Beware of people who call themselves “thought leaders” or “change agents” and worse yet, the “venture philanthropists” and “social entrepreneurs” who pull the wires. They may be well intentioned, Anand Giridharadas writes in Winners Take All; their money might even help “lives within the faulty system,” but those donors have no interest in “tackling the faults.”
Winners Take All reminds us of the unevenly distributed benefits of the contemporary world presided over by the great philanthropists. Medical research is highly advanced in America, but public health is poor; the internet created “astonishing new ways to learn” yet reading scores have slipped; Google has scanned millions of books (depriving writers of royalties?) that barely anyone reads. And don’t get Giridharadas started on the accelerating income gap. “Three-and-a-half decades of wondrous, head-spinning change” has had “zero impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans.”
Winners Take All is a scathing attack on a society that sells Uber as “empowering the poor.” At the end of the night, the driver still doesn’t have a family sustaining job. With their mania for privatization, the philanthropy of social entrepreneurs “crowds out public solutions that would solve problems for everyone.” But then, public solutions haven’t always worked either. Winners Take All is thought-provoking and revealing yet perhaps too optimistic about achieving positive alternatives to the present malaise.
