Anand Giridharadas with Joy-Ann Reid: Winners Take All | 2018-09-05 | NYPL Author Talks

[Music] please join me in welcoming join Reid and Anantara das [Applause] beautiful audience they're also attractive thank you for being here look great compliment the audience just always always always well thank you all for being here it is really fun to be here to actually get to have an extended conversation with on on Tues book I should say is on the indepe bestsellers list as of now you can give that a round of applause normally when we get to talk we get to talk for a total of six minutes with four other people also talking with people yelling in our ear yelling in our ear rap hopefully no one will do that today thank you to Aden and Arden this is a cool coupling we have Aden an ardent Aden who introduced us and Arden who at a certain point will be walking around giving us a time cue and then she will cue your portion of the evening we want you guys to engage ask questions there'll be a mic that comes around please no speeches but ask questions all right so let's just jump right in winners take all the elite charade of changing the world a subtle title I'm gonna start by asking you on what is wrong with rich people giving away their money on the surface nothing on the surface what is not to like with rich and powerful people spending some of their hard-earned or not hard-earned money making the world a better place I became curious about the juxtaposition of two facts about our age that we'll all recognize we live in an incredibly generous time by any measure more money being given away now than ever in history The Giving Pledge you know but it's not just money it's also like every elite college graduate wants to change the world I mean you have kids in that age group look who doesn't want to change the world in that demographic you know someone said to me in the book like at any dinner party someone's got it one kid in Africa on an internship and someone else's kid to starting a social enterprise so we clearly live in a time in which elites want to help and yet this is the most unequal time in America 100 years it is a time of democratic decay and dysfunction as you Chronicle so well on the weekends and it is a time in which most Americans have come to feel I think correctly that this society is rigged in favor of the few doesn't work for people anymore most people anymore and the American Dream that this whole enterprise is supposed to run on is is is a lie and a nightmare and so the problem with rich people giving back I found is that it's not just not enough to solve those problems I actually came to be persuaded that it was how those problems were being upheld that giving had actually become the wing man of continued taking an extreme taking and generosity had actually become the wing man of injustice and and changing the world and this talk of changing the world had become the wing man of keeping the world the same so that your world doesn't have to change interesting that you just remind me that I forgot to do my shoutouts I want to shout out to Goldman Sachs uber Facebook who made this book possible they cannot have been written without you not possible not possible without your generous contribution to decay as well as trying to fix it I want to be a little bit kind contribution contributions that's right just by doing what they do contributing their genius just by being them just by being them they're wonderfully made this book possible absolutely I want to read a little bit from the prologue of the book this is on page nine hopefully all of you were on book buying moods this evening afterward you're gonna get an opportunity the Trump economy is great the Trump economy there we go it's like the gig economy only with Trump all right so here's a little bit from the book and you talk about the myriad ways in which elites seek to change the world but change things on the surface so that in practice nothing changes at all and you write the people with the most to lose from genuine social change have placed themselves in charge of social change often with the passive ascent of those most in need of it explain if you think about someone like Mark Zuckerberg okay going around telling people he's changing the world he's liberating mankind on the surface obviously this is preposterous okay but I want to suggest that it wouldn't be possible for him to pull it off and reap whatever dividends he does from it if enough of us didn't sort of buy into it okay it doesn't have to be a lot of us but there's kind of circles of enablement of this kind of idea if enough of us didn't actually think Elon Musk is a world changer if enough of us didn't think that those hedge fund guys who go to Robin Hood once a year and have a gala to help people in New York if we didn't think they were saving New York if we didn't sort of culturally buy into it if the newspapers didn't you know when Steve cases wife wants to start an impact fund and they write this totally flattering article without kind of looking at the distribution of income in our society all of that passive cultural enablement is what I find allows this kind of acculturate aching followed by some amount of giving to occur and so I didn't just write I wrote this book partly you know but secondarily to convince rich people to come correct and to stop living in a way where they are causing massive harm or in or sustaining that harm and then you know throwing us some scraps to fix it but I mostly wrote it for everybody else to stop believing these stories because these stories these myths are actually what allows this age of inequality to to go on and I'm gonna say you know when I was reading that thomas piketty's book that many of you bought and didn't read and i you know as a service to you decided to read it but only when i started writing this book and and i you know early on in the book he has this line and i was you know i was in the early phases of writing this and kind of aimless and purposeless while while trying to figure out what this book was and there's this line he has he says whether or not this kind of extreme inequality that we have now is possible depends on the strength of the apparatus of justification and I saw that phrase the apparatus of justification and I thought that's in my books my book is not about the absolute levels of inequality and hey you know his R is going faster than gee I can't do that kind of stuff my book is about the culture that allows that to be possible interesting already give all I want to say thank you because now when I go to dinner parties I won't call him Piketty I thought it was Piketty and I'm really embarrassed now that I didn't notice I think we all because it sounds like picket line Raya those picket ease well you know what I'm gonna be so much more yeah I'm much more acceptable at swanky dinner parties now I want to get into that a little bit because part of the whole myth of America is the Horatio Alger story the idea that you can become a wealthy and then go from poverty to philanthropy in one lifetime and we sort of look at the Carnegie's you write about Carnegie in your book the idea that the Rockefellers and the Roosevelt and the wealthy among us actually have the potential because they have the money but also in a lot of in a lot of instances they have the desire and the soul of return of trying to give back and you are kind of challenging that as a