In his book, Winners Take All — The Elite Charade of Changing the World , Anand Giridharadas spares none of the “philanthrocapitalists” and benevolent elites of the world. According to him, the global elite — whether it is Bill Clinton or Silicon Valley mavens or thought leaders doing the rounds of Davos and giving Ted Talks — largely ignores the fact that it has helped create the very problems that it is now trying (ineffectively) to solve. Private solutions have replaced public solutions as the role of government has shrunk. Excerpts from a phone interview:
In your book, you coin a term, “MarketWorld”, to refer to the “winners” in the title. What does it mean, and why did you feel it was important to coin it?
What isn’t named is hard to change. My observation was that a lot of seemingly different phenomena were actually part of one larger story. Young people’s idealism on college campuses when they go on to start careers in management consulting is different from how multi-billionaires give away their money; which is different from how the conference circuit (like TED and Davos) shapes ideas in a particular direction. A lot of people talked about each of those issues, but what I wanted to do was scoop them into a whole, and say, “I actually think this is part of the same phenomenon.”
The whole was various kinds of elite practices that gestured at change while serving wittingly or unwittingly to keep things the same. It seemed to me that ‘MarketWorld’ was the right term for this — of the belief in market solutions, a belief that the winners of the market are those best positioned to help the losers. The big question that I started this book with is, how is it that we have so much innovation in this country with so little progress?
When did the status quo as we know it — this unshaken faith in market capitalism — really take hold?
The conventional understanding is that this is a fairly recent ideology that emerged in the 1970s. I think there was some sense of a threat to business interests from gathering public anger and the desire for certain kinds of reforms, and a fear of communism. There was an effort to venerate the businessman as a kind of civilisational hero, denigrate government as an enemy of liberty and justice and the good life, and generate private solutions to everything. That can be seen in the rhetoric of the time — look at Reagan and Thatcher. Reagan saying, government is not the solution, it’s the problem. Then there are people who didn’t quite embrace that free market ideology in its pure form, but did accept a diluted version. So you have Bill Clinton saying that the era of the government is over. It has created a society in which a few monopolised almost all the gains of the future.
Your book is focussed on American society, but what parallels do you see in India?
It’s so common among affluent Indians to have a self-image of being wonderful keepers of one’s servants. ‘They are like family to us, they are part of the family’ — this rhetoric upholds the system of servitude that we all know deep in our hearts is barbaric and gives them no chance of making a better life. Do people actually abide by labour laws or the limits of the workday? The gestures of caring and compassion are combined with a deep belief in a system that keeps them locked up.
When I was a reporter in India for five years, I witnessed jobs ricocheting from country to country — a new industry comes to India and five years later that industry is fully gone to Vietnam. In an age of dislocation, it is very natural for people to actually want to claim certain kinds of certainty, because of all the certainties that they are losing. I don’t think it’s an accident that our age of globalisation and technology and extreme inequality has been the age of identity politics and identity fundamentalism.
You admit in your book that your are a recipient of some of the winner’s privilege. How do you grapple with it?
The comedian Dave Chappelle makes the point that to view something like the MeToo movement or the racial history of the U.S. in terms of a victim and a perpetrator is to oversimplify. At a deeper level, everybody is a victim of living in that bad system. That’s why the solution to these kinds of systemic problems is not criminal justice, but truth and reconciliation. I have a certain amount of compassion, which I try to reflect in the book, for others, and I hope, for myself, because I think we’re all living in a bad system.
It’s a totalising world view that has engulfed many decent people and caused them unwittingly to uphold an indecent system. Most writers I know — non-fiction writers certainly — and journalists, simply do not get the kind of support from their jobs that they would get a generation ago. And so, many of us have turned to other things. I have given paid speeches. And at one level, I feel that is really problematic. At another level, you’re not going to be able to fix this at the plane of the individual.
What measures do you think society should take to counteract some of the problems you mention?
I think in the U.S., there are a few areas where we need to have a very serious conversation. One is around taxation. We probably don’t tax inheritances and business enough — we allow for a lot of evasion. Second area is figuring out labour and the future of work in the 21st century; there’s no question that work has changed, and that all of our structures for protecting workers simply don’t cover many of the industries in which work actually occurs — it doesn’t cover Uber, it doesn’t cover the entire gig economy.
Education — in America, your father and mother’s income predicts your income 30-40 years later with greater fidelity than in any other rich country. That is a caste society in everything but name. None of those things can be fixed through private solutions. What we can do practically is, next time you spot a problem, think of a solution that is public, democratic, universal and institutional, that isn’t a private fix.
