Winners Take All

I first saw Anand Giridharadas on Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, on the episode about billionaires and why they won't save us. After looking him up, I came to discover he had written an entire book on the subject… I shelved it on my to-read list and forgot about it until I felt compelled to read it again. During his interview on the Patriot Act, Giridharadas has an exchange with Minhaj, responding to how he would deal with certain plutocrats:

G: “Batman is what all these plutocrats do. You cause problems by day, in the way you run your company. And then you put on a suit at night and pretend you are the solution. Let's tax the hell out of Bruce Wayne. And then we wouldn't necessarily need him to put on a costume.”
M: “Your take is anti-Batman?”
G: “I want to make Batman unnecessary.”

This is essentially a great summary of the thesis of this book, which is that the wealthy members of MarketWorld, a term Giridharadas coins to refer to the rich business elites in the philanthrocapitalist world (“doing good by doing well”), believe themselves to be the vigilantes of their world. Even though their companies and systems contribute to systemic inequality and a myriad of other issues, they justify their participation in the system by creating foundations or developing philanthropic projects. In the show, Minhaj presents a clip of Bill Gates being asked if he would ever run for president (this was from the ‘90s or 2000s); he laughed a bit and said he was more than happy with the amount of power he had, with its lack of term limits and external oversight. In other words—billionaires can be philanthropic, but whose interests are they really serving? Who can hold a billionaire (or trillionaire now) accountable? Giridharadas does admit that MarketWorld has achieved some good things in the world, but it is simply not enough.

I went into this book intrigued but a little skeptical. I don’t brand myself in political ideology because to be committed is to refrain from understanding, and understanding other perspectives is how you get a greater sense of the big picture. Still, I found Giridharadas’s writing and argument easy to accept, so perhaps he was preaching to the choir. The ones who really need to read this book—his wealthy philanthropist friends—are probably the ones who would chafe at it the most. For the ordinary citizen, this book is probably a truism that, if not fully aware of, we have sensed to be the case. But this is a world in which the ordinary citizen has less political power and influence than large corporations, who can donate to Super PACs and fund the policy initiatives that would enable them to continue their profit seeking at the laborer’s expense. Giridharadas does a great job of diving deep into the market world without requiring the reader to know about economics, with topics ranging from the Gospel of Wealth robber barons to modern foundations.

Despite its good intentions and compelling message, the book does become repetitive—you’ve understood his main argument just by reading this review and the exchange I quoted, but this point is made periodically throughout the book’s several chapters, seen through the lenses of various individuals and foundations. While it was interesting to read about specific individuals and their own struggles about being complicit in MarketWorld, it started to drag a bit past the halfway point. Furthermore, Giridharadas himself admits that the best vantage point to the problem is from within—he himself was complicit in MarketWorld for a time, and bought into its ethos… until he didn’t. I don’t fault him for that. In a cutthroat world, you have to make a living somehow, and not everyone can be privileged enough to satisfy their personal ethics in their work. It seems that Giridharadas has since shifted gears, and I’ll give him credit where credit is due for bringing attention to this idea (though I wouldn’t say he made it popular, he seems to describe seeds of this idea going back maybe a decade).

This book also doesn’t offer convenient solutions, as MarketWorld would prefer. Not everything can be turned into an app or five-step program. Giridharadas lays out the problems in his book, and hints at what a possible future may look like—it involves the dismantling of MarketWorld ideas. The problem is, these ideas have a strong hold on politics, philanthropy, and even many areas of social justice discourse in the United States and elsewhere. It seems like an impossible thing to ask—changing the entire political structure of how things are done. But is it enough for us, the ordinary citizens, to simply accept the status quo? Giridharadas encourages us not to be, and I commend him for that. It is time for the ordinary people to demand more of democracy, in order that we may one day have faith in our democratic institutions.

Some interesting quotes I highlighted:

“Management consulting firms and Wall Street financial houses have persuaded many young people in recent years that they provide a superior version of what the liberal arts are said to offer: highly portable training for doing whatever you wish down the road.”

“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.”

“Society tells me I have to go to school, get a good job, and then I’ll get a salary, because I’m in America,” Jacobs said on another occasion. “And that’s what I did, and now I’m in debt. And now I’m suffocating.”

“VCs [venture capitalists] are among the most powerful people in the world today, but in his mind he was the little guy. When your leader still wears the beret from his days in the rebel army, you should be afraid.”

“As Upton Sinclair said, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.’”

“Social change is not a project that one group of people carries out for the benefit of another.”

“There was a time, as the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy has observed, when we loved ‘public’ enough to place our most elevated hopes in republics, and when ‘private’ reminded us of its cousins ‘privation’ and ‘deprived.’”

“The private sector didn’t merely add to the public sphere’s activities. It got to change the language in which the public sphere thought and acted.”

