- What is happening now in
my view is a neo feudalism where the Zuckerbergs and Bezos's of the world are basically
becoming the new Lord and ladies. And they're deciding, even
when they do nice things, they're deciding what kind
of schools we should have, what kind of financial aid programs universities should have, you know, what kind of disease, anti-disease programs we should have. And what's so striking about this, this is problematic on several levels, number one, a lot of these people are our worst economic sinners, reinventing themselves as our saviors. Mark Zuckerberg presents as one of the most idealistic corporate
CEOs in American history. He's literally the only
CEO in American history who possibly tipped a
federal election result. - I'm here today with Anand Giridharadas, a journalist and writer whose new book, "Winners Take All: The Elite
Charade of Changing the World". Thanks for joining us. - Thank you for having me. - This book is a dynamo. I've often said to my young people, that the Young Scholars Initiative at INET that if we get this right, the depth and duration
of their midlife crisis will be diminished. The consciousness that young
people are pulled up into, the vortex of elite universities and brand names where they work and all kinds of things
are only, how I say it, loosely correlated with a
sense of deeper purpose. And this book, tears open, which you might call the
path that they're navigating through what I call the
siren songs of temptation. And so, I'm really excited to
be able to explore with you and share with people why you wrote this book and what you're saying
in different dimensions. - My method is I kind of took,
write portraits of people as part of exploring larger
ideas about the world. And the idea I was exploring was this idea that we live in this age of
extraordinary elite generosity, social concern, philanthropy,
every Silicon Valley company. It's not enough to just
have a company out there. You got to claim you're
liberating humanity. All the foundations in New York, every investment bank in
New York that, you know, or financial house that help
cause a financial crisis that now claims it's in CSR
and help empowering the poor. The winners of our age
in the United States are engaged in efforts everywhere you look to make the world a better place
do good, make a difference. However, however, however, we have the staggering and stubborn facts of an age of historic inequality
that's not getting better. An age in which the American
dream has become a thing that does happen in other countries but doesn't really happen here. And a system that is almost designed to leave most people unable to realize their dreams and potential. And so, I became curious about how is it that every foundation head
and people donating billions and Michael Bloomberg making donations and Mark Zuckerberg changing the world and Jeff Bezos doing what he's doing, how is it that we have
all of that activity, and TOMS shoes and social enterprises and Bono doing a million things
involving red iPhone cases. We have all of that and we have the staggering,
stubborn facts of an America that doesn't work for most Americans. And I became interested in the ways in which rich people when they step into the arena of social change, change, change, redefine change in ways that
suit their own interests. Defang change, promote forms of change that are friendly to winners, don't involve higher taxes, more regulation of their businesses, and in fact lean on things
like market arrangements or, you know, win-win social
enterprises or whatever. So, I say that to say... The story I wanted to tell
was that larger story, but the way I tell these
stories as a writer is through characters, through people living these experiences. And I realized the book had to start with an innocent young person,
not a plutocrat sitting in a back office scheming
to build this world. An earnest young person
trying to make their way in the world and getting
drafted into this ideology. And so, Hillary Cohen, is a senior at Georgetown
when we meet her in the book. It's 2014, she's deciding
as so many of us do at different moments in our
life, what to do with her life. And she was a very talented,
very bright person. She's the kind of young woman
many people have met her, I thought, she should
be president one day, she's gonna do great
things, she radiates that. And she had a lot of choices. She had a great education at Georgetown. And what she knew is she
wanted to change the world. Like many young people today,
like many elites today, she wanted to make a difference matter, help on the scale of millions. Well, she arrives at
Georgetown with that ambition and it's a fertile time at Georgetown to be thinking about that. You have, it's the that era, is the era of Black Lives
Matter getting started. It's the era of the Tea Party with its own kind of right wing critique of a rigged American system.
