Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“Trump is at once an exposer, an exploiter, and an embodiment of the cult of elite-led social change.”

Throughout his book, Giridharadas takes a decidedly progressive standpoint, supporting ideas like fighting inequality, government regulation of business, and democratically grounded programs to treat socioeconomic issues. However, he’s also careful to avoid partisan thinking. In the Prologue, he emphasizes that Donald Trump successfully capitalized on populist sentiments that reflected non-elites’ resentment at the increasing wealth gap and its resultant effects. Giridharadas neither blames Trump alone for the elite “charade” of social nor ignores how many liberals have contributed to this charade. Instead, he sees the situation as much more complicated.

“Accountancy, medicine, education, espionage, and seafaring all have their own tools and modes of analysis, but none of those approaches was widely promoted as the solution to virtually everything else.”

Winners Take All assembles a variety of evidence to support its argument, including statistics, citations from experts, and case studies of individuals inside and outside MarketWorld. In addition, Giridharadas uses plain-language reasoning to emphatically convince readers of his argument. Here, he critiques the supposition that the market-driven approach is a one-size-fits-all solution to a wide range of social, economic, and political issues by reminding readers that other highly specialized fields—like accountancy or seafaring—don’t overstep their bounds and claim to contain the answers to all problems.

“The biggest risk of putting a corporate consulting firm in charge of designing fixes for societal problems is that it may sideline certain fundamental questions about power.”

One of the key points of Giridharadas’s argument is that a basic conflict of interest exists in asking businesses to be the ultimate answer to all social problems. Businesses have the goal of building profits and market power, and if answering social problems means realigning power and opportunity to eradicate inequality, then businesses must either ignore their own interests, or—as Giridharadas argues is most often the case—not truly address those social problems. He implies that real solutions are built more democratically and with input from government and individual stakeholders.

“Like many MarketWorld do-gooders, she was more interested in starting something new than in examining how she and those around her—and the institutions they belonged to—might change their existing ways.”

In examining the story of entrepreneur Stacy Asher, Giridharadas begins from a vantage point of suspicion about her desire to create positive change. Asher responded to having seen poverty in Africa firsthand by creating Portfolios with a Purpose, a stock investment game from which proceeds are given to disadvantaged people in Africa. Giridharadas looks beyond what seems like a “win-win” situation to ask why Asher’s response involved using the same financial methods that increase elites’ wealth rather than look for ways to create fundamental changes to eliminate inequality.

“It captures MarketWorld values perfectly: You could change things without having to change a thing.”

Bothered by the win-win thinking of entrepreneurs and elites, Giridharadas sums up their approach in a single line. The supposed change they claim to enact, he argues, effectively upholds the status quo and accepts inequality. By repeating the word “change,” Giridharadas implies how elites’ use of the term is devoid of meaning.

“America doesn’t have a problem of lagging productivity so much as a problem of the gains from productivity being captured by elites.”

Giridharadas directs attention to the often-retold myth that hard work and productivity lead to success and wealth. Given this myth, he implies, elites may argue that a lack of productivity on the part of non-elites has led to the wide gap between the wealthiest individuals and everyone else. Giridharadas argues that the problem is instead more structural: Business and financial regulations tend to favor already-wealthy individuals, ensuring that financial gains among businesses are held for them rather than being distributed in some way to benefit others.

“Longer lives for rich people were just something that happened to be coming down the pipe. Not so much a better health care system for all.”

Giridharadas criticizes the notion that continuing improvements in technology and standards of living will not only ensure increases in wealth but also lead to longer lives and better health. He instead argues that most individuals won’t benefit from these increases. Given the widening wealth gap, most people will lack the resources to acquire the benefits reserved for elites.

“A king presides over a multitude of truths. But a rebel, who takes no responsibility for the whole, is free to pursue his singular truth. […] It is not in the rebel’s job description to worry about others who might have needs that are different from his.”

Giridharadas dismantles the idea that elite business leaders can both be maverick “rebels” and have the good of the public genuinely in mind. He argues that the entire notion of the business leader as a thoughtful social leader is a lie. Instead, they show more allegiance to the success of their business or individual gains than to social improvement.

“Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe […]. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.”

David Heinemeier Hansson is the founder of the work productivity software Basecamp. His example provides one of the relatively few positive ones within Winners Take All. Giridharadas shares a quote from Hansson in which he criticizes the hyper-competitive drive of elite business leaders who aren’t content to simply do good business but instead see massive power as their benchmark.

“Who owns what no one has any choice but to use?”

Giridharadas takes a cue from Brendan Martin, who founded the Working World, an organization devoted to cooperative finance in Argentina, Nicaragua, and the US. Martin pointed out that, historically, platforms fundamental to society, such as agriculture and land ownership, eventually had to be made publicly accessible. Giridharadas considers contemporary platforms of importance, like technology, in the same light. While relatively few individuals hold vast power and control over technology, that technology is a basic need to individuals the world over. Thus, Giridharadas implies, the benefits of that technology must be redistributed and shared to reduce inequality and promote the good of all.

“Many genuine agents of change must make peace with never being seen as such, at least within their own lifetimes.”

Some elites take credit for creating social change as a way to increase their stature. However, Giridharadas argues, these claims of creating supposed change are insincere. True philanthropy and efforts to foster social improvements are, when authentic, more likely to come from the work of individuals who don’t expect or ask to receive public recognition, fame, or fortune.

“Elites seemed increasingly guided by lite facsimiles of change. These ideas largely exempted markets and their winners from scrutiny, despite their immense power in decided how people’s lives were lived and their support for a system that produced extraordinary fortunes and extraordinary exclusion.”

