Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  For Carnegie, then, inequality was a brief state between the taking and giving phases. Giving back, he wrote, is “the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of the rich and the poor—a reign of harmony.” This idea of temporary inequality is vital: For Carnegie, inequality is transitional—a necessity for progress, but soon reversible thanks to the fruits of that progress.

  Carnegie seemed to anticipate the objection that the poor might not need so much help had they been better paid. Dripping with paternalism, he defended the necessity of temporary inequality. “Wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves,” he wrote. By “small sums,” he makes clear in the ensuing sentences, he is referring to wages. Citing the case of Peter Cooper—industrialist turned philanthropist and the founder and namesake of Cooper Union in Manhattan—Carnegie wrote:

  Much of this sum if distributed in small quantities among the people, would have been wasted in the indulgence of appetite, some of it in excess, and it may be doubted whether even the part put to the best use, that of adding to the comforts of the home, would have yielded results for the race, as a race, at all comparable to those which are flowing and are to flow from the Cooper Institute from generation to generation.

  Carnegie believed that he could not pay workers well, could not be sentimental about how many hours of work were too many, for that would hurt the public interest. But he could give back to the workers. He financed libraries, museums, and other public amenities for the eventual pleasure and edification of his underpaid workers. He wrote:

  Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself.

  This is the compromise, the truce, distilled: Leave us alone in the competitive marketplace, and we will tend to you after the winnings are won. The money will be spent more wisely on you than it would be by you. You will have your chance to enjoy our wealth, in the way we think you should enjoy it.

  Here lay the almost constitutional principles that one day would govern MarketWorld giving: the idea that after-the-fact benevolence justifies anything-goes capitalism; that callousness and injustice in the cutthroat souk are excused by later philanthropy; that giving should not only help the underdogs but also, and more important, serve to keep them out of the top dogs’ hair—and, above all, that generosity is a substitute for and a means of avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and a fairer distribution of power.

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  One hundred twenty-seven years after Carnegie’s essay was published, everyone at a charity gala in New York seems to have internalized its core principles. The organization raising money helps troubled, vulnerable, and poor New Yorkers find work, housing, skills, companionship, and safety. The whole night is divided into two types of performances from the stage. The young and the helped, mostly black and brown, repeatedly dance for their donors. Then, between performances, older white men are brought up to praise them and to talk about, and be applauded for, their generosity to the program.

  Most of the men work in finance. They include the corporate raiders who, seeking to raise profits by cutting costs, have helped to do away with stable employment. They are the gentrifiers who have pushed real estate prices through the roof and made it harder for families like those of the young dancers to maintain a livelihood in the city. They are the beneficiaries of tax laws that give carried interest a major break and help to keep the public coffers low and the schools attended by the city’s poor underfunded, thus driving them into the streets and occasionally, when they are lucky, into the charity’s arms. But these men have been generous, and in exchange for their generosity, these issues will not come up. No one will say what could be said: that these precarious lives could be made less precarious if the kind of men who donated to this program made investments differently, operated companies differently, managed wealth differently, donated to politicians differently, lobbied differently, thought differently about pretending to live in Florida to avoid a minor New York City tax—if, in other words, they were willing to let go of anything dear. It is one night in one city, but it speaks of a broad, unstated immunity deal: Generosity entitles the winners to exemption from questions like these.

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  On his way to the top of the philanthropic world, Darren Walker had attended more galas of that type than he could count, and had endured his share of wealthy white people saying nice things about him while refusing to see a connection between their lives and the nearly inescapable life that he had escaped. And this was one way to explain the letter he wrote challenging the immunity deal, to explain how he mustered the gall to break the taboo.

  “Look at Darren,” he mimicked his admirers cooing. “Why can’t they all be like Darren? I mean, look at Darren. He had a single mother. He put himself through school. You know, he never had a father. He didn’t even know who his father is.” The question that his life raised for them was: Why couldn’t all poor people end up like Darren Walker?

  “Part of my job,” he told me one day in his Ford Foundation office, “is to remind them why they can’t all be like me—what we have done to make it harder for people like me, with my background, with my heritage, to be able to end up with my story—and how, systematically, we are completely making it impossible for stories like mine to continue to emerge in the years ahead because we’re doing horrible things now. And I feel like I need to do that. I just feel like I need to do that.”

  This impulse had taken a long time to develop, though, because at first Walker was not a natural critic of the philanthropic complex so much as a natural poster child for its good works. He was born in Louisiana, at the Lafayette Charity Hospital. The rich families had their own hospitals and clinics, and the poor whites and African Americans were tended by institutions of charity. Walker’s mother found herself in a harsh predicament: a black mother “in this small town, not married, had two babies with this man, and, obviously, he’s not going to marry her,” Walker said. His mother, “who was wonderful, and perhaps challenged in many, many ways, had the foresight and the ambition” to realize: “I need to get out.” She moved the family to Liberty County, Texas, to the town of Ames—the county’s “Negro town,” as Walker put it.

