The author depicts this book as “a debate with my friends” deconstructing familiar TED talks, business consulting strategies, and events at The Aspen Institute where the author was a fellow in 2011, so just how radical Winners is as social critique will sneak up on readers.
Author Anand Giridharadas rubs shoulders while “embedded,” but he clearly believes his colleagues should not be trusted to manage the marketplace of ideas or governance of the nation on behalf of the people.
Who are the elite? One needs to be careful in the resurgence of intolerance and hate mongering. I didn’t detect any “dog whistling” in Winners, blaming intellectuals, bankers, and entire races of people. Though he doesn’t quite define elite that way, Anand is talking about people who find themselves successful who then turn to make political or social change occur who come to a certain thought framework through their financial success. As Colorado Governor Hickenlooper often says, “making enemies is not good business.” In the book the author coins “MarketWorld” where thought leaders convene at corporate events to frame problems to their convenience.
Anand notes, “There is no denying that today’s elite may be among the most socially concerned elites in history (this is a genuine compliment). By the cold logic of numbers, it is among the most predatory in history.” No amount of philanthropy or business-speak advice can fill the void between those two statements. This disconnect is the crux of the argument in Winners.
Noting the discrepancy of 72% increased productivity since 1973 resulting in only 9% increase in median worker pay, Anand states “America does not have a problem of lagging productivity so much as a problem of the gains from productivity being captured by elites.” This is another angle into the 1% argument, for sure, but it also encompasses some conservative and populist criticism that has affected recent elections. The imbalance is real, and it is corrosive. Today we don’t have a political language to talk about it.
How are “elites” doing it? Apparently by boring us into believing that useful ideas must also be inoffensive. It is New Age pain avoidance mashed with smiling trickle-down Reaganism. Mostly, there is a mashup of self-help as business coach talk absorbing what used to be the realm of social criticism. Where are yesterday’s “intellectuals?” Not giving TED talks.
Anand tells many stories to show how ideas become so pervasive that their very ridiculousness hides in plain sight; for instance, ”win-win” or “doing good by doing well,” everything Bill Clinton says, “government is bad,” or the idea that globalism will naturally benefit workers, or that reducing taxes on corporations and the wealthy will magically rebalance the game for the other 99%. Anand takes on each of these through interesting stories. Anand’s greatest unstated critique may be on the now widely accepted conciet that government is best run like a business by businesspeople, and without doing damage to the massive accumulation of wealth.
Anand doesn’t spend much time reminding readers that for much of the 20th Century, America was a machine that leveraged innovation to improve infrastructure, social justice and deliver the benefits of prosperity broadly across the population. “A successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement. Americas machine is broken” he states coldly to begin the book.
Anand reminds us that for much of the 20th Century capitalism looked and operated differently. To remind readers, CEOs once made a reasonable proportion more than most workers—enough to purchase a nicer home or automobile, not necessarily enough to fly private jets to Davos and become or create “thought leaders.” Widely accepted rules and regulations did not tip the playing field to corporations but prevented business interests from damaging the public interest. This apparently is a radical concept today that government is for the people, watching out for their interest which is often structurally opposed to the profit motive and allowing an asymmetric accumulation of wealth. This is not a moral distinction, just practical reality.
Andrew Carnegie is often referenced in this book. He is a kind of patron saint of philanthropy in America. Carnegie believed that wealth belonged not to the individual but to the community, that estate taxes should be punitive since giving to descendants bred feeble children.
Of course, heavily taxing peers of the Carnegie Elite that lead to one of the most widely prosperous periods in history, during which time the U.S. government overcame the Great Depression, won two World Wars, led bold public endeavors such as rural electrification, building hydro-electric power dams and reservoirs that allowed the West to be peopled while building interstate highways that improved peoples’ lives and enhanced opportunities for commerce—all through the enterprise of “big government” acting as the part of paternal protector of the people through laws, regulation and government programs that were in rejection of a philanthropic Carnegieism. But FDR “Fear from…” posters aside, FDR’s great economic equity campaign did not really retain its hold when the money started flowing again. Reagans great Houdini move was letting voters put themselves in the place of those in power and reject limitations on taxation or regulation because who knows, you too might someday become wealthy…. and not want to be overtaxed or regulated. In the meantime, just de-fund roads, schools, health care, and any social safety net that other great democracies have built for the people. That genius rhetorical stroke has yet to be countered on the left since the 1980s. There remains a lack of coherent argument for it either. Like Groundhog Day, Winners points to the echoes the philanthropy as a comparable substitute for a robust government (and perhaps academe as well) which surround us and supported by elites on all sides of the spectrum.
One refreshing thing, the book is not particularly focused on or overly critical of Donald Trump. That doesn’t mean Anand (or this author) support any of his views, just that far too much airtime is spent chasing tweets. In fact, the book spends more time deconstructing how insidious many trends embraced by Bill Clinton and his Global Initiative have become. Please, this is not in support for far-right, wingnut criticism of the Clintons who just moved the center very far to the right and have made a lot of money never looking back.
America has been careening this direction for many years as it slowly deconstructs the gains of the FDR era, Post WWII, the Great Society and now the Environmental laws of the 1970s, as well as the investments in space exploration and science that led to so many later private innovations.
Anand’s core point is that elites use Philanthropy as a front to launder ideas and money away from real change toward changes that just don’t really change much. This, of course, is leading to a pressure building among the populace which is slowly figuring out that they are not among the Winners.
This book comes out in the year that the greatest accomplishment of federal governance was a major tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, when a staggering amount of money—much of it un-traceable thanks to the Citizens United decision that awarded corporations personhood –was spent on the 2018 election, when the current administration is bent on destructing the greatest public risk mitigation tool ever invented—the U.S. government—while much of the populace cheers wildly. It begs the question who is guarding the other side of the debate that won most of the 20th century? Democrats? Bernie Sanders? The answer is, no one. That is why the book is a worthy read.
Late in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World Anand tells of Chiara Cordelli, a political philosopher from the University of Chicago who says, “it seems to me these days everyone wants to change the world by themselves. It is about them: it’s about what they do.” In other words, we have given up on the collective approach to problem-solving that used to be the realm of governance. Winners is not exactly a book about policy or political theory. It is a book about idea laundering by the winners who—imagine this—are not likely to propose rules that diminish their structural advantages. Democracy is not supposed to be outsourced.
Cordelli’s quote comes from an idea festival during which she sat next to Sanford Weill, former chairman of Citigroup whose position she summarizes as “rich people like him need to step in and solve public problems because government is to broke, too incapable and not up to the task.”
How convenient?
