Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7 and Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Exposing the Elite Charade of Doing Good

A basic premise of Winners Take All is that all is not what it appears to be in the world of elite-led ventures to change the world. Giridharadas signals this idea by putting the word “charade” in the subtitle of his book. This suggests that the actions and initiatives that are said to benefit average people or less-fortunate individuals might be a kind of performance masking the reality of elites’ motivations. Giridharadas’s goal is to unveil this charade, exposing how many elite claims to do good for others really serve to uphold inequality.

Throughout the chapters of his book, Giridharadas builds his exposé. One of the key critiques he establishes is that the “win-win” thinking promoted by elites is anything but. While the win-win perspective seems to suggest that “[w]hat is good for me will be good for you,” it also essentially means that “you could help people in ways that let you keep living your life as is, while shedding some of your guilt” (38). Elite leaders characterize the problem-solving methods of governments, non-profits, and similar institutions as “win-lose” because they’re not focused on gaining profits but rather on service to the public or to groups in need. Describing such efforts as win-lose is an attempt to discredit their method of problem solving. Giridharadas’s point, on the other hand, is to show that elites’ claims to create win-win situations, or that “you could change things without having to change a thing” (37) are false and that they instead result in greater benefits for elites while failing to create substantial, fundamental change.

Similarly, Giridharadas dismantles the concept of thought leadership, which has become vital to elite plans to change the world. Thought leaders purport to offer guidance that informs planning, innovation, and action to drives change. Moreover, the elite world has embraced thought leaders, Giridharadas contends, because their ideas are said to disrupt thinking exemplified by governments and other established institutions, offering maverick alternatives that can move more nimbly and promote win-win results. However, Giridharadas argues that the ideas of thought leaders like Amy Cuddy and Malcom Gladwell are constrained by elites’ influence, because elites will accept only ideas that conform to their expectations and comforts. Thus, he suggests, thought leadership is another charade, one that supposedly offers change but also upholds the elite status quo.

A third example of how Giridharadas dismantles the elite charade of changing the world comes in his Chapter 6 analysis of the practices of modern philanthropy. The idea of redistributing wealth to help those less fortunate and to support institutions and causes of value seems unquestionably good. However, by analyzing both historical and contemporary examples of philanthropy, Giridharadas exposes the cracks in this assumption to try to break the “silence” and raises “questions about the system in which the wealth was generated” (160). Moreover, he tells the story of a philanthropic insider, Darren Walker, who is uneasy with the basic beliefs of modern philanthropy. Pointing to a person familiar with the world of philanthropy who questions its practices gives further weight to Giridharadas’s argument that philanthropy, like other elite-led ventures to promote good, is disingenuous.

Highlighting the Impact of Inequality on Individuals

Throughout Winners Take All, Giridharadas points to inequality as an issue that is partly a consequence of the concentration of wealth and opportunity among elites. In addition, he consistently argues that many of elites’ attempts to change the world exacerbate inequality. Giridharadas suggests that elites attempt to mask their acceptance of inequality by ignoring its existence. They avoid reminders “that there [are] such things as power and privilege” and that “people had a long habit of exploiting one another, no matter how selfless they and their ideas seem” (82-83). He demonstrates the importance of the issue of inequality in the book’s Prologue, which notes how, despite elites’ programs to create good, the wealth gap between the top 10% of society and everyone else is wider than ever, and opportunities for non-elites are becoming ever-more constricted.

Giridharadas shows that this perspective has a long history when he examines industrial magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s so-called “Gospel of Wealth,” which accepted inequality as “a brief state between the taking and giving phases” (163). Moreover, this perspective continues to influence modern philanthropy, as shown in Chapter 6’s discussion of Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. Walker wrote an open response to Carnegie’s ideas titled “Toward a New Gospel of Wealth,” in which he asks, “[w]hat underlying forces drive the very inequality whose manifestations we seek to ameliorate?” (171). However, when Walker addressed the private equity firm KKR at a philanthropic event, he toned down his remarks, implying that elites continue to exert control over exactly how philanthropy looks at (or ignores) the topic of inequality.

Other sections of Winners Take All examine additional examples of how elite-led ventures to create change can exacerbate rather than eliminated inequality. For example, Chapter 2 mentions the app Even, developed by Jane Leibrock. The app was presented as a way for gig workers and others with fluctuating incomes to create a safety net for themselves by withholding a portion of their earnings—for which the service Even charges a fee. While the venture seems like a way to help workers whose wages may be precarious, Giridharadas questions why elites don’t put pressure on companies like Lyft and Uber (those that employ gig workers) to pay their workers more fairly. Instead of changing the structural practices that contribute to inequality, Giridharadas implies, elites are more interested in maintaining the status quo because, through apps like Even and many other means, they can continue to prosper while inequality exists.

Envisioning Socioeconomic Alternatives

The primary objective of Winners Take All is to expose the numerous issues associated with elite individuals and organizations taking control of initiatives to change the world—issues that many people may be unaware of. Thus, Giridharadas is more concerned with raising awareness and critiquing elites’ methods and motivations than with offering specific solutions to solve the problems that those methods and motivations cause. Nevertheless, Giridharadas’ book points readers in the direction of alternative methods of fostering social and economic good, methods that would be more democratic, egalitarian, and sustainable.

Throughout Winners Take All, Giridharadas makes it clear that many individuals want to envision a better world—one not centered on greed, individual gains, and oppression. Hilary Cohen, described in Chapter 1, illustrates an idealistic person committed to positive change, someone who “wanted to pursue that idea of human flourishing for others” (15). She found her initial inspiration not in the world of business but in the world of ideas when she read philosopher Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In this way, Giridharadas implies that the solution to the problems caused by the “elite charade of changing the world” will come from outside the world of money. Similarly, Darren Walker, discussed in Chapter 7, exemplifies someone who carries ideas from outside MarketWorld even as he works within it. Born to a poor single mother and facing numerous disadvantages, Walker nevertheless attained success, eventually becoming head of the Ford Foundation. However, along the way, his disadvantaged background “reminded him that nothing changed if you didn’t change the system as a whole” (167-168). Despite their ideals and outside perspectives, both Walker and Cohen work within the world of elites as the leader of a philanthropic organization and as a consultant, respectively. Sean Hinton and George Soros, both discussed in Chapter 5, provide similar examples.

The “elite charade” presents itself as a market-driven alternative to established (often governmental) approaches to creating change, using the language of disruption and doing good. Giridharadas’s argument is that this “charade” is at best a quasi-alternative. Economist Dani Roderik, discussed in Chapter 7, points to more of a genuine alternative. He suggests that is a smugness associated with neoliberal ideas of “doing-well-by-doing-good” on the global stage that is as damaging as conservative, xenophobic, nationalist, and self-serving approaches. To enact real change, Roderik contends, we must recognize the reality that unilateral solutions, such as an insistence on market-driven approaches to solving social problems, do not square with the diversity and nuance of situations found around the world. Instead, we must recognize “the hard work that we should get engaged in” to solve these problems (224). Giridharadas points to the academic Chiara Cordelli as another point of inspiration, devoting several pages of the Epilogue to quoting from Cordelli and summarizing her ideas. Cordelli insists that elite do-gooders must take a hard look at themselves, accept the existence of inequality, actively work to correct the systems that led to it, and stop looking the other way and living with the status quo. In fact, Winners Take All closes with a quote from Cordelli; thus, Giridharadas emphasizes the point that real and lasting change must come from outside the system.