  Walker’s mother studied to become a nurse’s assistant and soon earned her certificate. She always worked, but it was not enough to keep poverty at bay. Walker remembers being at their tiny house and the electric man or the telephone man coming by to cut off service on their past-due account, and he would negotiate with them, ask for a grace period or at least enough time for his mother to go out, cash her check, and return.

  One day, a woman showed up at the home asking if she could register Darren for something called Head Start. His mother agreed, not knowing much about it. Here was charity again blessing Walker, but charity that functioned as a humble complement to government action. Starting in the 1920s, the Rockefellers and other donors had funded research on children. Much of it was based at the University of Iowa’s Child Welfare Research Station, where scholars established the then-controversial idea that children’s success depended more on the opportunities given to them than on heredity. These researchers had made their case quietly and in the shadows of politics over decades. Then, what began as charity became public policy when, on May 18, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson stood in the Rose Garden of the White House and announced a new initiative to ensure “that poverty’s children would not be forevermore poverty’s captives.” Within weeks, the government would
open 2,500 preschool programs, aiming to reach 530,000 children. The goal was to prepare them to attend school in the autumn, and to treat the tens of thousands of them who had health impediments. One of the first half million enrollees would be Walker.

  He also benefited from the kindness and wisdom of a schoolteacher named Mrs. Majors, who told Walker he was talented but that his behavior risked his being placed in special ed, where the system sent too many black boys, who from there traveled with near inevitability down a pipeline into prison. Mrs. Majors’s sociological insight was sound: “Six of my cousins, my male cousins, have been in prison,” Walker says. “One of them committed suicide in prison. All of them were in this pipe.” Mrs. Majors’s warning helped him turn himself around.

  His path showed him the power of interventions large and small to transform individual lives. But there were moments along the way which reminded him that nothing changed if you didn’t change the system as a whole. For example, when he was twelve, he worked as a busboy out of necessity—to supplement his mother’s paycheck in order to keep their household afloat. (Years later, he would tell the trustees of the Ford Foundation, who were considering him as a potential leader, that the restaurant job had prepared him for the role more than any of the others he had had.) Given his age, he might have been working illegally, and he felt something visceral and dark in the job. He felt what it was like to live on the margins of human society. The restaurant took the long-standing but abstract facts of his life and staged them as a vivid performance. “You walk around a room where there is excess and plentifulness and people of economic means who actually have the disposable income to go out and eat and pay more than what the food actually cost to have a meal and drink nice wine,” Walker said. “And you walk around on the periphery of that room, and you are invisible. You’re invisible even when you are taking away the plates and cleaning up after people. You’re invisible. No one says, ‘Thank you.’ No one acknowledges your presence. And that experience, for me, remains the most profound and the most important.”

  Still, he bought into the American story that exceptional individuals can work, and buy, their way out of powerlessness. As his cousins circulated in and out of prison, he made it to the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned undergraduate and law degrees. He joined the international law firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. He moved to UBS, the financial services firm, where for seven years he worked in the capital markets division. He quit and took a year off to volunteer in Harlem, feeling the pull of social uplift. The experience of helping families like his own moved him. He joined the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a community development organization in Harlem, and focused on the building of public housing and a public school. Then he moved on to the Rockefeller Foundation, where he was told by a colleague that he wasn’t the usual “Rockefeller type,” not because he was black—it was a new day—but because he was gay. Finally, he landed the Ford job, overseeing a multibillion-dollar investment portfolio.

  In keeping with his official position and his own joyous magnetism, his careful irreverence, his attention to everyone in a room, he soared into the upper echelons of New York society. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was on the boards of the city’s ballet, of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, of Friends of the High Line. He began to be first-name-dropped. You know, Darren was saying the other day…Darren and I were on a panel, and…One day he would be at a White House state dinner for the Chinese president; another day he would be in Silicon Valley helping Mark Zuckerberg reflect on his giving.

  Even as he was establishing himself in big philanthropy, there were constant reminders of what his and his colleagues’ efforts were persistently failing to change. He was at a gala one night when he received a text from his sister with photographs from the funeral of his aunt Bertha. In one of the pictures, Walker noticed a cousin of his. He was wearing a prison jumpsuit, and an unknown white man was standing behind him. Walker texted back: “What is with that?” She answered that in Louisiana they sometimes let you out of prison for a relative’s funeral. You pay a service fee, and a police officer comes with you. On another day, another message, another funeral. A different cousin of his had died. The cousin’s family had no money, and so Walker’s mother covered the cost—using the credit card that Walker pays for her.

  The dissonance with his own life grew louder with time, as did his questioning about his complicity. His compensation was to be $789,000 that year; he wore fabulous clothes, had billionaire friends, attended lavish galas, dined at sumptuous restaurants, lived in a luxurious condominium on Madison Square Park, which was sweetened by a tax abatement that he did not need. The tax abatement bothered Walker; it played into his guilt. He lived among millionaires and billionaires who had secured for themselves a tax break for their apartments and his—money that could have been invested in his cousins and all those others he had left behind in Texas. Would he or anyone else, however principled, renounce the tax break? Of course not. That’s why he had begun to feel a need to talk about systems. “Why do we live in a society where that can happen?” he asked. “And what do we need to fix that? And we who are privileged ought to be engaged in that, because we can’t say, on the one hand, ‘Isn’t it horrible, this affordable-housing crisis we have in New York?,’ and then, by the same token, accept a system that is essentially corrupt.”

