Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  “For me, it is equivalent to have a master who denies people the right to freedom, and then, however, justifies that by saying, ‘I’m a benevolent master,’ ” she said. “So I actually support slavery, but once I have the slave, I really treat them well, and, actually, they live under great conditions.”

  One can counter that “if you have slavery, of course, it’s better to be a benevolent master than a non-benevolent master. That seems to be obvious,” Cordelli said. Yet when it comes to looking back on a system like slavery, most people would agree that the only reasonable course of action back then would have been to refuse to buy a slave, refuse to participate in slavery, refuse to go along. It is when considering the present that things get murkier. A political and economic system that has shut half the nation out of growth and progress for a generation becomes understandable, becomes something to work around; the issue is said to be complicated. While some fear their stance will come to seem unreasonable one day, they choose acceptance. They seek to work through and with the culprits of injustice. They might even enlist them to advise or sit on the board of their justice-seeking project.

  Sometimes that acceptance masks itself as incompetence or ignorance. Yes, someone like Laurie Tisch might say, in theory the system must be changed. But it is so hard. “Structural changes and systemic changes” are fine and good, Amy Cuddy says; the problem she confronts is: “Who do you talk to to make that happen?” Creating a voluntary pool of better-behaved capitalism on the side is easy, Andrew Kassoy says; changing the law for all businesses requires an activist’s gifts, which he claims to lack, and honorable officeholders at all levels of politics—a profession that doesn’t offer the lucrative rewards of MarketWorld.

  Cordelli dismisses this fatalism about the system, this emotion of impotence regarding institutional change, as “absurd.” It is absurd, she says, because citizens of MarketWorld “live their life through a sense of themselves as entrepreneurs, as agents of change.” But this gung-ho attitude about bending the world to their will turns out to be rather temperamental. “When it comes to effecting change in a way that makes them feel good—when it comes to building a business, lobbying for certain things, effectively helping some people through philanthropy, then they are agents,” Cordelli said. “They powerfully and intentionally can exercise change.” However, she went on, “When it comes to paying more taxes, when it comes to trying to advocate for more just institutions, when it comes to actually trying to prevent injustices that are systemic or trying to advocate for less inequality and more redistribution, then they’re paralyzed. There is nothing they can do.

  “This is absurd in the sense that it’s a concept of agency that doesn’t make sense philosophically and doesn’t make sense practically,” she said. It is, first of all, not necessarily any harder to fight for a change in corporate law than to invent a parallel infrastructure of capitalism. It is not necessarily harder to seek more effective taxation of globetrotting plutocrats than to develop an elaborate annual conference getting them to give a little back. The MarketWorlders, Cordelli is reminding us, are selling themselves short. They do big, complex, elaborate things all the time; they solve hard problems. Their declared inability to contribute to solutions at the political and systemic level can ring hollow. Besides, the system under which MarketWorld has thrived in recent decades was not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It was engineered by man. MarketWorld had shown itself willing and able to engage in the arena of politics—to “change the system”—when it came to seeking lower taxes, freer trade, the repeal of laws like Glass-Steagall, debt reduction, scaled-back regulation, and many other policies that have made the present age so bountiful for its own citizens. Yet the reversal of some of the very things it had fought for was deemed too hard, too political, too vast to take on.

  As harsh as her criticisms might sound to them, Cordelli is giving Kassoy and others in MarketWorld a way out. She is confessing, on their behalf, what some of them privately fear to be true: that they are debtors who need society’s mercy and not saviors who need its followership. She is offering what MarketWorlders so adore: a solution. The solution is to return, against their instincts and even perhaps against their interests, to politics as the place we go to shape the world.

  If Cordelli is right, the basic assumptions of MarketWorld are wrong. Doing what good you can loses some of its luster in her mode of calculation, in which what you accept matters as much as what you do. Businesspersons calling themselves “leaders” and naming themselves solvers of the most intractable social problems represent a worrisome way of erasing their role in causing them. Seen through Cordelli’s lens, it is indeed strange that the people with the most to lose from social reform are so often placed on the board of it. And MarketWorld’s private world-changing, for all the good it does, is also, for Cordelli, marred by its own “narcissism.” “It seems to me that these days everyone wants to change the world by themselves,” she said. “It’s about them; it’s about what they do. But there are other people around you, and you owe it to them to support institutions that can, in the name of everyone, including in their own name, secure certain conditions for a more decent life.”

  When a society helps people through its shared democratic institutions, it does so on behalf of all, and in a context of equality. Those institutions, representing those free and equal citizens, are making a collective choice of whom to help and how. Those who receive help are not only objects of the transaction, but also subjects of it—citizens with agency. When help is moved into the private sphere, no matter how efficient we are told it is, the context of the helping is a relationship of inequality: the giver and the taker, the helper and the helped, the donor and the recipient.

  When a society solves a problem politically and systemically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen. It is saying what it believes through what it does. Cordelli argues that this right to speak for others is simply illegitimate when exercised by a powerful private citizen. “You are an individual,” she said. “You can’t speak in their name. I can maybe speak in the name of my child, but other people are not your children.