truly altruistic thing why I mean you know since we're just in an intimate group here I'm gonna I'm gonna say answer that question with the story about my own life a little bit which is that I grew up with that story not because we were wealthy philanthropists but because we were an Indian immigrant family and a lot of immigrant families actually have some version of that story because the feeling can be you know were these castaways who came here with nothing and we worked hard and we and so I that was very much a part of my family culture growing up and it's a story that always cuts off realities about where you you know the status you may have had in the old country which may have actually helped you get a leg up here the fact that you may have been entering into a my father came to go to school here so that was entering into a privileged place the fact that we happened to be among those rare Indians who spoke English when they when they left and I mean all of that gets cut out and it becomes and I think immigration is actually part of the way we shore up that Horatio Alger story we import people who are predisposed to think in some ways that they they fought and made it themselves and it was actually ironically in my life going to India and being a form correspondent for The New York Times in India that I actually realized that what was true in India was true everywhere which is that most people don't make their fate most people in India but actually most people here aren't where they are because of how hard they worked some people are but those are the exceptions and I think with this book I became very interested in how these people use the story of their own tremendous intelligence and fortitude to make the money to justify a power grab into now rectifying problems that they helped to cause in other words the brilliance of the arsonist now entitles him to become a fire fighter because he's so good when he was at Goldman Sachs he was so good at that arson that yes although he was in the fire spreading business at that time what matters is his aptitude at it which was off the charts and now when you need an arsonist at some foundation that's fighting inequality I start when you firefighter that's some foundation that's fighting poverty or the mayor needs someone to be you know the chief advisor on equalizing the economy or something like that a charter school needs a board member the arsonist is in pole position because he rose from nothing out of that Horatio Alger story that equips him with this special power to now be the solution to the problem that is him because I do want to I want to talk a little bit more about that sort of that kind of mix of altruism and also self protection right protecting sort of the means of gaining wealth but what you just said sounds like you're president it sounds a little bit like the argument that Donald Trump made was listen I know all about you know the way that politicians steal because they used to steal from me correct I know all about disrupting important they were corrupt with me yes so I'm I alone can fix it cuz I know that I know for talking about this and you know he didn't arrest from nothing he rose from the nothing of a 14 million dollar inheritance but you know to his a lot of his supporters he you even right here and I read or another little piece in your book you say that Trump that people have an intuition that it'll that this cult of elite backed social change is BS and that Trump exploited that intuition right by whipping it into frenzied anger and then directing most of that anger not at elites but at the most marginalized and vulnerable Americans you know so there two things there first of all I think what Trump did the most positive thing I can say about him is that he correctly understood a correct intuition that many Americans had that was underserved by other politicians that the system was rigged and that elites in government and business were sort of in cahoots with each other and didn't care about you know regular people as much as they proclaimed he's not the fur I think Bernie Sanders also tapped into that feeling I think Howard Dean tappman Ross Perot tapped into that feeling but he did a good job of reading the presence of that feeling and catering to it and making choices to serve it the tragedy of Donald Trump is that he then deflected it and instead of reflecting Arneson that anger and going after some of the people who have hurt the working and middle classes in America he'd like suddenly made it about you know blacks and Muslims and immigrants and and and women and like things that you know just nothing to do with that cause the second important thing that you raised is this point about language I think this is so important and so painful for many of us the reality is a lot of Trump's language and I use this word and heavy quotations but kind of intellectual moves he went to the best schools on earth he did he did he did a lot of his intellectual moves are actually the moves over the last 20 30 40 years of the philanthropists most of whom in my experience vote for Democrats so let's just talk about some of those moves I made stuff in China and Mexico yeah I totally made stuff in China in Mexico that's why I uniquely can go to China and Mexico and get better deals I'm the sitter that's the arsonist rebranded as fire fighter that is the same as what every philanthropist tells us because I work in business because I work in hedge funds I can actually go fight for working people and figure out what they need better than others I can figure out public education better than others when Trump secondly says you know or does you know I can enrich myself while fighting for the weakest among us right he's old the whole thing is premised on that you know that is the win-win which is at the heart of this book that is the phone enos of the win-win the idea that that many wealthy people have spread in this country that they can have their cake and eat it too that that doing what is right for others requires no sacrifice again he didn't invent that idea that idea was that track was laid for him by perfectly lovely things like TOMS shoes and these others that just spread this idea you know tote bag that changes the world or a bank that can just totally rape and pillage but also have an impact fund on the side like a lot of us participated in giving this guy a set of templates and I think you don't get Donald Trump without like 18 parallel system failures that were uncorrelated from each other a lot of machines have to break at the same time and they can't all be the fault of the Republican Party and Paul Ryan and the Koch brothers and I think that's where it starts to become an uncomfortable and painful conversation that I think a lot of us a lot of us either bought into ideas or participated in a culture that allowed our biggest problems to be unsolved that rich blamed to pour in middle-class and working-class people that things were great when they weren't and that allowed this phenomenon to like kind of wreck our civilization you know it's interesting you say that a couple things there that you write about Facebook you read a lot about Facebook companies like Amazon face another sponsor tonight planet but there is this sense that like Mark Zuckerberg because he came up and created this high-tech thing can fix education because he knows something special that maybe we don't know