- Occupy - Right, you have Occupy, you have the Pekiti book
landing in that period. So, Pope Francis, the
kind of most radically anti inequality religious
leader maybe ever, you know, the Jesuit, like
the founders of Georgetown. So, that's very much her world. And yet, despite all of
those atmospheric influences and her own impulse to change the lives of millions of people, she ends up being
absorbed into this culture in the book called "Market World", which is this kind of
belief that it is possible to change the world, in fact
to best to change the world, through the institutions
of extreme capitalism. That going to McKinsey and Goldman Sachs and learning that training
is how you change the world. Going to Silicon Valley is
how you change the world. And despite her instincts, she gets kind of sucked into that culture. She does an internship at Goldman. That's a little too
much on the doing well, end of the doing well
by doing good continuum. That doing well by doing good is a big phrase around her at the time. But then she ends up going to McKinsey. And at first she kind of resists it. She keeps seeking extensions
for turning down the offer, but she ends up being
sucked into this story that a lot of young
people are sucked into, which is if you wanna make
people's lives better, you have to apprentice
in the tools of business. And so, Hillary Cohen,
you know, does that, ends up at McKinsey. And realizes very quickly, that McKinsey is in fact
what it always has been, which is a company that, you know, helps you shave 6% off the cost of a tire manufacturing plant. And not in fact, in the business of changing the world as some of its marketing
materials misled her into believing. And she's about to leave. And guess which client she
gets that makes her think, oh, maybe I should say, Barack Obama, about to leave the presidency, starting a foundation
to revitalize democracy. And of all the people in the world who does he call to seek advice on how to revitalize democracy
through his foundation? The Washington office of McKinsey. And so, Hillary now thinks, well, he's getting duped by
the same thing I got duped by. On the other hand, if Barack Obama thinks
we should be thinking about the future of
democracy, maybe we should. And so, she stayed a little longer. But I started with her because I think what she got pulled into is something many well-meaning elites have gotten pulled into in our time, which is a fantasy that
you can have your cake and give it back to. That you can do well and do good. That you can make a
difference and make a killing. That you can be generous and remain part of social arrangements that are unjust. - And the do good part, if
you will, the judge and jury is those other elite people
affirming what you do. It isn't the, what you might call downtrodden
experiencing progress. - We actually have a
system in this country for making the world a better place, and it's called democracy. But I'll tell you something, the winners of our age don't
like to use that system for their world betterment schemes because you know why? They only have one vote in that system and that is not enough votes for them. So we actually have programs
to make sure people are eating. We actually have programs to
make sure people go to schools and that they're good schools. We actually have programs to
represent people's preferences and translate that into
policies that'll help people. We have robust mechanisms. They're not perfect and they're
in a bad way now because of- - You spoke of this, there was one point where
you said, essentially, I'll paraphrase, the market world Silicon Valley experiment was essentially blowing off the whole, what you might call vision
of the enlightenment. - Absolutely, one of the ideas that came out of the enlightenment was if you think back to
kind of futile Europe. You had a bunch of peasants and then you had a bunch
of lords and ladies and landed the states, you know, and these peasants farm their fields. And you had peasants whose
lives were vulnerable to the whims of the Lords and ladies. If they wanted to take
this much wheat that year, that's how much they would take. And if they wanted to
let you rent their thing they would and wouldn't. And it was a cruel world. And part of what we built on
the 17th, 18th century onward was universal systems through governments and institutions and laws
where your life didn't depend on the, you know-
- Doing favor locally. - Yeah, how much caffeine
your lord and lady had that morning.
- Yeah. - Whether they were happy or not. It depended on a set of
universal laws and norms. And we built things like,
eventually over time, public schools and Medicare and social security and
interstate highway system. And so, what is happening now in my view is a neo feudalism where
the Zuckerbergs and Bezos's of the world are basically
becoming the new lord and ladies. And they're deciding, even
when they do nice things, they're deciding what kind
of schools we should have, what kind of financial aid programs universities should have, you know, what kind of disease, anti-disease programs we should have. And what's so striking about this, this is problematic on several levels, number one, a lot of these people are our worst economic sinners, reinventing themselves as our saviors. Mark Zuckerberg presents as one of the most idealistic corporate
CEOs in American history. He's literally the only
CEO in American history who possibly tipped a
federal election result. - Yeah. - You know, I don't
like the Koch brothers, I don't like people who
dump effluent into rivers, but I got to say it was
the guy in the T-shirt with a nice smile and a nerdy vibe and an inability to process emotions. It was that guy talking about community, community community. It was that guy who actually compromised a US federal election. - Let's talk about that for a second. Most villains in movies are
conscious, sadistic, et cetera. Mark Zuckerberg created a
system that produced that, but I don't think that was his intent. Nonetheless, that's the outcome. And it is to be criticized in the, a happy guy in the T-shirt is a mirage. - A lot of us have been
trying to help Mark Zuckerberg for the last many, many years. I think the guy's... Ever since he was sued by
his own business partners who he screwed in the early years, a lot of people have been
telling Mark Zuckerberg, you're a little predatory,
you're a little blind. You don't really process
emotions that well, you don't have feelings. But that's fine. Like, there are things you can do, there's books you can read,
there's people you can hire. The guy has been staggeringly. I mean, I know people who work with him, who have worked for him, who advise him. They describe someone who
has this messianic desire to make the world better, who thinks he has figured
out tools that are capable of liberating humanity
faster than the rest of us. But when he hears from the rest of us, hey, it's not just that you're
things three degrees off. There are fundamental things
about you and what you've built and the people you have around
you that are 180 degrees off, he's unable to process it. And particularly in the
Valley, think with Elon Musk, you think about the Google people, these are people who are some
of the most socially ignorant in adept people on earth
who are now in charge of the tools. - The architecture of our-
- of socializing. - Yeah.
