Roberta Brown-Jones, Nederland.  

“Generosity is not a substitute for justice.”

I’m always interested in reading different theories about how to cure our social ills, so when I spotted former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas’s book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, on NCL’s new non-fiction shelf, I eagerly grabbed it.

Winners Take All is a thought-provoking and cogent critique of the practice of using the expertise and generosity of charitable elites to fix social problems. While Giridharadas concedes that some of these wealthy business elites truly wish to help, he strongly disagrees that reliance on them in resolving large social problems is the answer.

In researching his book, Giridharadas obtained candid interviews from people across the spectrum of the business and philanthropy worlds (of which he was a formerly a member). His interviewees, whom he calls MarketWorlders, expressed a pervasive belief in market-driven, “win-win,” for-profit approaches to poverty. However, some also had begun to realize that the ultra-rich frame problems and their solutions in ways that will not threaten the underlying systems that allow the wealthy to thrive and the poor to stay poor. These private solutions, he believes, can be more harmful in that they crowd out public solutions that could improve more people’s lives in the long-term and allow for broader representation.

As Giridharadas points out, technology elites like to propose entrepreneurial, win-win solutions for job creation that are based on apps or platforms like Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber. These jobs, however, often exist outside of any kind of safety net or regulatory environment. What can initially start out as a way for a powerless individual to gain entry into alternative ways of earning a living can have unintended consequences. Uber and Airbnb started out as rebellious companies bucking the taxi and hotel industry in order to make a profit while simultaneously giving individuals more independent earning power. Yet years later, issues of discrimination and abuse of the so-called contractor status of workers have cast a shadow on these companies.

From an even darker perspective, Giridharadas believes that elite donors, which he likens to benevolent slave masters, are often drawn to causes that can atone for some of their past exploitative sins. Giridharadas cites several examples of very generous benefactors to public causes whose wealth was gained via industries that caused more harm than good.

One notorious example he uses is the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, gained most of its wealth from its sales of the opioid-drug OxyContin. They vehemently suppressed regulation of the popular painkiller even as its addictive properties became known and the overdose death toll continued to rise. However, they have donated massive sums of money to museums, libraries, universities and services for low-income and homeless populations.

Giridharadas cites a former professor’s observation that stuck with him: the idea that “money had transcended being currency to become our very culture, conquering our imaginations and infiltrating domains that had nothing to do with it.” In Giridharadas’s opinion, what the market-based do-gooders fail to recognize is that in order to create positive societal change, some personal sacrifices will need to be made and different priorities adhered to, other than profit.

My main criticism of Giridharadas’s work is that it assumes the possibility of a functional populace willing to become educated and activist on social issues. This contingent will also need to remain uncorrupted in order to create governmental policies and laws that protect all people, not just the privileged. From a cynical point of view, these days that seems to be a very tall order. We may need to continue to rely temporarily on the generosity of the privileged while working toward a model of government that allows more equitable opportunities for all.

Roberta Brown-Jones is Library Assistant Emeritus at the Nederland Community Library.