and so that if they can just a pie and gamify and give every you know impoverished person you know an app or a little sort of device something technological and put that technology in their hands a lot of people do believe that that that kind of as you say techno splaining to poor people that you can actually make everybody have possibility you think that's a flawed way of looking at things you know there I think it was John James mill John Stewart's Milton's dad who wrote this history of India and he famously wrote that he was uniquely qualified to write this history of India because he was not biased by having gone there and it's interesting that that Mark Zuckerberg when he spent a hundred million dollars to transform the schools of Newark he had not gone there when he embarked on that he would you know he went there for the first time to do that now I understand that that colonialism and that are different situations but they're a lot less different than you may think I think what's interesting is with text specifically which is a bit of a subset of this larger issue you know I think none of us are fooled by like a banker or a chemical company or you know just like normal businesses that just make normal things none of us are fooled into thinking that they are liberators of man we give them too much political power etc but with this tech thing there is this sense that I think is rooted in a kernel of truth that their tools are inherently empowering which has a kernel I mean it's more than a kernel of truth if you are a really great singer living in Algeria your chance of being discovered in the age of YouTube shot through the roof you were not going to get at new york agent you know before the age of youtube so okay like that's powerful and I think what happened is a lot of them bought onto that story of the inherently empowering leveling power of what they had and as that power has grown as they have built monopoly after monopoly as they have become basically the most powerful people in history controlling our commerce I mean they got to trillion dollar companies right now controlling commerce controlling discourse you know by small mistakes allowing elections to be maybe totally compromised you know gutting our news business I mean my friends who work in journalism will basically tell you sitting across from Facebook is like meeting you know Tony Soprano it's like you don't publish on our platform no ads we collect the revenue like hope you got your newspaper next year right we've allowed them to get away with that because we bought this story that I that I call the book the kind of rebel king theory that we've bought their own fantasy that they are like rebels against the man they're insurgents instead of understanding that they are not just the Rockefellers and Carnegie's of our age they are so much more powerful than the Rockefellers and Carnegie's were because they are in our minds they're in our elections they they they have a power over our children and they have us all massively addicted and we need to actually get our act together society and use our power to rein in their power oh you even rank that Facebook despite calling itself a community single-handedly redefined the word friend for much of humanity based on what was best for its own business model and the you know the sense that Google as you say they have they know everything you search for everything you buy every off-color joke you've ever typed every utterance you've ever spoken in your home in the presence of its kitchen helper every move you've made in front of its home security camera and you go on Airbnb you know all be that the control that they wield in your life that you give them right that people are giving Pete them this control by not setting their security settings to prevent it means they're wheedled in so what's the what is the risk because you do write about the fact that one thing they've done is to step in and prevent themselves being regulated that they prevent government from controlling them so that's one thing they get out of it is that the only purpose of this that they want a control giving so that no one can rein them in you know I I one of the things that I found in the book and spending cuz you know we're having a conversation about the ideas here but I you know I want people to know like this is a reported book where I went into this world for for a couple of years and and spent time in with people to understand how these people are trying to change the world and what and at what I always do as a journalist to try to understand it as best I can from their point of view and I encountered what I would say is a very wide spectrum from the naive to the shrewd there are definitely people and I think like New York finance supplies play more examples of this which we know where greed is definitely a primary motivation and the primary story and the giving or the world changing or whatever is just part of the lubricant of the machinery of taking right and there's like an email I love from Goldman Sachs you know in the November 2007 like big New York Times story coming out saying how did we escape the mortgage crisis while we were selling all these toxic things to our clients they would end up going to pay a five billion dollar fine for like what was described in that email and they said you know we got to make sure this reporter writes about Jesus gives in this same story but unfortunately she didn't she didn't bike she's like a good reporter and bit like that email just shows like they fully understand the linkage between the giving and like the bad story about how you escaped the mortgage crisis while selling toxic products your clients and but I think in Silicon Valley it's a very different story I actually think that's the naive end of the spectrum and I actually think the naive folks who like Zuckerberg like Elon Musk who I think as best I can tell really think they are doing what is best for humankind are actually a much bigger challenge for us I actually think we know reasonably well what to do with like greedy people we actually were pretty you know the SEC like detect suspicious trades but like it's not perfect and we haven't financed crisis every now and then but like we have a pretty elaborate infrastructure to protect against those kinds of greed idealistic monopolists who are deeply convinced that if you and me as journalists leave them alone and if the government leaves them alone they will simply be able to liberate Afghan girls and Algerian singers and you know Japanese politicians faster and better than any empowerment engine in the history of mankind those are people with what I would describe with you know understandable irony is like a maogong the like self conception and as those two examples show like that can go either way and I think we are right now in the positions of society of just like hoping it bends towards Gandhi that is not a good posture and just a simple thing you know I'm sometimes accused of like not being practical in this book because somehow people are under the mistaken impression that calling for the dethroning of an entire ruling class is not a simple practical solution but a very practical idea that like the practice some practical people in this room more practical than me should be talking about more and investigating is like what we do about monopolies that is a very simple like thing that we should be