection. But for technology, there are a significant number of opportunities—Google search being the most massive example of all time—where we simultaneously are doing something lucrative and really good for the world. And, in fact, I think that a lot of times you can get in situations where they’re all aligned, where the bigger the reach of the good you’re doing, the more money you’ll make.” It was a vision in which social justice and the concentration of power would somehow increase in tandem, ad infinitum.

  “This is a great example where you’ve got to struggle, you’ve got to think really carefully, and it’s complicated, it’s messy, it’s super easy to rationalize,” he continued. “I’m sure I’ve done this at times, where I rationalize, like, ‘Oh, well, this is going to be better for the world,’ when really it’s just going to make more money. But on the other hand, what’s cool about for-profit endeavors—there’s a lot of things for-profit endeavors are not suited to do, where you need the nonprofit sector, you need the government sector. But one of the things the for-profit sector is great at is self-sustaining, because you don’t have to constantly be fund-raising.”

  This idea was important to many MarketWorlders: Business solutions could, despite appearances, be more compassionate than the alternatives because the profits they paid the winners assured their continued beneficence. The ideal business, Rosenstein said, has both revenue (“the value that it is capturing”) and positive externalities (“the value that it creates in the world that it’s not capturing”). Google’s
ad sales are revenue; the way it has made it effortless for anyone, anywhere, to look up anything is a positive externality. “In the case where you can create a system where you have both,” he said, “where every dollar you make is also a positive externality, what’s amazing about that is that now you can keep investing in that engine. You can do bigger things. You can reinvest. You can hire great people.”

  That business was a self-sustaining way to do good was especially convenient given Rosenstein’s assessment of his peers. “The truth is, I’ve done a lot of research on this: Very few people are willing to make a big financial sacrifice to do good,” he said. “Look at millennials. The majority of millennials want to have a job with meaning, but they’re not willing to sacrifice having a good income for it. I do not blame them. I might feel the same way; it’s very easy to feel that way. But I think there’s more opportunities than people expect where we don’t have to choose, where you can make good money and be doing good in the world.”

  Rosenstein’s faith in such progress allowed him to overlook unintended consequences. When you build the kinds of tools that he believed in, you cannot know how people are going to use them. Rosenstein admitted as much. He sees teenagers obsessed with and anxious over the number of likes that their Facebook posts attract, and he wonders about his legacy. He could also be blind to the ways in which the companies he had served, Google and Facebook, could do well and do good, and at the same time accumulate a level of power—over information and news in a free society, over people’s private details and whereabouts and the content of their every conversation—that is dangerous and quasi-monopolistic and needs to be watched over, if not broken apart.

  When you ignore these kinds of concerns, it becomes easier for Asana to do well by doing good, the Silicon Valley way:

  By helping people work together more easily, we make it more effortless for groups to coordinate their collective action, so that they can achieve their goals and manifest the missions that drive them. In the next few years, we’ll reach millions of people working in groups to improve the world we all share. Through them, we’ll improve the lives of every person on the planet.

  It was an inspiring vision, notable for its appropriation of “collective action”—a term that traditionally connoted unions and movements and other forms of citizens making common cause in the public sphere. The vision reflected a bitter truth: Often, when people set out to do the thing they are already doing and love to do and know how to do, and they promise grand civilizational benefits as a spillover effect, the solution is oriented around the solver’s needs more than the world’s—the win-wins, purporting to be about others, are really about you.

  Later that evening, Rosenstein drove from Asana to Agape, the communal home where he lives. It is an ornate and stately old mansion, the walls adorned with intricately carved wood. People were making their way to the dining room, where two tables had been pushed together, around which was a mix of chairs and an old church pew. As people met, they tended to hug. Many were young, waifish creative types for whom the modest rent was probably a stretch. It was a community that Rosenstein had cofounded and that he cherished. The group sat and held hands, and someone said a secular grace, and then everyone dove into the cartons of Cambodian takeout.