  “This is what it means to be free and equal and independent individuals and, for better or for worse, share common institutions,” she said. Our political institutions—our laws, our courts, our elected officials, our agencies, our rights, our police, our constitutions, our regulations, our taxes, our shared infrastructure: the million little pieces that uphold our civilization and that we own together—only these, Cordelli said, “can act and speak on behalf of everyone.” She admitted, “They often don’t do that.” But that isn’t the way out that MarketWorld so often made it out to be. “It’s our job,” Cordelli said, “to make them do that, rather than working to weaken and destroy those institutions by thinking that we can effectuate change by ourselves. Let’s start working to create the conditions to make those institutions better.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In the summer of 2015, I stood anxiously at a podium in Aspen, Colorado, wondering what happens when you tell a roomful of rich and powerful people that they are not the saviors they think they are.

  Four years earlier, I had been named a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. You may recall it from these pages as the program that seeks to deploy a “new breed of leaders” against “the world’s most intractable problems.” I was a strange pick. The fellowship says of its prospective leaders that “all are proven entrepreneurs, mostly from the world of business.” I was not, nor have I ever been, an entrepreneur, and writing, if it is a business, isn’t a very good one. But I don’t make a habit of turning down trips to Aspen, and the fellowship sounded pleasant—four one-week sessions with a group of twenty or so classmates, spread over two years, in which we would read important texts and debate them and discuss our lives and woes in secrecy, while pondering how to “make a difference.”

  At first, my exper
ience of the fellowship was defined by this small group. I bonded with my classmates and exchanged my struggles with theirs and ended up being the officiant at one of their weddings. As I nestled into the Aspen Institute’s universe, there were other, more dubious pleasures. I began to have friends with private jets; sometimes I flew in them. I mingled with the ultra-rich in antler-decorated mansions overlooking the Roaring Fork Valley. I brought my mother to the Aspen Ideas Festival, where we shared a hotel room and could not stop laughing about who would get the tiger-print bathrobe and who the leopard-themed one.

  Even as I savored these luxuries and connections, I found something amiss about the Aspen Institute. Here were all these rich and powerful people coming together and speaking about giving back, and yet the people who seemed to reap most of the benefits of this coming-together were the helpers, not the helped. I began to wonder what was actually going on when the most fortunate don’t merely seek to make a difference but also effectively claim ownership of “changing the world.”

  It was peculiar that many of our conversations at the Aspen Institute about democracy and the “good society” occurred in the Koch Building, named after a family that had done so much to undermine democracy and the efforts of ordinary people to “change the world.” It was off-putting when the organizers of our fellowship reunion sprang a Goldman Sachs–sponsored lunch on us, in which the company’s do-gooding was trumpeted and its role in causing the financial crisis went unexamined. It bothered me that the fellowship asked fellows to do virtuous side projects instead of doing their day jobs more honorably. The institute brought together people from powerful institutions like Facebook, the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, and PepsiCo. Instead of asking them to make their firms less monopolistic, greedy, or harmful to children, it urged them to create side hustles to “change the world.”

  I began to feel like a casual participant in—and timid accomplice to, as well as a cowardly beneficiary of—a giant, sweet-lipped lie. Who exactly were we leaders of? What had given us the right to solve the world’s problems as we saw fit? What interests and blind spots were we bringing to that problem-solving, given the criteria by which we had been selected? Why were we coming to Aspen? To change the system, or to be changed by it? To speak truth to power, like the writers we read in our seminars, or to help to make an unjust, unpalatable system go down a little more easily? Could the intractable problems we proposed to solve be solved in the way that we silently insisted—at minimal cost to elites, with minimal redistribution of power?

  In my fifth year in the program, I was asked to give a talk to a few hundred of my fellow fellows at our summer reunion. This wasn’t unusual. A mantra of the fellowship is to learn from one another rather than fly in outside speakers. At a given reunion, dozens of the fellows will speak in one way or another. As summer dawned and the gathering approached, the complicated feelings of the last few years swirled within me. My guilt and discomfort churned, until at last, half certain, I decided to write and deliver the speech that was the seed of this book.

  “I want to suggest,” I said that day from the podium, “that we may not always be the leaders we think we are.” I described what I called the Aspen Consensus: “The winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm.”

  Public speaking doesn’t usually scare me, but that day it did. I didn’t know what happens when you tell a group of people who consider themselves your friends that they are living a lie. But there I was. I finished the speech. People stood and roared, to my enduring surprise. Soon afterward, though, Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. secretary of state, came onstage and gently disparaged my speech. “Que cojones,” another woman whispered to me. Her husband, though, started speaking ill of me behind my back. A billionaire came up and thanked me for voicing what has been the struggle of her life. Some in the leadership of the Aspen Institute began frantically asking who had allowed this outrage to occur. That evening at the bar, some cheered me, others glared at me icily, and a private-equity man told me I was an “asshole.”