talking about that was a huge part of what happened a hundred years ago in a similar moment we need to be dealing with the issue of monopolies right now these companies pose antitrust issues that are not really covered by the law there it's not straightforward abuse of market power because we all buy into it and there's Network effect so it's actually valuable to us to only have one Facebook and it's valuable to us to only have one Airbnb and like these are new problems that you know thousands of people need to be thinking about and researching and writing books about because we just can't live in a world full of these idealistic robber barons who are who think they're liberating man while basically owning the society among five of them this book really does feel like you're writing about modern-day robber barons but in that era you did have a backlash of regulation to try to break them up and rein them in bust the trust etc this morning as I was watching the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings Ben Sasse gets up and he gives us soliloquy there was actually quite smart he tried to do Schoolhouse Rock right he said we're gonna explain to you how government is supposed to work and what he the argument he made is that we as ordinary people we can elect our representatives to Congress they are then supposed to create the rules of the road but what's happening is rather than Congress stepping up to their responsibilities their article one power they're essentially handing over their power to a sea of bureaucrats who work for the second branch of government who are not elected by the people who can make a regulation that affects this business or Facebook or Google or some business in Idaho where that person in Idaho or Facebook cannot change it because they didn't vote for that person they can't vote them out and so the argument the counter-argument to yours is that the more you regulate these businesses the less democratic small D it is what do you think that I think that's interesting I mean like I'd be curious who wrote that statement for him book two months ago and be back there in a couple months you know I think that that's plausible but but i but I do not think we are at a moment I think there's some things we actually do over regulate probably I you know I have a lot of friends who are very liberal and who have like small startups and what they will tell you is like painfully that it at like the right has a certain point about it being really hard to start a small business and I actually think something we should probably do in America is make it easier to start a small business and harder to run a huge business because right now it's a lot easier to like be Pepsi than it is to start a restaurant and like we should probably switch that up but I but but but I think when I when I think about that those branches of government I think the real thing that actually disturbs me is that the giving the givers have actually become an unelected fourth branch of government you know and and in it's a branch of government that has some of the powers of the others I mean in many ways they make they just make laws they decide what a certain district school should be like but they also kind of have the power of judicial review that the courts are supposed to have and they just overrule the public interest on a bunch of issues I mean philanthropy in the u.s. last year was 410 billion dollars okay The New Yorker just made this point in a review of the book there's kind of thing where I was like I wish I put that in my book they said that philanthropy is on track to exceed federal discretionary non-defense spending okay now just think about that for a second at some basically this is private government that we're trending towards this is not like a little bit of the bet local ballet in Akron right we are creating a parallel private route and and all of us in this room are actually working longer hours every year to pay higher taxes to pay for rich people have a tax deduction when they give that money away right and it is approaching a level where it's going to exceed that federal spending on education and the arts and various other things and the question of what is that money doing not at the level of each program but but how is it preventing what I think is the only real reckoning that needs to happen which is the redistribution of power in American life not helping some people not some scraps not a charter school that you can boast to people about in Connecticut an actual change in who has power in this society and it may be the sort of most direct way that this citizen exercises power obviously is over electing the government and you do write in the book about sort of the decay of government which you make the point and it is I think a valid point if you look at the most seminal changes in the actual lives of human beings who've lived in this country over the last hundred years they've come from government they've come from the New Deal they've come from the Great Society they've come from the civil rights bills that were passed through government so in what way does this fourth branch of government this huge charitable you know giving multi-billion dollar multi-billionaire fourth branch of government how does that make government worse so one of the the most common push backs to this conversation we're having we'll start there is like well government is so bad right now that we gotta we have to work around it right we're just waiting we're waiting you know it's like you know when they have those like Iraqi government's in exile in Paris and they just hang out in Paris for like 4050 years it's like drinking things and then like when there's an opportunity to you know go back home to Iraq and run Iraq like they're there waiting shoutout to george w bush great great american president now it retrospectively michelle you know yeah yeah people are just so hungry for someone to pass something so so so people will say you know we're in this time of dysfunctional government people can't the government can't do anything so I'm here I got this money why don't I do this social venture or fund why don't I do this little program in Africa or why don't I do you know whatever whatever it is that they do and that's it that's a tough one I think it's true but you can the Trump era like clearly the government's not going to be solving a lot of problems and and I and I'm not against them doing that what I'm interested in understanding is what is the total effect of doing that and my argument is if governments atrophying and then we use as an excuse to work around it and solve more problems this way government further atrophies and then we solve more problems this way and over time you get to the reality we have now which is four hundred and ten billion dollars and starting to approach close in on the that federal funding level and so I do believe that this private giving this kind of privatization of social change in some ways is a symptom of dysfunctional democracy but it's a symptom that circles back around and becomes a cause and more importantly it becomes a justification for not fixing government and and what I mean by that is you know the when the right used to just say government is evil and governments terrible I mean that worked on its people and it had a certain number of people that would reach but it was always limited what I believe this