Anand Giridharadas has powerful qualifications for writing about the “winners” in a globalized world. After studying at Michigan, Oxford, and Harvard, he joined McKinsey, where his father was a partner. But his real dream was to become a journalist, and that he did, at high altitude, with two books, successful TED talks, and a Henry Crown Fellowship at the Aspen Institute to his name. Giridharadas made the big time; he was comfortably ensconced within the globalist whale, where philanthropy was almost as popular as greed. As he puts it in his new book, Winners Take All, “I mingled with the ultra-rich in antler-decorated mansions overlooking the Roaring Fork Valley.” He didn’t like the view. He began to question whether all the do-gooding and world-changing around him was “a giant, sweet-lipped lie.”
Like Tom Wolfe in Manhattan, Giridharadas might have gifted the public a fat social novel, sweating with billionaires and their unhappy servitors. The big idea of Winners is that elite philanthropy is so much free cheese in the mousetrap of ruthless monopoly capitalism. The story would be enlivened and ennobled by plot and character, tragedy and farce. Instead, Giridharadas stretches his big idea very far indeed, and what would have made an entertaining multi-tweet thread or a diverting Sunday magazine feature is delivered as yet another book of reportage aiming to start a conversation.
Still, Giridharadas is a genial guide to what he calls MarketWorld, “an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo.” As we tour MarketWorld’s “constantly shifting archipelago of conferences,” Giridharadas aims to dramatize the conflicts and pressures of having loads of money. There’s Stacy Asher who runs a hedge fund and a charity called Portfolios with Purpose. There’s the “deeply spiritual” millionaire Justin Rosenstein, who co-invented Facebook’s “like” button. There’s Laurie Tisch, heir to a $21 billion fortune, who muses, “I mean, it’s probably better not to be poor.”
With none of the duties, heritage, habits, or image-softening eccentricities of a proper aristocracy, those Giridharadas profiles make for rather dull reading. Every one of them is a head-scratching vacillator, a Hamlet of neoliberalism. Their success, their guilt — “I really wonder about my privilege” frets Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation — it’s all here in tedious, hand-wringing detail. You hope Giridharadas had enough time to tell them the truth that if their conscience, however underdeveloped, tells them not to do something, such as signing off vast areas of pristine Mongolian veldt to dubious mining companies, as one of these characters does, then don’t do it.
Much of Winners’ firepower is saved for MarketWorld’s nominal intellectuals, the so-called thought leaders. They give the elite “an ethical philosophy, a language to justify themselves to themselves and others.” Giridharadas is persuasive when he criticizes this TED consensus and its “Pinkering,” the rhetorical use of supposed progress in human history to “delegitimize the concerns of those without power.” He is less persuasive when he assures us that in the past there were no thought leaders, only a class of free-range critics who roamed the public square, neither tethered to institutions nor patrons, speaking truth to power.
This is silly nostalgia. What, for instance, does Giridharadas imagine Plato was up to in Syracuse? The artists and luminaries of Renaissance Italy?
Because Giridharadas was once a thought leader himself, duped by the “apparatus of justification,” he assumes the rest of us take our intellectual cues from TED too. Hence cumbrous asides such as, “That ideology is often called neoliberalism,” or, “The panopticon was a design for a circular prison.” Some of us, shockingly enough, still receive enough education to be more familiar with Jeremy Bentham than Thomas Friedman.
In its final chapters, Winners attempts to link the global elites’ recurrent fits of PowerPoint philanthropy to the angry populism sweeping the West. “The preference for distant needs and transnational problem solving can deepen the feeling that all those globalists are in cahoots with one another,” he writes. Bill Clinton, the thought leader in chief, was twice interviewed for this book, and his solution to populism is about as banal as you’d expect: “The only answer is to build an aggressive, creative partnership involving all levels of government, the private sector, and non-government organizations to make it better.”
Giridharadas dislikes the globalists almost as much as Steve Bannon does. He wants to see financial regulation, employee rights, and the breakup of monopolies replace philanthropy as the cure for contemporary inequalities. MarketWorld will be replaced with BigGov, and the masses will leave populist anger and return to “politics as the place we go to shape the world.” That must be why this Diogenes has given interviews to the likes of Forbes, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times to promote his book, knowing those are the readers who really matter. Whether he’ll have persuaded them to do anything constructive is another matter entirely.
Will Lloyd is a freelance writer from London, England.
