Review and Discussion of

“Winners Take All, The Elite Charade of Changing the World”

by Anand Giridharadas

1. What are some of the systemic problems giving rise to the author’s writing this book?

a. p. 5: The fortunes of the world’s billionaires now grow at more than double the pace of everyone else’s, and the top 10 percent of humanity have come to hold 90 percent of the planet’s wealth.

b. p. 86: Per Oxfam, just sixty-two billionaires possessed as much wealth as the half of humanity (3.6 billion People), down from three-hundred billionaires a few years.” (p.86) When better data became available, Oxfam said just nine billionaires, not sixty-two, had 90 percent of the wealth.

c. p. 6: In gathering this 90 percent of the wealth, many of these 10 percent “have caused serious societal problems.”

d. p. 5: When many of the 10 percent have tried to take ownership of the problem, the result has been both laudable and self-serving.

e. p. 5: The approaches of taking ownership “mostly aren’t democratic.

f. p. 53: “The growing volatility of millions of working-class Americans’ income, thanks to the spreading practice of employing people erratically, the rise in part-time jobs and gigs . . . that left many eternally chasing work instead of building livelihoods.”

g. p. 75: “industry is more concentrated that most, with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft controlling much of everything.”

h. p. 157: “Growth in inequality might be a foe to civic comity, but it is a friend to private philanthropy.” Robert Reich

i. p. 92: “In recent decades, Americans have lost faith in virtually every institution in the country, except for the military . . .”

j. Cynicism towards the government opens up opportunities for the 10 percenters to address the wealth distribution through “market friendly” ways.

i. p. 19: To wit: Reagan declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

ii. p. 19: To wit: Bill Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over.”

2. From a psychological view, what characterizes the approach the elites have taken to redress the inequitable distribution of wealth?

a. p. 8: Being “in the vanguard of social change” may take the edge off of public anger and “improves the image of the winners.”

b. p. 8: “Market-friendly ways” should be used, so as not to “upset fundamental power equations.”

c. p. 10: “Controlling efforts to question the distribution of money and power” for the 10 percenters.

d. p. 26: Instilling the attitude that “we cannot drive lasting change by creating new top-down programs from Washington.”

e. p. 34: Creating the illusion that “they are changing the world when they may instead—or also—be protecting a system that is at the root of the problems they wish to solve.”

f. p.38: “help people in ways that let you keep living your life as is while shedding some of your guilt.”

g. p. 52: “if no one questioned the entrepreneurs’ fortunes and their personal status quo, they were willing to help.” And they do not want “help organized through democracy and collective action”

3. What does Giridharadas mean by the term “MarketWorld”?

a. p. 30: “To do well and do good, to change world while also profiting from the status quo.”

b. p. 30: Promote socio-economic change “through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the system that people share in common.”

c. p. 49: Supports the notion that “we get what we deserve through marketplace arrangements . . . “rejects the notion that there are different social classes with different interests who must fight for their needs and rights.”

d. p. 73: “In the mid-1990s, Bill Gates predicted that technology would help to equalize a stubbornly unequal world: . . . The network will not eliminate barriers of prejudice or inequality, but it will be a powerful force in that direction.”

e. p. 73: Sprinkling “seeds of technology” will allow “equality to sprout.”

f. p. 109: “Scaling back her (Cuddy) critique of the system (e.g. sexist issues) had allowed her to be wildly popular with MarketWorld elites and more easily digested by the world at large.”

g. p. 120: “watered-down theories of change that are personal, individual, depoliticized, respect of the status quo and system, and not in the least bit disruptive.” “MarketWorld that tell us that change is easy, is win-win, and doesn’t require sacrifice.”

h. TBD

4. How did the author differentiate “public intellectuals” from “thought leaders”?

a. p. 92: “Public intellectuals” argue with each other in the pages of books and magazines; they “pose a genuine threat to winners.”

b. p. 92: “Thought leaders” give TED talks that leave little space for criticism or rebuttal and emphasize hopeful solutions over systemic change.”

c. p. 93: Since 1990, the lower percent of academics on tenure track (by half) and newsroom staffs reduced by 40 percent have opened up a void filled by “thought leaders.” “thought leadership is easily conquered by charlatans.”

d. p. 97: TED talks (1) focus on the victim (a win-win approach), not the perpetrator (a win-lose approach); there is no culprit. And (2) personalize the political by seeing “problems as personal and individual dramas rather than collective and systemic ones.”

e. p. 108: “Deemphasizing talk of the system had made her (Cuddy) ideas more accessible, which caused her to become even more aware of how dismal the system was.”

f. pp. 122 and 123: Framing arguments “about poverty are more acceptable than ideas framed as being about inequality.” Inequality “means to change the system.”

g. p. 104: Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.”

5. In what ways or what examples demonstrate the way “Winners” emphasize technology as the panacea to our socio-economic challenges?

a. p. 140: TechnoService harnesses the power of the private sector “to link people to in formation, capital and markets . . .” “It is possible to read into this that people are poor because of the absence of linkages, not because of caste, race, land, hoarding, wages, labor conditions, and plunder; not because of reversible decisions societies have taken.”

b. p. 148: “dynamic scheduling” tools at Starbucks helped it pay the smallest wage to service a given amount of demand,” thereby making the company more profitable while bring more chaos into workers’ lives.

c. p. 151: Staff recruited from consulting and finance firms are assumed to know better than the beneficiaries of the MarketWorld’s largesse what “the answer to the problems” should be.

6. What types of parameters does the author cites as needed to seek improvement of the world and the lives of other people?

a. p. 153: “Justice demands universal participation.”

b. p. 153: “Social change is not a project that one group of people carries out for the benefit of another.”

c. p. 159: Robert Reich writes “that the new foundations “were troubling because they were considered a deeply antidemocratic institution, an entity that could exist in perpetuity and that was unaccountable except to a hand-picked assemblage of trustees.”

d. p. 255 and 259: Chira Cordelli states that “Winners” bear responsibility for the state of the government institutions for two reasons:

i. “because you’re worth nothing without society, and also

ii. because we would all be dominated by others without political institutions that protect our rights.”

e. p. 262: “. . .this right speak for others is simply illegitimate when exercised by a powerful private citizen.” “This is what it means to be free and equal and independent individuals and, for better or for worse, share common institutions,” Cordelli said.

f. p. 272: When a society solves a problem politically and systemically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen.”

7. What types of regulations and parameters can change the way wealth and income is distributed?

a. Labor laws, e.g. at Microsoft workers with immigrant visas can only work at Microsoft and are unable to apply for work at higher pay. (source-earlier book readings on immigration)

b. Inheritance taxes: p. 257: Chira Cordelli wrote, “If you have campaigned against inheritance tax, you have directly tried to avoid paying taxes. If you supported and directly, voluntarily benefited from a system where there were low labor regulations and increased precarity,” then, she argues, “you have directly contributed to a structure that foreseeably and avoidably harmed people.” That is “direct complicity.”

c. Regressive and low levels of income taxes: p. 77: “Doing everything to reduce their tax burdens, even when legal, stand in contradiction with their claims to do well by doing good.” [Note: Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos live in a state without a state income tax though no one is monitoring where they spend their time.}

d. Industrial and mining regulations: p. 52: “winners” do not want antitrust regulation of tech companies”

e. Breakup companies that created the wealth

f. Education: p. 52: “the world to be changed in ways that had their buy-in—think charter schools over more equal public-school funding . . .”

g. “Real change often demands sacrifice.” p. 254: “Real change may compel trade-offs and the necessity of choosing your priorities.”