is is trickle-down change instead of trickle trickle down economics this is trickle-down social change right let let's preserve a society in which the government does little in which the winners therefore win a lot because they're not being policed in which social problems multiply because the government's not really protecting people and the winners are doing whatever they want and then with all this largesse let's let's us solve the problems and what no one factors into that equation is what I call the winner's veto when winners solve social problems they're only going to solve them in ways that don't take anything from winners have you ever heard a TED talk about cracking down on tax havens I'm serious I mean is there up maybe there is no one here is viewed it you know is there going to be a I mean Goldman Sachs got the green bonds they got the prison recidivism thing as long as they don't recidivist a Connecticut and they got the impact investment fund like this goldman sachs interested in figuring out how to make taxation work so that you know investors don't pay less than their secretaries know and would you expect them to so when the winners take over change they change change they do fake change and the art the passionate plea for this book through the stories of these people who are wrestling with what changes and how they can best make it is how do we figure out how to go back to making a real change in this country I mean ask yourself to go back to what you said a second ago ask first just look at what you did today whatever you did today and you know one here's your judge whether you worked or you know whatever you did a lot of what we did in this room today would not have been legal for us a hundred years ago either because you wouldn't be in this country or you wouldn't be working because you're a woman or you wouldn't be working because you're a person of color or you wouldn't have had the political power to you know have you whatever it is none of that that just allowed you to do what you did today the basic infrastructure of us none of it came from powerful people throwing you scraps it came from changing laws and systems and building movements to change the rules for everybody and all of the most important things in this society have have occurred there which doesn't mean private endeavors bad but it means it's built on top of a set of norms and institutions and laws which allow us to build those beautiful private castles one of the fascinating stories you tell desire man I'm history geek and I love to go back in time you talk about Carnegie and you talk about the way that the robber baron sort of devised this idea of self protective philanthropy knowing that inequality would be so bad that eventually it would create social unrest and the victims would be vent like they'd be behind the barricades while the rabble are out there right and so their idea was not to make the rabble have more because we can't have that not to not gonna raise their wages we're not gonna do any of that we're just gonna create this sort of philanthropic shield around ourselves so that we look like we're not so bad do you think that today's robber barons essentially have just adopted that same philosophy you know one of the things when you when you write words and one of the things you hope but basically never happens is that a set of words you write will become so influential that it will unconsciously become the framework people use you know and one of the only people the truth not only but you know one of the very few people that truly pull that off in American life was Andrew Carnegie with that wealth tract hero which you may have studied in school is the gospel of wealth I mean it is hard to think about a single document that provided the framework that basically to this day a hundred and thirtysomething years later people basically use as the way to think about giving and taking an irresponsible 'ti to others in American life and what he basically did was in this time as you say of rising anger and a time very much like this where there were all these new things being invented a new economy was in the you had immigrants coming in and you know scaring people as they always do those pesky immigrants and and he wrote this tract that basically did the following he said it basically laid out the way I think about it a bargain and the bargain you know was basically you leave us alone in the money-making phase Thank You Siri that was I was deep yeah if you had any doubt with her Apple was like monitoring was that one trillion dollars can buy a lot of surveillance so he laid out a deal where he said you know you leave me alone in the money-making phase and then I will what I offer you in exchanges I will give lavishly in the in the like time of you know grandchildren and reading glasses so what was interesting about him though is he lived up to both so he was utterly ruthless breaking unions blow look at you know did not pay as little as he could pay and he and he said I have to pay them as little as I can pay because otherwise my business is not gonna survive but then he actually gave in an extreme way in a way that by the way people only now copy like the first part of his thing right like he actually believed that if you hold on to your wealth and don't distribute it you are an immoral person he believed it was wrong to die with any wealth he actually believed that you are the wealth is not yours his paternalism was that he believed that you were the custodian of it and that paying it to people as wages was wasteful which is you know why he doesn't look so good in retrospect but in his defense he believed in being as extreme a giver any book libraries and you know but he has laid the foundation for everything when people think about this giving and taking and this idea that basically kindness ex post facto justifies anything-goes capitalism and that's the link and so one of the people are write about in the book and spent a lot and a limousine with his Darren Walker the head of the Ford Foundation and Darren's big project that I write about in the book is to try to write a new gospel of wealth because he understands that you can't you need it you need an intellectual charter to actually replace that intellectual charter you don't know about Darren Walker african-american head of the mighty Ford Foundation which is pretty exciting I'm okay to say one thing about that one of the things that comes up again and get in the book is someone was interesting people in these elite spaces are people who are in these spaces and therefore very powerful but as a personal matter right are on one on the wrong end of one or two or three power equations in their personal life right and therefore have a I mean the women in my book were very different in the men in my book and I kept feeling I need to like find what but it was actually there was a point there like being on the wrong end of certain kinds of power equations and I think they're gonna be the the very important reformers around this system well we're very close to a question time but I have to get him before we go to questions if we've talked about Bill Clinton you talk about CGI's Clinton Global Initiative he write about it in the book it is in a lot of ways the perfect fusion of these two things or this is somebody who came obviously from government he was a governor he was president of the United States