Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Inequality is the primary consequence of the enormous gap between wealthy, powerful elites and everyone else. Giridharadas notes that because of factors including but not limited to neoliberalism, free market policies, and political connections, “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” (5). The remaining 10% of the world’s wealth is distributed over 90% of the world’s population, meaning that vast differences exist between the fortunes of elites and non-elites. Throughout Winners Take All, Giridharadas suggests some of the consequences of this inequality for non-elites, which include stagnated wages, shrinking possibilities for improving socioeconomic status, increasing difficulty accessing resources, feelings of disenfranchisement and dissatisfaction, and much more.

Giridharadas coined the term MarketWorld as a shorthand for a certain subset of elites. He defines it as “an ascendent power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo” (30). The MarketWorld purports to foster social and economic benefits for non-elites—but only in ways that don’t endanger elites’ possession of power and ever-increasing wealth.

Winners Take All examines what seems like an unquestionably good practice—corporate charitable giving—and exposes it as another sign of the hold elites have over changing the world. Giridharadas notes that a “marked feature of American giving before the age of big philanthropy was the helping of the many by the many,” but all of that changed with the rise of a few enormously wealthy capitalist industrialists, including John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, in the 19th century (156). Examining philanthropy historically, Giridharadas shows that suspicions about modern philanthropy have existed since that time but that figures like Darren Walker (president of the Ford Foundation) are beginning to vocalize their discomfort with the complacency of philanthropy and its tendency to protect elite interests without tackling the fundamental problems that lead to inequality and other issues.

Thought leadership is a concept embraced by MarketWorld and refers to individuals who are embraced and revered for promoting ideas that are based in optimism, “uplifting stories,” and reasoning “inductively from [thought leaders’] experiences more than deductively from authority” (91). The darker side to thought leadership is that these revered individuals don’t challenge the structures and institutions of the status quo even though those structures and institutions may contribute to inequality, discrimination, and other problems. In addition, Giridharadas implies that thought leaders are biased because they work within the MarketWorld system, unlike public intellectuals, who separate themselves from financial and governmental authorities. As a result, the ideas promoted by thought leaders ultimately exacerbate inequality and other problems.