Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

The prologue of Winners Take All presents the book’s basic critique of the control that elite individuals and groups have over initiatives to solve pressing social and economic issues. Giridharadas points out that despite the elites’ numerous, supposedly well-intentioned initiatives to improve the world, inequality and dissatisfaction are more prevalent than ever. Researcher Thomas Piketty has shown that economic opportunities have advanced for the top 1% and have stagnated or dropped for the majority. In addition, the prologue makes Giridharadas’s goal clear: He intends to explore who is responsible for widening inequality despite claims to be improving society. Winners Take All also investigates how we arrived at this situation and what to do about it. Additionally, the prologue makes the book’s method clear: Winners Take All uses the stories of a range of elite individuals, from business executives to philanthropists to thought leaders, to explore questions about inequality and socioeconomic improvement.

Giridharadas highlights this method in Chapter 1 through his in-depth discussion of Hilary Cohen. Cohen represents the idealistic individual who chooses to become involved in the world of high-level finance and consulting with the goal of promoting social and economic improvements. She’s young, ambitious, and honest in her intentions. This is shown, for example, in the formative impact of ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s book Nicomachean Ethics on Cohen’s thinking during college. She was influenced by Aristotle’s insistence that the pursuit of wealth is not the highest aim in life. Cohen took this perspective with her even as she began looking for jobs in consulting. Such details emphasize that Cohen’s motivations were rooted outside the business world, in a desire to foster good rather than build wealth.

Giridharadas begins his book this way, with a portrait of a young woman wanting to do good for reasons not directly tied to financial markets—rather than with a portrait of an established elite, like venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar (who is discussed in Chapter 3). By beginning with Cohen’s story, Giridharadas acknowledges that the socioeconomic projects of elites and those involved in what he calls the MarketWorld are in many ways well-intentioned. Nevertheless, by showing how Cohen is pulled into a world of self-serving business ventures that don’t live up to the ideals they espouse, Giridharadas simultaneously builds his critique of the MarketWorld approach to solving socioeconomic problems.

Giridharadas shows that the problem can’t be reduced to simply elites versus non-elites. Instead, it infiltrates and spreads ideas from within the institutions in which people like Cohen do their work, including universities, governments, non-profits, and businesses. For instance, “Socialism clubs have given way to social enterprise clubs on American campuses,” and President Bill Clinton introduced a “Third Way” in politics—between the left and right—influenced by the role of financial markets (17). Because Cohen operates within key institutions of the MarketWorld, like the consulting group McKinsey and the Obama Foundation, Giridharadas can use her story to expose from the inside the “charade” of the elite changing the world.