he has this massive foundation that is by any accounts doing good around the world and giving money away so is he part of the problem if the if as you say this idea of sort of giving as a way to shield powerful people from consequences the way they got their wealth well what did what then do we make of something like CGI which is created by a former president as he said to me repeatedly during my interview with him yes but they were just wait I think what you meant was yes exactly gotta do more Elvis I don't do any I don't do accents anymore I was actually brought out as a child to do accents for all my parents at dinner parties and I retired early yeah I got your back yeah if you need somebody to do the accents tell you yeah we'll be here all night I would tell a couple things about that Bill Clinton soar because it's interesting so Bill Clinton was at Georgetown I start the book with a young woman at Georgetown recently who graduated and the story of her senior year and how she decides what to do with her life and basically she's in an atmosphere that's familiar from many elite colleges where all the options are about like you need to go work in business if you want to make a difference so then I end the book with another Georgetown person Bill Clinton and what's so striking to me is if you were to go back to 1964 when he was at Georgetown who among us believed more than Bill Clinton did in using movements and politics and the law to improve society right so Lyndon Johnson he was inspired by the Great Society he devoted he didn't go to Goldman Sachs for a couple years like he went back to Arkansas he could have done anything right he could have gone anywhere in the world he could have join any white-shoe law he went to Arkansas and he made his life in politics and fast forward to when I spoke to him in 2017 or the CGI that I covered in 2016 who believes more than Bill Clinton today in this new kind of way of changing the world which is basically rich donors deciding what programs they want to fund and involving some agencies involving maybe a union involving an activist but with their power to fund this or not a model of social change that is essentially Goldman Sachs and McDonald's worked together on a program to you know help Pepsi build smaller coke cans whatever you know that kind of thing all the partners are here and so I became curious about just how he made that evolution because I really think it's hard for me to think about anybody in the world who traveled the arc that my book talks about more than Bill Clinton and so I went to the CGI and I spent two days there and it was kind of this fascinating experience I mean they keep talking about they've transformed the lives of 435 million people around the world according to Palantir which did their analysis which is another company listening to us tonight and clearly they have done good work when I lived in India but they did the whole aids thing they did they brought the price of AIDS drugs down by doing this like only Bill Clinton deal where he got the companies that take the price down if he could get the African companies to commit to a certain level of buy and like he did it like they have definitely saved lives and helped millions of people but he said something that was very striking at the end of that CGI about this partnership goldman sachs mcdonald's pepsi model of changing the world he said this is all that works in the modern world this is this is the only way to make change in the modern world and it took the breath out of me and this is a guy who ran the most powerful machinery of state in the history of human civilization so a brief side thing and i promise i'll wrap it up is i wrote a version of this book a long time ago and i mean oh you know a couple years ago submitted it and was told that it didn't work and a friend of mine read it and said you got to find the love in this book and that was a transformative thing and i got it i got rid of half the book start over and went to actually go even more deeply engage with people trying to understand it from inside and so instead of writing the snarky chapter about cgi which is my original plan I went to go I'd like wrote this long email to his staff person saying I think he's traveled as fascinating arc and I talked to him expecting them to say no and they said like sure so I have this 90 minutes with him and it was the most both am eight it was six months after the election it was the most amazing and sad conversation look there's no one's smarter on these questions and he and he understood and he got it and he and he and he actually talked about how he actually has anxieties that some of these TOMS shoes he kind of people around him in his world actually don't understand real change and that he's always trying to remind them you got to work with systems you gotta work with systems but he was totally blind to the way in which the plutocrats around him have have captured him I said you know you guys made about 250 million dollars since leaving office according the Wall Street Journal like do you understand in an age of populism why that rubbed some people the wrong way no no I 47% taxes I donate some money to my friends in Arkansas have medical problems you know you by the way if you give it directly to the hospital you don't pay the gift tax and and and I'm I'm like Robin Hood except I don't even hold an arrow on them that's what he said and and then we got finally into this argument about that just to me captures the the insipidity of this idea of change in the world we I tried to craft an example of something that makes as clear a case for the government solving a problem as any so the example I came up with was something he'd worked on which is childhood obesity he's soft drink companies Lobby to get the vending machines in public schools these are government schools these are children who can't vote can't easily organize I've no countervailing power they're very well-connected companies you know seems like a good case for like using the power of law and government to like protect those kids who are dying because of this product that is no redeeming value and he says to me well the way I chose to work with them was to do it collaboratively and you know we shrunk the cans a little bit and it's not because you got a the thing is if you want to make this kind of change you got to innovate because they still have to have a business model on the other side and again my breath was gone and maybe I need to get in better shape but I just sat there thinking a man who literally ran the most powerful and sophisticated machinery of state in human history is sitting here telling me we can't anymore protect children from things products that are killing them in government schools that we all own in common because we have to be solicitous of the business model of Pepsi and Coke and I just think if we don't go back like that has not changed that is fake change and I don't care if it's Bill Clinton or anybody else that's not real change and we need to actually go back to remembering how we made change in this country because it wasn't that way all right well round of applause okay [Applause] I think my questions were awesome however one can always be improved upon so raise your hands if you would like to ask a question we thank you very much we did we stood sort of I had a conversation with on and afterwards about who asked questions