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  Behind Asher’s Portfolios with Purpose, Rosenstein’s Asana, and countless other similarly minded initiatives, there stands a radical theory. It is a new twist on an old idea about the beneficial side effects of self-interest. The long-standing idea took root in the emerging commercial societies of urban Europe a few centuries ago. Its most famous statement is Adam Smith’s declaration about the social benefits of human selfishness:

  It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

  This idea that self-love trickles down to others is an early ancestor of win-win-ism. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith elaborates on the idea with his famous metaphor of the “invisible hand.” The rich, he writes,

  in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.

  The selfish pursuit of prosperity, Smith is arguing, takes care of everyone just as well as actually attempting to take care of everyone. From this general idea familiar theories derive. Trickle-down economics. A rising tide lifts all boats. Entrepreneurs expand the pie. Smith tells the rich man to focus on running his business on the assumption that positive social consequences will occur automatically, as a happy by-product of his selfishness. Through the magic of the “free market”—an oxymoron ever since the first regulation was imposed on it—he unwittingly arranges for the common good.

  The kind of win-win represented by Portfolios with Purpose and Asana—as well as the new impact investment funds pledging to combine strong returns with poverty alleviation, and the new social enterprises, and the bottom-of-the-pyramid retail plays—innovated on this tradition by turning it upside down. The new win-win-ism was built on the same assumption of harmony in the interests of the winners and the losers, the rich and the poor, but it rejected the idea of social good as a by-product, a spillover. The winners of commerce were no longer told to ignore the social good and keep their contribution to it indirect and unintentional. They were to focus on social improvement directly and intentionally. Rosenstein shouldn’t just start a software company, but one he thought most likely to improve the condition of humankind.

  In the journey from Adam Smith’s theory to that of the win-win, the entrepreneur is transformed from an incidental booster of the common good into a unique figure specially capable of tending to it. Business goes from being a sector with positive social benefits to being the principal vessel for human betterment. “Businesses acting as business, not as charitable donors, are the most powerful force [my italics] for addressing the pressing issues we face,” the Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter declared in one formulation of the idea. “Business is the ultimate positive-sum game, in which it is possible to create a Win for all the stakeholders of the business,” John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods Market, and Raj Sisodia write in a book that has become a bible of the win-win faith, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business.

  The new win-win-ism is arguably a far more radical theory than the “invisible hand.” That old idea merely implied that capitalists should not be excessively regulated, lest the happy by-products 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.

  An influential statement of this new creed is found in the book Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World. Published in the autumn of 2008, as millions of people watched the economies around them collapse and could have been excused for feeling that the rich were ruining the world, the book made the case for the wealthy as saviors. The authors, Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, stress that this salvation comes not in the old, happy-by-product way, but directly, when the winners assume leadership of social change:

  Today’s philanthrocapitalists see a world full of big problems that they, and perhaps only they, can and must put right. Surely, they say, we can save the lives of millions of children who die each year in poo
r countries from poverty or diseases that have been eradicated in the rich world. And back home in the United States or Europe, it is we who must find ways to make our education systems work for every child.

  While Adam Smith’s ideas were based on an analysis of how markets work, this new idea is based on a view of the moneyed themselves. Bishop and Green write that the “self-made” people who built their fortunes amid “the surge in entrepreneurial wealth in the last thirty years” are different from winners past, and not just because of their willingness to help others by parting with wealth they only just acquired. “Entrepreneurs are also, by nature, problem-solvers and relish the challenge of taking on tough issues,” Bishop and Green write. They describe “philanthrocapitalists” as

  “hyperagents” who have the capacity to do some essential things far better than anyone else. They do not face elections every few years, like politicians, or suffer the tyranny of shareholder demands for ever-increasing quarterly profits, like CEOs of most public companies. Nor do they have to devote vast amounts of time and resources to raising money, like most heads of NGOs. That frees them to think long-term, to go against conventional wisdom, to take up ideas too risky for government, to deploy substantial resources quickly when the situation demands it.