Meet the 'Change Agents' Who Are Enabling Inequality

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: August 27, 2018 at 08:41:13 EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Meet the 'Change Agents' Who Are Enabling Inequality
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Meet the ‘Change Agents’ Who Are Enabling Inequality
> By Joseph E. Stiglitz
> Aug 20 2018
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/books/review/winners-take-all-anand-giridharadas.html>
>
> WINNERS TAKE ALL 
> The Elite Charade of Changing the World 
> By Anand Giridharadas 
> 288 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
>
> First came the books describing just how much worse economic inequality had become over the past 20 years, with all 
> the dramatic political implications now impossible to ignore. Then there were the tomes about globalization 
> (including my own, I admit), detailing the West’s unfettered pursuit of neoliberal policies that abetted all this 
> unfairness.
>
> Well, prepare for a new genre: books gently and politely skewering the corporate titans who claim to be solving such 
> problems. It’s an elite that, rather than pushing for systemic change, only reinforces our lopsided economic reality 
> — all while hobnobbing on the conference circuit and trafficking in platitudes.
>
> Anand Giridharadas, a former columnist for The New York Times, spoke about this phenomenon at an Aspen Institute 
> conference in 2015, and he takes his ideas further in his entertaining and gripping new book, “Winners Take All.” As 
> the Democratic Party struggles to figure out its future and global demagogy thrives, it’s worth considering where we 
> went wrong and how best to save the world from the dangerous turn it has taken. It’s now very clear that 
> globalization, technology and market liberalization did not bring their promised benefits — at least not for the vast 
> majority of Americans and those in advanced countries around the world.
>
> For those at the helm, the philanthropic plutocrats and aspiring “change agents” who believe they are helping but are 
> actually making things worse, it’s time for a reckoning with their role in this spiraling dilemma. I suggest they 
> might want to read a copy of this book while in the Hamptons this summer.
>
> In a series of chapters centered on different individuals who are part of this rarefied class, Giridharadas exposes 
> the rationalizations of the 0.001 percent who actually believe they are making the world a better place. The Sacklers 
> helped create the opioid crisis but give money to important causes. The chief executive of Cinnabon thinks that being 
> transparent about the fat and sugar she peddles offsets the harm her company creates. It’s a land of PowerPoint 
> presentations and cuddly good intentions.
>
> Giridharadas calls this prevailing ethos “MarketWorld,” made up of people who want “to do well and do good.” He 
> beautifully catches the language of Aspen, Davos and the recently extant Clinton Global Initiative, which will 
> doubtless reappear in the newly born Bloomberg initiative. It’s a world of feel-good clichés like “win-win” and “make 
> a difference.” The rote conversations of this crowd were on recent display at the Public Theater, in the beginning of 
> the second act of the Bruce Norris play “The Low Road.” As Giridharadas describes the ethos of MarketWorld, it’s made 
> up of people like former President Bill Clinton who saw the anger bubbling up but proved unable to “call out elites 
> for their sins: or call for power’s redistribution and fundamental systemic change; or suggest that plutocrats might 
> have to surrender precious things for others to have a mere shot of transcending indecency.”
>
> Like the dieter who would rather do anything to lose weight than actually eat less, this business elite would save 
> the world through social impact investing, entrepreneurship, sustainable capitalism, philanthro-capitalism, 
> artificial intelligence, market-driven solutions. They would fund a million of these buzzwordy programs rather than 
> fundamentally question the rules of the game — or even alter their own behavior to reduce the harm of the existing 
> distorted, inefficient and unfair rules. Doing the right thing — and moving away from their win-win mentality — would 
> involve real sacrifice; instead, it’s easier to focus on their pet projects and initiatives. As Giridharadas puts it, 
> people wanted to do “virtuous side projects instead of doing their day jobs more honorably.”
>
> In order to really have an economy with the greatest opportunity for all, the kind of economy they seem to champion, 
> the MarketWorlders would have to pay high levels of corporate and personal income tax, offer decent wages to their 
> workers, allow unions, fund public schools (instead of pet charter projects) and support some form of single payer 
> health care and campaign finance reform. One simply can’t arrive at a more economically equal reality when the rungs 
> of the ladder are so far apart.
>
> At Davos and the other international conclaves where the muckety-mucks celebrate the new economic world they have 
> helped create, which has rewarded them so amply, corporate leaders move seamlessly from sessions discussing the risks 
> of climate change, growing inequality and financial instability, to dinners at which they praise tax cuts for 
> billionaires and corporations and applaud proposals for deregulation. They conveniently don’t mention the increases 
> in taxes on a majority of those in the middle, the Republican moves to eliminate health insurance for some 13 million 
> in a country where life expectancy is already in decline, the increase in pollution, the risk of another financial 
> crisis, the ever increasing evidence of moral turpitude — whether it’s Wells Fargo cheating its customers or 
> Volkswagen cheating on its emission tests. Cognitive dissonance is intrinsic to MarketWorld.
>
> [snip]
>
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