Bruno Giussani is one of the TED Talk organizers, but Giridharadas notes that Giussani has come to question the motivations of elites, some of whom speak at TED events. Giussani’s concerns align with Giridharadas’s: Both feel that elites have gained increasing power while simultaneously enacting policies and practices that shield them from responsibility for increasing inequality. Thus, the example of Giussani provides one of many cases in Winners Take All that use individuals connected to elites to critique their world from the inside.

“There are many facets to this kind of ideology that have been used to justify the current situation.”

Chapter 4 discusses Giussani extensively. Here, Giridharadas quotes directly from Giussani, who critiques elites’ defense of the global economy. Many global neoliberal economic policies are justified by claiming to promote good for one group, sector, or area while ignoring the harm done to others. For instance, Giussani notes, the rise of the middle class in China doesn’t erase layoffs of factory workers in Manchester, England that result from that rise.

“In Mongolia, Hinton’s approach was to learn from the people he was studying by hanging back, observing, realizing all he didn’t know. Success required letting other people lead him.”

Chapter 5 centers in part on the experiences of Sean Hinton, who made his mark as a consultant and later as the head of George Soros’s Economic Advancement Program. Before that, however, Hinton studied musicology and served as an economic liaison in Mongolia. Those earlier experiences outside the world of business and finance colored his worldview in a pure way, Giridharadas implies. What Hinton found in his work as a consultant and leader was a set of values that were fundamentally at odds with what he learned about listening to and learning from others.

“They have evolved from being a specialized way of solving particular business problems to being, in the view of many, the essential toolkit for solving anything.”

Giridharadas builds on Hinton’s discomfort with the problem-solving methods of consulting groups like McKinsey, critiquing the way these methods are seen as a universal approach to addressing all kinds of social and economic problems as well as business ones. He argues that these specialized methods are too reductive and narrowly focused. Rather than see problems in their complexity, they force so-called solutions that may be damaging.

“Somehow in being efficient and being clever and being productive, people thought they had the license to just stop thinking about human beings and the well-being of everybody else in the system.”

The market-driven, business-mindset approach to solving social problems often has unintended consequences, Giridharadas reminds readers. This approach can be so focused on win-win solutions that it steamrolls over aspects of a given issue that can’t be reduced to a data point or that don’t contribute to win-win thinking. In any case, the well-being of individuals can suffer as a result.

“Criticism focused on how the new philanthropy not only laundered cruelly earned money but also converted it into influence over a democratic society.”

Chapter 6 provides a historical overview of modern philanthropy and shows that criticism of philanthropy isn’t new. In examining the “gospel of wealth” promoted by Andrew Carnegie, Giridharadas notes that even in the early days of modern philanthropy, critics realized that the money given for philanthropic causes might have been gained in less than just ways. Likewise, those critics became upset at the way that elites could gain social, economic, and political influence through gifts perhaps superficially made in the name of philanthropy.

“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, […] if, in other words, they were willing to let go of anything dear.”

Giridharadas provides an overview of a meeting of elites at a philanthropic banquet. He notes that they’re ready to congratulate themselves for the supposed good they’ve fostered through their donations. However, he argues, they never question fundamental aspects of their wealth and status which, if examined, would show that if they realigned their business practices and priorities, they might eliminate the need for philanthropy at all.

“True generosity might mean restrained taking, not just the belated shedding of some of what had been taken.”

In Chapter 6, Giridharadas investigates the charade of philanthropy and turns to the words of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. The renowned civil rights leader was a stark critic of elite philanthropy in the tradition of Andrew Carnegie. King insisted that true philanthropy would help to ensure that those who need help were given more of a chance from the start, rather than having elites suppress non-elites first and then only later give back to them in ways that uphold the elites’ power and status.

“It is civic life. It is the habit of solving problems together, in the public sphere, through the tools of government and in the trenches of civil society. It is solving problems in ways that give the people you are helping a say in the solutions.”

Toward the end of Winners Take All, Giridharadas turns increasing attention to alternatives to the elites’ approach to changing the world. For instance, he supports non-business approaches to solving problems, including government regulations and public debates. These approaches, he argues, build connections and equality rather than breeding elitism and inequality.

“The Democratic Party had a chance to stand for a robust alternative to market hegemony […] but it often did, under Clinton and Obama, in a tepid, market-friendly, donor approved way that conceded so much to the government’s haters that the cause lost the fire of its purpose.”

In critiquing the Democratic Party in Chapter 7, Giridharadas turns to a perspective he shared in his book’s introduction: He doesn’t see the problems of the elites’ attempt to change the world as a simple matter of conservative versus liberal. In fact, Giridharadas notes, while Democrats may claim to represent the more liberal direction of American politics, many Democrats (including the Clintons and President Barak Obama) have often supported the ventures of MarketWorld rather than critiquing them and working more directly to fight inequality and other pressing issues.

“The inescapable answer to the overwhelming question—Where do we go from here?—is: somewhere other than where we have been going, let by people other than the people who have been leading us.”

Winners Take All focuses primarily on critiquing elite-led ventures to promote socioeconomic change rather than offering concrete alternatives. However, Giridharadas doesn’t ignore the possibility of an alternative, particularly as he closes his book. Given that Giridharadas uses stories of individuals whose backgrounds are outside the world of business or who are dissatisfied with market-driven change, it follows that he believes the alternative to elites’ control over changing the world must originate outside the world of financial power and prestige.

“There is the fact that absent a political system of shared institutions, anyone could dominate anyone.”

The Epilogue reiterates many of the book’s key points and turns attention to next steps. Having argued that alternatives to elites’ control over changing the world ought to come from outside the world of business, Giridharadas emphasizes the importance of political interventions and government regulations. While political institutions certainly aren’t without fault, Giridharadas implies that they’re an important check on markets and the tendency of elites to protect their own interests in the face of inequality.