Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Chapter 2 begins with the story of another individual—Stacy Asher—who, like Hilary Cohen, intends to do good. While Cohen’s pivotal moment was reading Nicomacchean Ethics, Asher’s was seeing orphans in Tanzania. Asher’s response to a sudden, inescapable awareness of poverty is telling. Rather than work to send funding or aid directly to the orphans, her Portfolios with a Purpose first filters aid through the financial market. The fantasy-football-type game is promoted as a fun way to do good, but this characterization overlooks a deeper issue. Giridharadas counters that the elites who have the capital to put toward Portfolios with a Purpose benefit by driving up the prices of stock bought for the game (for aid to Africa)—stock they themselves may own or manage. They may profit in this way even though these same individuals may be contributing to the debt problem in Africa that exacerbates the problems faced by orphans and others.

The Even app developed by Jane Leibrock is a similar type of arrangement. Giridharadas discusses how Even charges vulnerable people money to insure themselves against wage instability instead of working to redistribute wealth or eliminate the wage instability itself (such as by requiring companies like Uber and Lyft to treat their contractors as regular employees). In this way, Even illustrates how “win-win” thinking serves to increase the wealth of the already wealthy while stagnating the possibilities of those vulnerable people.

Giridharadas states that such arrangements are touted as “solutions” within the MarketWorld because they’re win-win. The concept of both sides—givers and recipients—benefiting can seem too obvious to doubt, and it’s backed by neoliberal economics as explained by Michael Porter and other experts. Porter, for instance, argued that businesses are the most powerful force for solving major problems—a key tenet of the MarketWorld. However, as Giridharadas argues, win-win solutions have hidden, sometimes self-serving implications—which are likely not a surprise to elites. Such “philanthrocapitalism” is built on what Giridharadas sees as an overly optimistic, neoliberal belief that harmony will come from progress and a free market. In the face of issues like stagnant wages and rising inequality, however, that belief seems to be a lie. “America has stabilized its own income statements over a generation by off-loading uncertainty onto workers,” Giridharadas charges, a practice that has contributed to the growth of inequality (57-58).

The MarketWorld not only promotes win-win thinking, but it actively criticizes the “win-lose” approach of governments and non-profits: Giving and not gaining in return is antithetical to the market approach. From another perspective, the market approach can call itself superior because it can claim not to have to fundraise like governments and non-profits, though this overlooks the importance of venture capital and capital investment. Meanwhile, Giridharadas posits, inequality continues to grow, but elites reject the very language that would critique inequality and other injustices. For example, Emmet Carson, who runs the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, is told to stop using the language of social justice because elites see its concepts, like wealth redistribution, as win-lose.