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His book on the topic "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" is also a fantastic read.

For more on this, I highly recommend Anand Giridharadas's 2018 book "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" on the problems behind billionaire philanthropy.

It feels more and more relevant in a post COVID world.

For anyone interested in this topic I highly recommend the book Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas and his various media appearances and upcoming TV show on Vice as food for thought.

I've read (and enjoyed) "Winners Take All" but I'm still having trouble understanding your argument. Could you explain what you mean by the "government-controlled economic environment" and how giving to charities "just harms capitalism." Thanks.

> But a system of philanthropy is inherently biased insofar as since donors can and do choose charitable causes that match their own preferences.

Anand Giridharadas goes pretty deeply into that idea in this talk that he did at Google. I highly recommend watching it, I thought it was elucidating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM

I want to read his book "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" but I haven't gotten to it yet.

This is a text book example from Winners Take all, by Anand Ghidharadas.

They use philanthropy to look noble in the effort of creating a greener planet through recycling. And note that this effort is voluntary, from the kindness of their heart. While, they are the ones creating the problem in the first place. They'll fight any law that will stop them from creating the problem and benefiting from it.

Anand Ghiridaradas' Book "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" is very insightful in that regard. He held a google talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM) about it that got a bit of notoriety since he apparently ruffled a few feathers there.

There's an interesting book on this topic of individualized philanthropy by the powerful and its effect of masking the deeper systemic problems. It's called "Winners Take All" by Anand Giridharadas.

I'm only about halfway through, but the central thesis appears to be that the powerful, even if they truly want to make a good-faith effort to improve the world, will naturally gravitate towards forms of social change that don't challenge their power. He describes this kind of thinking as "win-win" in that only solutions that don't involve those in power sacrificing the conditions that made them powerful will be considered by the philanthropic class. These "win-win" solutions then displace more direct "win-lose" solutions that actually address the underlying power dynamic.

The arguments put forth ring pretty true to me, and this GoFundMe stuff fits the model perfectly.

Pair this New Yorker article with Anand Ghiridaradas' thread from today about his experience with the Media Lab. [0]

Ghiridaradas is author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World [1]. He was also on the panel for MIT Media Labs' Disobedience Award. It was their answer to the MacArthur Foundations' "Genius Grants". Reid Hoffman, of LinkedIn, Greylock, and Blitzscaling fame is the donor who sponsors the Disobedience Award. He comes out looking...not good.

[0] https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1169947031806365696?s...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37506348-winners-take-al...

Here's a podcast interview to the author of Winners Take All Anand Giridharadas about the damage philanthropists do to public education https://soundcloud.com/haveyouheardpodcast/win-win

There is a wealth of literature on the subject, no pun intended. Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" (or, more practically, summaries of it) offers one interesting perspective. A different take can be seen in books like "Winners Take All" by Anand Giridharadas.

On the most basic level, you should question your own premises. The reality of extreme wealth inequality is that rich people do have a substantially outsized say in running the government and exercising other forms of power, and they are often able to evade laws as well as engage in activity that is harmful to the poor.

Wow, Ghiridaradas coming so correct. I tried to read his book “Winners Take All” multiple times and found it absolutely unreadable, he kept restating the same point with different overly-complex words and name-drops. But here he writes with real clarity and real precision. Just wish he’d applied that same clarity to the writing style in his book!

"These new philanthropists bring to charity an “entrepreneurial disposition”, Hay and Muller wrote in a 2014 paper, yet one that they suggest has been “diverting attention and resources away from the failings of contemporary manifestations of capitalism”, and may also be serving as a substitute for public spending withdrawn by the state.

Essentially, what we are witnessing is the transfer of responsibility for public goods and services from democratic institutions to the wealthy, to be administered by an executive class. In the CEO society, the exercise of social responsibilities is no longer debated in terms of whether corporations should or shouldn’t be responsible for more than their own business interests. Instead, it is about how philanthropy can be used to reinforce a politico-economic system that enables such a small number of people to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth. Zuckerberg’s investment in solutions to the Bay Area housing crisis is an example of this broader trend."

[1]

Although with your "in excruciating detail" it sounds like you've been presented with the evidence before, yet you are somehow unwilling to admit the failings of the system. This last part is meant as an observation and not as a negative value judgement.

This video with Anand Giridharadas is also great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM, as well as his book 'Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World'.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/24/the-trouble-wit...

We're in the middle of a big cultural reckoning with the "business friendly" or "win/win economics" ethos of management consulting having been the guiding star for most large public service and non-profit organizations for the past few decades.

Anand G's "Winners Take All" summarizes the problems with this approach and his arguments in that book are slowly becoming more mainstream. On top of that, Pete Buttigieg's status as a McKinsey alum running for President makes it particularly salient.

I'm currently reading Anand Giridharada's 2018 book "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" which, while not exactly revealing anything new , does present a good collection of behaviour from the elite class wrapped in a good narrative structure.

There is one thing that never changes in their behaviour; Problems are not solved by acknowledging their underlying root causes (usually erosion of regulation, civil liberties or other social contracts), but by 'inventin' our way out of the problem. Usually to the financial gain of the elite in question.

As someone currently living in a country with strong unions and regulatory agencies, I have a hard time imagining how the U.S society could have eroded to this degree over time without the general populace taking notice and standing their ground against it.

This is an interesting read, and a good review of Giridharadas. But I'm frustrated that it fails to grapple with the most obvious question of all: who counts as rich?

Instead, we get "Winners Take All aims at today’s upper-crust in a world where wealth has continued to calcify into stock dividends and plush inheritances of the global one-percent...". It's the sort of line that makes me think either Giridharadas or Meyer haven't done their homework, because entering the global one percent takes an income of around $32,000, or a net worth of around $770,000. The average member of the global one percent doesn't have any stock at all, much less a plush inheritance! 46% of Americans break the global 1% income threshold, and ~5% break the wealth threshold. The global one percent are defined by international divides, not intranational ones.

Back home, the 1% continues to be a bizarre construct that conflates heart surgeons with Waltons; the bottom half of the 1% have seen their incomes roughly triple since 1950, while the top 0.01% have seen a 10x increase. Even Darren Walker's million a year only puts him around the 0.3% of earners.

I don't mean to discount the article or the book: it's fascinating to see a comparison of how the ultra-rich view social wellbeing compared to the rest of us. But I do think there's a bit of a failure to grapple with exactly what extreme wealth is, and just how far up the scale goes.

Books mentioned in the article:

- How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman

- The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy by Mariana Mazzucato

- Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

edit: formatting, copy paste issues (argh)

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas.

"An insider's groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to 'change the world' preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve."

https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Take-All-Charade-Changing/dp/...

https://twitter.com/AnandWrites