Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

In Chapter 5, Winners Take All returns to examples of figures who start out with good intentions of fostering social good, figures who recall Hilary Cohen and others discussed earlier. George Soros and Sean Hinton were both influenced by aspects of their backgrounds that had nothing to do with business: Soros’s experience of living under Nazi rule spurred his mission to promote justice, while Hinton’s background in musicology and cultural studies impacted his openness to listening to and learning from other people. Giridharadas views both men favorably, implying that outsiders’ perspectives might be critical to correcting the way that elites have commandeered ventures to create social change.

However, like Cohen, Soros and Hinton both found themselves drawn into MarketWorld. Thus, Giridharadas again shows the power of the message touted by elites. After decades of promoting justice through his Open Society Foundation, Soros was convinced to create an impact investing program in line with win-win thinking. Likewise, Hinton shifted from using his knowledge of Mongolian culture as an economic liaison to working as a consultant for McKinsey. As he learned the McKinsey method of convincing clients by limiting and carefully framing the scope of a problem, Hinton consequently felt somewhat as though he were betraying his instincts about openly and actively listening to people. Hinton’s concerns convey his (and Giridharadas’s) worries about elites’ lack of humility. Like Cohen, Hinton is an outsider because of his ideals—yet has an insider’s perspective on elites because of his work with McKinsey. Giridharadas draws on this perspective to again expose the elite “charade,” arguing that McKinsey’s method isn’t based on solving problems but rather on manipulating how clients see problems.

The discussion of Michael Porter provides another example of how Giridharadas uses insider/outsider perspectives to critique the MarketWorld approach. Porter, an economist at the Harvard Business School, developed foundational ideas in neoliberalism, ideas that influenced the free-market, business-dominating approach to solving problems that elites favor. Thus, Porter is an insider, yet Giridharadas describes how at some point Porter began to reassess his views. He realized (and Giridharadas seconds) that purporting to solve problems in the MarketWorld-favored way obscures the richness of problems. For example, it was disingenuous for elite leaders to say that they promote women’s rights while simultaneously avoiding taxes, thus making “women-friendly policies like universal daycare more elusive” (141-42). While the inside/outside perspectives of figures like Soros, Hinton, Porter, and Cohen are complex, Giridharadas ultimately draws on them to expose problems within the elite approach to solving social issues, constructing an argument more nuanced and reliable than a fully external attack—which might be more easily dismissed.