An Insider Takes Aim at Corporate America’s ‘Elite Charade’
As
a conference-circuit regular and former McKinsey consultant, writer
Anand Giridharadas has seen firsthand business leaders' efforts to solve
social problems. Here’s why he’s come to see those efforts as more
self-serving than world-changing.
The setting is ironic
for a late-afternoon cocktail with Anand Giridharadas, the
self-appointed scourge of well-meaning plutocrats everywhere. The author
of the biting 2018 book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
has suggested the bar at the Big 4 Restaurant in San Francisco's
Huntington Hotel, where he is staying. And so we sip drinks amid the
dark wood paneling and white tablecloths of a redoubt that quietly
screams plutocracy. Oil-painted portraits of two of the bar's namesake
19th-century railroad magnates, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins, gaze
down sternly at us as we discuss what Giridharadas believes to be the
pernicious impact of the 21st century's own robber barons.
The villains in Giridharadas's tale live in a land Fortune
readers will recognize. He calls it MarketWorld, a place where any
problem can be solved by market forces—including issues involving public
health or primary education, which common sense suggests only
governments or massive publicly funded institutions can possibly tackle.
Giridharadas thinks the MarketWorld ethos enables those in charge to
convey a sense of sacrifice while comfortably calling the shots, thereby
preserving their place at the top. When a big company donates thousands
of computers to public schools while lobbying to squelch tax hikes that
would keep those schools funded, that's MarketWorld in action. "I felt
there was a phenomenon of the people who benefited most from the last
four decades entrenching their monopoly on the future," he says, "by
claiming to be leading the charge to fix our biggest shared problems."
His
list of privileged culprits and their enablers is long. These include
for-hire "thought leaders," as distinguished from nobler critics;
philanthropists and "impact" investors who prescribe fixes for their
benighted beneficiaries without asking how they'd like to be helped; and
the merry band of attendees of what he calls the "TED, Davos, and Aspen
conference circuit" who reinforce one another's rarefied conceptions of
goodness. Where others see noblesse oblige, in other words,
Giridharadas spies disingenuous self-dealing. Giridharadas
knows his subject because he's a full-fledged member of the club.
Indeed, the 37-year-old journalist is that most dangerous form of
critic, the insider who bites the hand that feeds him. An Ohio native
with a vertical shock of salt-and-pepper hair, Giridharadas checks all
the boxes of the global elite. Educated at Harvard and launched into the
working world as a consultant at McKinsey, he has given two TED Talks, was a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and is now an editor-at-large for Time
magazine. He gives paid speeches and attends swell parties, rubbing
shoulders with the one percent. He is prolific on Twitter, naturally,
and is quick with substantive rants as well as pithy put-downs like
"Plutes be pluting." His arguments resonate with other idealistic
insiders (some of whose crises of conscience he recounts in Winners Take All), even if those arguments aren't changing the practices of those insiders' employers.
He's got no issue per se with well-heeled do-gooders trying to change the world.
His beef is with how rich and influential people and corporations
bestow their gifts and the implications for governmental organizations
that could otherwise have far greater impact. Elites, he says, are happy
to help so long as the results are a "win-win"—provided that the
benefactors themselves don't suffer, whether from higher taxes or from
policies that would restrain rapacious behavior. But Giridharadas argues
that the only way to solve society's biggest problems is for "some
people to do worse"—a solution for which the privileged have little or
no appetite.
Few escape Giridharadas's ire. Former President Bill Clinton gets most of a chapter in Winners Take All
for his now defunct Clinton Global Initiative conference, which offered
a platform for the powerful to promote pet philanthropic projects,
regardless of their past misdeeds or the merits of their proposals.
Pious tech leaders particularly bother Giridharadas—precisely because
they wield power under the flag of idealism. Each has a self-serving
narrative, he argues: "Uber just wants to create micro-entrepreneurship
in America. Google just wants to organize all the world's information.
Facebook just wants to build a universal community of mankind. And I
really think they believe it ... Our society is way more defenseless
against the idealists than the realists. We don't regulate the idealists
well, because to some degree we are sucked in by their story." Research for his book predated the rise of left-wing Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
with whom he clearly sympathizes. And Giridharadas doesn't much dwell
on Donald Trump, with whom he clearly doesn't. If anything, he's fed up
with both U.S. political parties. He blames Republicans for having
denigrated government for decades, though he gives them points for
transparency. "It has been one of the most successful intellectual
campaigns in the history of the world," he says. "It spread globally as a
kind of theory in which government is bad and entrepreneurs are the
only good thing." But he reserves special scorn for Democrats who have
bought into anti-government orthodoxy: "You have Obama creating the
Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. The founding
charter says that top-down programs from Washington don't work anymore.
Really? Barack Obama only could vote because of a top-down program from
Washington"—the Voting Rights Act of 1965—"that worked pretty well."
Why
pick on rich people and companies that sincerely are trying to help?
When "the modest act of do-gooding abets harm-doing on a much bigger
scale, the net effect of the do-gooding may be negative," he retorts. An
example he cites is the attention paid to Mark Zuckerberg's
philanthropy even as journalists were slow to catch on to Facebook's
data-privacy misdeeds. "If you took away all of the coverage that
resulted from that moral do-gooding," he says, "I think the guy would
have been busted by journalists and regulators, like, eight years ago."
Goldman Sachs, guilty according to Giridharadas of helping cause the
Great Recession, runs an initiative called 10,000 Women to help women
entrepreneurs. "If they really loved women that much, they would have
not done what they did in the financial crisis, which hurt way more than
10,000 women," he says. Philanthropy can "douse public anger," he
argues, which in turn "prevents public action that would really make
lives better."
Some plutocrats get off easier than others. Giridharadas has kind words, for instance, for Bill Gates,
notably the work his foundation has done in Africa, where some
governments don't have the capacity to solve intractable problems. But
all the same, Giridharadas questions the power that wealth confers on
Gates and his ilk, particularly in the U.S.: "I really don't think the
Founders envisioned you setting public policy agendas at the level that
someone like Gates does. That was one of the objections that a hundred
years ago used to be much more common, which is, 'Who are these people
to make decisions about public life?'"
The century-old objections
he is referring to gave rise to the Progressive movement, a direct
reaction to the political power amassed by the Dead White Men on the
walls of the Big 4's bar. The critic clearly yearns for a similar
development, a time of muscular governing to help the needy and to rein
in the powerful. For now, the portraits of those plutocrats—and the
position of their successors—remain firmly in place. A
version of this article appears in the September 2019 issue of Fortune
with the headline "An Insider Takes Aim at ‘The Elite Charade.’"
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