“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.”

I first saw Anand Giridharadas on Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, on the episode about billionaires and why they won't save us. After looking him up, I came to discover he had written an entire book on the subject… I shelved it on my to-read list and forgot about it until I felt compelled to read it again. During his interview on the Patriot Act, Giridharadas has an exchange with Minhaj, responding to how he would deal with certain plutocrats:

G: “Batman is what all these plutocrats do. You cause problems by day, in the way you run your company. And then you put on a suit at night and pretend you are the solution. Let's tax the hell out of Bruce Wayne. And then we wouldn't necessarily need him to put on a costume.”
M: “Your take is anti-Batman?”
G: “I want to make Batman unnecessary.”

This is essentially a great summary of the thesis of this book, which is that the wealthy members of MarketWorld, a term Giridharadas coins to refer to the rich business elites in the philanthrocapitalist world (“doing good by doing well”), believe themselves to be the vigilantes of their world. Even though their companies and systems contribute to systemic inequality and a myriad of other issues, they justify their participation in the system by creating foundations or developing philanthropic projects. In the show, Minhaj presents a clip of Bill Gates being asked if he would ever run for president (this was from the ‘90s or 2000s); he laughed a bit and said he was more than happy with the amount of power he had, with its lack of term limits and external oversight. In other words—billionaires can be philanthropic, but whose interests are they really serving? Who can hold a billionaire (or trillionaire now) accountable? Giridharadas does admit that MarketWorld has achieved some good things in the world, but it is simply not enough.

I went into this book intrigued but a little skeptical. I don’t brand myself in political ideology because to be committed is to refrain from understanding, and understanding other perspectives is how you get a greater sense of the big picture. Still, I found Giridharadas’s writing and argument easy to accept, so perhaps he was preaching to the choir. The ones who really need to read this book—his wealthy philanthropist friends—are probably the ones who would chafe at it the most. For the ordinary citizen, this book is probably a truism that, if not fully aware of, we have sensed to be the case. But this is a world in which the ordinary citizen has less political power and influence than large corporations, who can donate to Super PACs and fund the policy initiatives that would enable them to continue their profit seeking at the laborer’s expense. Giridharadas does a great job of diving deep into the market world without requiring the reader to know about economics, with topics ranging from the Gospel of Wealth robber barons to modern foundations.

Despite its good intentions and compelling message, the book does become repetitive—you’ve understood his main argument just by reading this review and the exchange I quoted, but this point is made periodically throughout the book’s several chapters, seen through the lenses of various individuals and foundations. While it was interesting to read about specific individuals and their own struggles about being complicit in MarketWorld, it started to drag a bit past the halfway point. Furthermore, Giridharadas himself admits that the best vantage point to the problem is from within—he himself was complicit in MarketWorld for a time, and bought into its ethos… until he didn’t. I don’t fault him for that. In a cutthroat world, you have to make a living somehow, and not everyone can be privileged enough to satisfy their personal ethics in their work. It seems that Giridharadas has since shifted gears, and I’ll give him credit where credit is due for bringing attention to this idea (though I wouldn’t say he made it popular, he seems to describe seeds of this idea going back maybe a decade).

This book also doesn’t offer convenient solutions, as MarketWorld would prefer. Not everything can be turned into an app or five-step program. Giridharadas lays out the problems in his book, and hints at what a possible future may look like—it involves the dismantling of MarketWorld ideas. The problem is, these ideas have a strong hold on politics, philanthropy, and even many areas of social justice discourse in the United States and elsewhere. It seems like an impossible thing to ask—changing the entire political structure of how things are done. But is it enough for us, the ordinary citizens, to simply accept the status quo? Giridharadas encourages us not to be, and I commend him for that. It is time for the ordinary people to demand more of democracy, in order that we may one day have faith in our democratic institutions.

Some interesting quotes I highlighted:

“Management consulting firms and Wall Street financial houses have persuaded many young people in recent years that they provide a superior version of what the liberal arts are said to offer: highly portable training for doing whatever you wish down the road.”

“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.”

“Society tells me I have to go to school, get a good job, and then I’ll get a salary, because I’m in America,” Jacobs said on another occasion. “And that’s what I did, and now I’m in debt. And now I’m suffocating.”

“VCs [venture capitalists] are among the most powerful people in the world today, but in his mind he was the little guy. When your leader still wears the beret from his days in the rebel army, you should be afraid.”

“As Upton Sinclair said, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.’”

“Social change is not a project that one group of people carries out for the benefit of another.”

“There was a time, as the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy has observed, when we loved ‘public’ enough to place our most elevated hopes in republics, and when ‘private’ reminded us of its cousins ‘privation’ and ‘deprived.’”

“The private sector didn’t merely add to the public sphere’s activities. It got to change the language in which the public sphere thought and acted.”

“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.”