- Right? The thing they are worse
at in their personal lives, they're now in charge of, for all of us. - If you believe in this
system called democracy, you need intelligent voters. So you're investing in what you might call the side effect of
education that's essential to the health of the republic. - Look, climate change is
an education problem, okay? The numbers totally beared out. The percentage of people with PhDs, who don't believe climate
change is real is trivial. The percentage with master's degrees is maybe a little higher, but, right? But if you doubled the percentage of Americans with a college degree, there'd be no problem
of climate change denial in this country. And then what that would mean is the world would actually have a shot
at maybe addressing it in a way that right now looks unlikely. A lot of our problems are
education problems in disguise because the ability to
believe in fake things is essential to upholding the
kind of system that we have. Otherwise, how do you
explain in a democracy, a system that doesn't
work for most people? Makes no sense. People have have to be
persuaded to believe in things that are not real. - Right, the democracies
become a plutonomy where the power of that vote is diminished and the more you can manipulate people as you just described, the more power the money has
relative to the individual. - And I've been trying to help
people see the connections between each of these stories. You know, I was just saying today, you know, we have a story in the news of Michael Bloomberg giving
1.8 billion to John Hopkins. Very nice gift, but why
does he have that money? Why is that happening that way? Then you got, a couple days
before this bombshell story on Facebook and how it
totally looked the other way as the Russians are waging
cyber war on this country to basically protect itself
from government scrutiny. Then you got the story of Amazon running the bachelor contest on American cities, getting a tax break for the world's richest man. You know, then you go back and we just have the 10 year anniversary of the financial crisis and
basically now 10 years later it turns out the only people
who are fully recovered from it are the people who caused it and on and on and on and on. These are all connected
and I think we are not who we think we are in this country and we are living in an
America that is the opposite of our self image. If you ask, if you stop in
any red state, blue state, small town, big city, farm stand, and you say, what are
your kind of central ideas of what this country's about? One of the things
that'll come up very fast in my experience is, American dream, like,
whatever effort you put in, that's where you end up. This is actually less true in America than in any other rich country. The thing we think is our thing, is like the opposite of our thing. Ours is actually the most cast... We are the kind of most cast society among the rich countries. - And by the way, the reduction of funding for our public universities, like University of Michigan
where you went to school and where I grew up
around or Cal Berkeley, they've ceased to be vehicles of upward mobility.
- [Anand] Correct. - And according to Raj Chetty's study with number of colleagues, the University of Michigan
now has more people from the top 1% than from
the bottom 60 combined- - Wow.
- as undergraduates. And that's 40,000 students. That's not some boutique college picking off trust fund kids. That's how they got to sustain themselves. - Wow.
- So the whole, like you said, the mask is what you might call occluding our vision of what's really happening. - You know, sometimes you can have like a very bad disease that remains invisible in your body, right?
- Yeah. There's cancers that you
people have for years without realizing they have cancer and then it's too late.
- Yeah. - I think we've had a cancer for a while in terms of the veneration of wealth thinking that people are smart
just 'cause they're rich, thinking they know what
our school should be like just 'cause they made
money in hedge funds, thinking that they have insight into how we should fight diseases just because they made
a soft drink company and caused diseases. And that cancer has been
in our society for a while and it was pretty much undetected. People weren't critiquing these things. When Mark Zuckerberg a
few years ago announced, "I'm giving 99% of my wealth away." I mean, every newspaper
story was this like puffy, like gauzy, philanthropy thing. I think Trump is the moment where we realize we have cancer and I appreciate him for that. I appreciate the way in
which he is flamboyantly made visible many of
the ugliest tendencies of our society. He is the incarnation of so much of what is bad in a culture that reveres money. And he's dramatized so many of the things I
write about in this book, the notion that the people
who cause our problems are best equipped to solve them somehow. The notion that you can kind
of seek to enrich yourself and sort of fight for the common man at the same time, win-win. The notion that you can be, just because you're a
business person you have like, these special skills to
solve any other problem that have nothing to do with your lane. - Well, I think the sensibility, we talk about new economic thinking, like it's this model versus
that model or whatever, but you're penetrating
to a different level, which is what I would call
the emotional contours of who you want to be and who you allow to be the judging jury of the meaning of your existence. And by understanding the context
in which ideas are formed and how they, what you might
call resonate with value, it challenges us all to think about governance, media, what matters to us. You're opening up a lot of structures that people who just played my model versus your model never considered. And I think that to me, that's a very beautiful
contribution that you're making. - Oh, thank you, that's- And it will help us all go deeper. Cornel West, the famous theologian and scholar said to me
one time, we were on stage at the Union Theological
Seminary and he said, "Robert, sometimes you
know you don't understand and what you have to do
is get quiet and go deeper until you can come back out." And I think the challenge
that you visioned in this book for all of the thinkers,
the intellectuals, the scholars or the people who think that they have some kind of right to a paternalistic design
architecture for society. I think you're shaking us all up and I'm grateful to you for doing that. Thank you.
- Thank you so much.
