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.