there is a psychology to it and I always find that many women pop their hands I want some guys to pop up your hands oh I want everyone to pop up your hands and let's do some questions okay so it looks that we have a gentleman right here all right so let's get a microphone we have a lady you had your hand up all right so where to start with this gentleman the gentleman first this time and then we'll have this lady on this end sir recent college grad eager to change the world don't you dare go work at Goldman Sachs well that's the thing I tell us how the movie ends first and we'll do a flashback yeah all right so I'm here in New York interviewing for programming jobs so I spent my entire senior year most of the summer applying for data journalism journalism jobs really nothing because as you I'm sure are familiar that's not the best industry right now I last week I gave up kind of and and well I I justified to myself I can learn a lot from Google and Facebook if I just I can be a better data journalist if I work for them so I applied to consulting agencies and and programming jobs last week and I have three interviews already so what am I supposed to do in that kind of position it's so much like the story in your book like the opening story in your book totally thank you for thank you for just sharing that it's not easy to share if anybody wants a higher than I mean we were big enough room here and some great people here so if you can hire this guy tonight I would really appreciate what's your name Kevin what okay great so just stand up stand up so everybody can see you we can we can do this tonight let's at least one don't don't say I don't create solutions okay let it be known library they say some of the library you don't get anything you can get employed employed actually a lot of people get employed in the library in America look I think it's a really hard issue and I think I want to unpack a couple things you said it may be that there are no data journalism jobs but also what I find is even when there are there it's hard to find they're not listed not when I was getting into journalism it just feels like there's like no journalism jobs it's getting a little better with social media you have some average but like for the longest in and it's true of a lot of industries true of NGOs should right so I hear this all the time it's not an essay there are no jobs but it's these firms to such an amazing job of catering to the anxiety of people at exactly the juncture you are or like where you were a year ago they reach in earlier they have these information sessions they actually you know they call their cohorts like a class first classes so what do they do they're making you feel like it's a seamless transition from senior year to like senior year plus just you know you're still sort of an adore me kind of thing or we're all nighters your they actually replicate your psychology they come in early and they get you on the escalator you don't to think and so like it's hard for me to tell you don't you know it's hard me to tell you like turn down someone is actually treating you well as a new graduate and a smart person and very well-dressed very employable might I repeat what all I would say is like look for opportunities to learn those skills that you want to learn that may be unconventional like some advice I got was like good another country right there are countries that are like very cheap to live in right well you can like do something interesting and like I don't know if you if you gonna be data journalists like you go to like a new English newspaper in Thailand right with your skills you may have be able to do stuff that is 10 years ahead of what you do here and like live on ten thousand dollars a year right like there's just you know but but it's not but I think we're like and for those who don't work in these you know working like who are involved in hiring I think it's important to think about how do you actually like compete and I use that word someone ironically but compete with the googles and Facebooks and like make people feel wanted and make them feel like that you don't have money to offer but at least there's like if some amount of certainty and psychology like make people who are your age like see the horizon of their future I promise this lady hi Anand how are you I I guess I I want to just say that I believe in our humanity I'm on Team human like my friend Douglas rushkoff says but would you say that our it's always been and and perhaps it will always be that our democracy is it odds with capitalism with our capitalism so the winners take all situation is really just a is it isn't that a successful outcome of capitalism it's you know that's that's in our system I don't want that to be but it's my fear that in fighting against that will we have a chance to win I don't be so pessimistic again I'm on team and I just I just I do not in any way think that that's the inevitable outcome of anything you know we're a big country so we forget all the other countries we are the exception in the rich world I mean have you all been to like Germany or France or seen them on TV they're fine they're fine they're not socialist paradise they're not coming you know but people don't like die of cancer because they're not millionaires in Germany they just don't or you know or in England or you know whatever ever like this whole idea we have been on the receiving end of a campaign for a long time that like actually very modest government programs that actually and I don't even like to justify the this way but that are actually good for business also because by the way if you have more talent lying around and not being like on the street battling cancer it's actually you'd like to have more going on in the economy more people buying stuff more good workers etc like democracy and capitalism have an adversarial relationship but they don't have a mutual annihilation relationship and for much of the last you know particularly the period everyone talks about the kind of mid 40s to the you know early eighties was there attention yeah where they're like Country Club Republicans and and people who wanted more activist government and left yeah but they also worked together right and like this whole idea of the free market like so just take something like Goldman Sachs which we've talked about a lot tonight because it's a sponsor like do you want why why didn't Goldman Sachs arise in some other country has any developing country produced anything like Goldman Sachs they all want to has anything mean no but hold on goldman sachs the existence of it is entirely dependent on this being a system our public institutions being what they are do you think of our courts didn't work the way they do if the SEC didn't work the way it does if we didn't have public education that just trained people in a way that Goldman Sachs is enough to train them after they're hired on day one like do you understand how much civilizational accomplishment lies underneath a goldman sachs so that is not a relationship of one destroying the other they depend on each other like you can't have those kind of robust public institutions without there being any money in the society we need money everything needs money right so we need some people to be making that money and we need some people to be creating the infrastructure that allows us to live together not kill each other and in most rich