Paul Adams - Summary of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Summary

of

Winners Take All

Anand Giridharadas

Conversation Starters

By Paul Adams

Book Habits

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EVERY GOOD BOOK CONTAINS A WORLD FAR DEEPER THAN the surface of its pages. Questions herein are designed to bring us beneath the surface of the page and invite us into the world that lives on. These questions can be used to:

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Introducing Winners Take All

T

he book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas is a groundbreaking investigation. The global elites have been around for a long time and in their success, they make efforts to change the world. However, Giridharadas argues that they do this not only out of pure motives but also in an effort to maintain the status quo and further obscure their role in causing these problems in the first place.

Giridharadas discusses the modern worlds reverence for rich entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Everyone is buoyed by the belief that the governments of the nations are incapable of handling the worlds problems and the giants of Silicon Valley can. This belief that sprung from Silicon Valley is being spread across the world. Giridharadas calls this gospel of Silicon Valley, the elite charade of changing the world. He explores what doing good has meant to the wealthy. The same people are benefiting from the unequal systems that created poverty in the first place. The rich people of today, like the Zuckerbergs, the Buffets, the Gates, are giving away money to causes and charities like never before yet the world is more unequal than it ever was. Giridharadas thinks that it is absurd to believe that the wealthy are the best people to change the system that they are benefitting from and more often than not, responsible for. For him, its like deciding that the best firefighters are the arsonists.

In this book, Giridharadas writes about a woman who was working for a start-up tech company. She peddles an app in order to help the poor in Silicon Valley to manage their unstable incomes. He shares expertly chosen anecdotes that are thick in irony. After all, tech start-ups should be blamed for introducing a fickle economy. They are the cause of the soaring prices of rent and homelessness in their own backyards. One story Giridharadas was about the Sackler family. They donate millions to universities and museums. These millions were made by OxyContin. Their company uses exploitative marketing and their predatory de-regulation are fueling the opioid crisis.

Giridharadas writes that there is no denying that todays global elites are among the most socially concerned and involved elites in history. However, by the cold logic of numbers, they appear to be the more predatory in history. Giridharadas skewers the feminism Silicon Valley style. They came up with a way to increase the participation of women in the workforce. They offer paid family leave, paid maternity leave, healthcare, and universal daycare, among many other benefits. Instead, these companies leaned in to the call that Sheryl Sandberg echoed to women to raise their hands more and say yes to a cheaper and less effective alternative.

Companies increased gender equality. They stemmed the tide of the opioid crisis is a costly way. These required companies to lower their respective bottom lines and to establish corporations and wealthy individuals to pay significantly more taxes. Giridharadas says that it will be much easier for the elites to give away symbolic scraps to the unfortunate. But, he argues, that many of them would not need the scraps in the first place if the society were working right.

Giridharadas also discussed the elites change-maker conferences. These include the Davos World Economic Forum and the Aspen Ideas Festival . He himself was a fellow at the 2015 Aspen Institute. During this time, he gave a talk to the attendees that turned on the discussion. He accused them of perpetuation and thus benefitting from the very problems that they claim that they were solving. This divisive talk became the seed of this book. He is a member of the world that the critics and he mines his experiences in the pools and private jets of billionaires. Hence in the inner sanctums of the modern gilded age, Giridharadas is asking the hard questions: Why should the gravest problems of our society be solved by the few unelected upper crusts? Why are the public institutions eroded when companies lobby and dodge taxes? He also points to the answer: The society should not rely on the scraps that the elites give away, rather we must act to build more robust and egalitarian institutions that will truly change the world.

Bill Gates says that he appreciates Anands commitment to spreading social justice. He continues to say that Winners Take All is a thought-provoking book his fresh perspective on solving complex societal problems is admirable. Benjamin Soskis, the author of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, says that this book levels a devastating attack on philanthrocapitalism. Publishers Weekly says that Winners Take All is a damning portrait of contemporary American philanthropy. They say that it is a must-read for anyone interested in changing the world.