  He mused, “I really wonder about my own privilege, and am I too comfortable in it?” He said his guilt “definitely nags at me on a daily basis.”

  Social scientists speak of “idiosyncrasy credits,” a kind of resource that a leader earns, which allows him or her from time to time to innovate on, or even defy, group norms. Walker had been working hard at racking up credits. “As you’re working your way up, you have to be nuanced, and you have to pick those battles,” he said. Now, at Ford, he had reached that pinnacle. “People return my calls. I don’t have to go to see Bob Rubin and Roger Altman. They come to the Ford Foundation.” In fact, the two men, who had rotated in and out of the highest levels of government and finance for decades, had just walked out of his office.

  Walker’s new status made him ask himself what he could do with it, how he could “leverage” his position on the inside of the circle to help those he had left behind on the outside. That was what he meant by his answer to one of the trustees’ questions during his interview for the Ford role. He was asked, “What kind of president will you be?” To which he answered, “I would want to use the platform of being president of the Ford Foundation to really deeply interrogate the structures and systems and cultural practices in our country that increase the likelihood of more inequality in our society and of more exclusion and marginalization of people, particularly low-income people, people of color.”

  Walker knew the kind of world he wanted to fight for, and knew there were many different ways to go about it. One was to drop out of the stratosphere into which he had risen, to quit what he called the “globetrotting jet set of people going from Davos to Bellagio to Aspen, talking about solving poverty.” Walker did struggle with the “contradiction in that,” and yet he was also realistic about who he was, which was some combination of the angry busboy and the UBS banker. What he could do, he concluded, was persuade winners who had let him inside their gates. He could convince them that many of the stories they told themselves and others weren’t true, and that these false stories had dire consequences. When stripped of those stories, perhaps a new conversation about equality, and a fair society, would be possible. Perhaps they would see the self-preservational quality of so many of their approaches to social change. Perhaps.

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  Walker’s letter went online in October 2015. It began to ricochet around the philanthropic world, some people receiving the same email from three or four different people. It shook up the giving universe and got people talking.

  Walker’s new gospel began where he ha
d to begin, with Carnegie. That text was, Walker said, “the intellectual charter of modern philanthropy, and its basic precepts remain the underpinning of U.S. giving and, in turn, have greatly influenced an era of burgeoning philanthropic enterprise around the world.” At the heart of Carnegie’s essay, as Walker read it, was the idea of extreme inequality as “an unavoidable condition of the free market system” and of philanthropy as an effective remedy.

  You can picture an executive at KKR reading this and nodding. Yeah, exactly, unavoidable. But then Walker began to go off script. The giving world, he wrote, needed “to openly acknowledge and confront the tension inherent in a system that perpetuates vast differences in privilege and then tasks the privileged with improving the system.” Here Walker was already breaking the Carnegie pact. He was questioning the idea of the rich as the best and rightful administrators of the surplus of the society. He was refusing to confine his analysis to what happens after fortunes are made in the marketplace. He was interested in how those fortunes are made and what choices have occasioned them. “What underlying forces drive the very inequality whose manifestations we seek to ameliorate?” he asked.

  Walker suggested that “we are crashing into the limits of what we can do with a nineteenth-century interpretation of philanthropy’s founding doctrine.” And he said Martin Luther King Jr. might offer a useful complement to Carnegie’s encrusted ideas, with his call to laud philanthropy while not ignoring “the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”

  King had argued that the circumstances of economic injustice, when examined, had something to do with the people in power, and that true generosity might mean restrained taking, not just the belated shedding of some of what had been taken. Inequality, by Carnegie’s lights, was a natural by-product of progress. The economy changes, a new technology is invented, and some figure out how to seize on it, and their wealth surges, and others are left in their humble cottages. Walker complicated this picture by arguing that “inequality is built on antecedents—preexisting conditions ranging from ingrained prejudice and historical racial, gender, and ethnic biases to regressive tax policies that cumulatively define the systems and structures that enable inequality to fester.” He was suggesting that people aren’t left behind and left out because they fail to take advantage of change. Many are born doomed because of who they or their parents or great-great-grandparents were, because of where they live, because of their color or disabilities—and because of the political choices the society has made about how to treat them. This, in Walker’s view, made it important to go beyond Carnegie’s idea of temporary inequality as the price of progress. Wealthy individuals needed to ask themselves, “Is the playing field on which I accumulated my wealth level and fair? Does the system privilege people like me in ways that compound my advantages?” Were the rich, as Carnegie had presented them, the transitory guardians of progress’s fruits, or were they hereditary hoarders of that progress?