countries people understand that those are just two things that both need to happen and if either of them happens to the the death of the other it's not good and that's not a weird idea and we make it weird here and you know if you look at German germany's Varian example if you look at Germany's data on productivity on the stock market on wages on profits on there are a lot of rich people in Germany they just don't think they should be in charge of the society can I got a government in Germany all right let's get some hands up right here you yep yes Stan Ann Ann I can't wait to read this congratulations speaking of rich people in Germany this guy this guy yeah so Dana Millbank says something interesting about the Trump administration having so many millionaires in his cabinet and it's because he believes wealth in and of itself is a qualification so I guess my concise question is how much has that ideology crept up in to the left that wealth by itself makes you smarter and better able to allocate resources and to help people then you know the bureaucrats and the government and then the second question is I just feel like a generation ago extremely wealthy people would have met everybody else in society either in the military in public school in public parks and public place so what role does the isolation of both classes have in trusting novelist I mean awesome look I think those are both such important issues I'm gonna deal with them quickly you know on the first one just when I was calming down I'm gonna get revved up again I think one of the weirdest ideas in our society that has entered the left and like all kinds of people is that the special and very particular skills of like management consulting and Investment Banking are like somehow the universal access codes of intelligent problem-solving I actually don't think I don't think those skills are like worse than any other I just think they're like I mean they're a little worse in some ways and they're very dehumanizing but I literally think there are a thousand professions all of which have like an interesting framework that one could deploy to making the world better so you think about a teacher on the southside of Chicago kids from tough backgrounds she's got a win authority in that class on like day one teach them identify who needs the most help right like I don't know that seems like a pretty useful framework for making decisions about what our society should be like but no one says you got to go do that to make change people don't even think you got to go do that to run our schools let alone do anything else I don't know like pilots look at a lot of data risk whether right that seems like a pretty useful skill to someone thinking about public problems we don't say everybody's got to be a pilot right you think about you know journalists not to like but like journalists listen to a lot of people who say the opposite things and like try at their best to like figure out where the truth lies and where's the preponderance of reality and what are you hearing again and again that is some larger thing like that seems like a pretty useful trick but we don't say everybody's got to go apprentice at the AP in order to be a change agent but you have to go to Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or maybe now some of the tech companies if you want to be a change agent so I just think that's like preposterous and and maybe go back to your question like getting out of that narrative maybe like go do some weird job like just a normal job like that actually if you think about it like huh like that'd be interesting skill to have for life because there are a lot more of those kind of apprenticeships than we often think what was the second thing oh yeah service like I think this is such an important I don't know if this is where you were going but we don't have these shared experiences anymore like one of the meaningful changes between the seventies you know when this era of extreme inequality sort of took off and today's like the draft ended not that I'm in favor of reinstating it but we actually don't have any kind of experience that we do in common by virtue of being human and I think it's actually when I think about again like you know I didn't I actually my editor couldn't make it tonight but I promised him a solution shop he's like with a solution shop I was like yeah totally we'll do it and we'll do it the way we'll do it is we'll do it right at the end and then the way we'll do it is I'll submit the rest of the book first and then I'll just like while you're reading that I'll write the solution chapter and then I didn't because I think like solution should be written by other people who read the book that's my view but I like to co-create that stuff by co-create I mean you create it but one thing that I do think is an interesting direction again for you to run away with not me is like to think about can we do national service and whether it's mandatory or one of the ideas that I'm always intrigued by is you know I think our society isn't government particular doesn't use its leverage very well like we help people in all kinds of ways right if you go to Harvard whether you pay full freight or take us if you take a scholarship you're definitely maybe getting some government up but even if you don't like federal funding is all up in Harvard right we don't drive a very good bargain so you want to go to Harvard like do a year afterwards right you want you want that financial aid money like do a year afterwards but frankly you want that science lab at Harvard that had received federal funding like do a year afterwards and actually getting people to some combination of like Peace Corps AmeriCorps but you know national service maybe teaching maybe whatever and frankly could be blue-collar stuff I think it may actually be real interesting like if we actually had a president you know who did an infrastructure bill like I'll throw that in there like go build some pipe somewhere like actually have some sort of shared experience of reality before we embark on these lives I think that's actually to be honest one of the only things culturally powerful enough to countervail the very powerful forces that I described in the book so I think one of the most overused phrases in the modern English language is literally however I think we could literally stay here all night and keep talking about this because everybody is asking such great questions and this is such a smart and interesting topic but we literally have to now go so we are gonna wrap up now I'm sorry we couldn't get to everyone's questions if you had questions you can ask them to honor yourself as he's signing your book because this is the book signing portion of the evening so let me ask where do people go okay got it all right so you're gonna go out the back stanchions to the right and you're gonna buy books and just imagine you know like imagine what it was like for me to not be a doctor there you go to buy the book thanks for being here god bless you and good night [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The New York Public Library

Views: 66,714

Rating: 4.8644066 out of 5

Keywords: Philanthropy, Winner Takes All, Anand Giridharadas, Joy-Ann Reid, Author talks, NYPL, New York Public Library, Helen Bernstein Book Award

Id: Fdt5a6CJ3HY

Length: 62min 56sec (3776 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2018