  Later that evening, beside a fireplace, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, asked if he could write about my talk. I hadn’t planned for my words to leave the room, but I agreed. He wrote his column. People began demanding to see the speech. I posted it online. It stirred many pots and conversations. I hadn’t planned to write a book on this topic, but the topic chose me. Thus I spent the next two years talking to and writing about people living this paradox of elite change-making that somehow seems to keep things the same.

  I tell you this so that you know the book’s origins, and so that I can give my first thanks—to the Aspen Institute, for embracing me and pulling back the curtain on elite-led social change. And I tell it because this backstory makes the following acknowledgment as plain as it deserves to be: the best way to know about a problem is to be part of it.

  This book is the work of a critic, but it is also the work of an insider-outsider to that which it takes on. There is almost no problem probed in this book, no myth, no cloud of self-serving justification that I haven’t found a way of being part of, whether because of naïveté, cynicism, rationalization, ignorance, or the necessity to make a living. I chose not to write about these things in a personal way because I didn’t want the book to be about me. But let me say here, while I am doing some acknowledging, that I once worked as an analyst at McKinsey, that I have given not one but two TED talks, that I earn a chunk of my income giving speeches, that I was attending conferences claiming to “change the world” long before I came to see them as a charade. I have tried to navigate my life honestly and ethically, but I cannot separate myself from what I criticize. This is a critique of a system of which I am absolutely, undeniably a part.

  For a long time, as I wrote this book, I grappled with the strangeness of indicting the practices and beliefs of a group of people among whom I have many friends. I felt an instantaneous recognition when I came upon an old phrase from the poet Czesław Miłosz. In 1953, he published a book called The Captive Mind, about his dismay at so many of his fellow Polish thinkers’ succumbing, one rationalization and excuse at a time, to the hypocrisies and repressions of Stalinism. He described his book as “a debate with those of my friends who were yielding, little by little, to the magic influence of the New Faith.” That helped me greatly. For my book, too, is, among other things, a debate with my friends. It is a letter, written with love and concern, to people whom I see yielding to a new New Faith, many of whom I know to be decent. Of course, it is also a letter to the public, urging them to reclaim world-changing from those who have co-opted it.

  Because it is a debate with my friends, some of those I have written about are, unusually for me, people I knew socially before entering into the relationship of journalist and subject: Sean Hinton, Amy Cuddy, Sonal Shah, Andrew Kassoy, Laurie Tisch. I am grateful that they were willing to wrestle with these issues with me, even though my views were clear to them. I am no less grateful to all those other subjects whom I did not know but who answered my emails and calls anyway, and took me up on sharing their stories and beliefs about making change. In a small handful of cases I have changed names to protect privacy.

  I am indebted to two professors. As I read Thomas Piketty’s masterpiece, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, I came upon a line that brought the purpose of my own book into focus. “Whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable,” Piketty writes, “depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification.” That day I decided my book would be an inquiry into the apparatus of justification. And Michael Sandel, who taught me at Harvard, was perhaps the first to plant in me the thought that money had transcended being currency to become our very culture, conquering our imaginations and infiltrating domains that had nothing to do with it.

  I want to salute those generous peopl
e who gave of their time to read chapters or even the whole manuscript: Richard Sherwin, Nicholas Negroponte, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Rukmini Giridharadas, Tom Ferguson, Hilary Cohen, and Casey Gerald. Thanks, too, to Zackary Canepari for lending me his cabin in the woods. Then there is my heroic wife, Priya Parker. She is the first to know how the writing is going, because, after all these years, she still insists on hearing every day’s harvest out loud. My wise and ever-supportive parents, Shyam and Nandini, and a flotilla of friends too numerous to name helped in their own vital ways: lending advice, shoulders, and diversions when the writing grew hard, as it always does—and providing rapid text-message title feedback. And, once again, I was blessed with the talents of Vrinda Condillac, a masterful editor and a brilliant, effervescent friend, who sat beside me and went through the manuscript paragraph by paragraph for most of two weeks.

  My wonderful agent, Lynn Nesbit, is one of those rare people who deserve their legendary status. There is no one better at shepherding books into the world, and at dealing with all the obstacles that come in their way. There is no one more reassuring to a writer, no one better at taking the long view, and, if there are still a few who, like Lynn, use their phones to gab and not just type, no one gabs better.

  Lynn led me to Alfred A. Knopf, but it was also a kind of homecoming. I first met my editor on this book, Jonathan Segal, a decade or so ago when I was writing about India. He didn’t end up acquiring that book, but he profoundly shaped it simply through his comments on the proposal. We found each other again with Winners Take All. Jon is smart, dedicated, passionate about books, and hard to please. When putting his penciled edits into the computer, I had the feeling of watching a master surgeon. At first, your eye focuses on the cutting. But then you notice the body he is bringing to health by removing what must be removed and transplanting and injecting and suturing. This book wouldn’t exist without his eyes, hands, and faith. I am also grateful to Knopf’s brave leader, Sonny Mehta, for his championing of books, and to Jessica Purcell, Paul Bogaards, Sam Aber, Julia Ringo, Kim Thornton Ingenito, and the rest of the team.