The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world – without
changing anything
Today’s titans of tech and finance want to solve the world’s
problems, as long as the solutions never, ever threaten their own wealth and
power. By Anand Giridharadas
Tue 22 Jan 2019 06.00 GMT
A successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the
raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement. America’s
machine is broken. The same could be said of others around the world. And now
many of the people who broke the progress machine are trying to sell us their
services as repairmen.
When the fruits of change have fallen on the US in recent
decades, the very fortunate have basketed almost all of them. For instance, the
average pretax income of the top 10th of Americans has doubled since 1980, that
of the top 1% has more than tripled, and that of the top 0.001% has risen more
than sevenfold – even as the average pretax income of the bottom half of
Americans has stayed almost precisely the same. These familiar figures amount
to three-and-a-half decades’ worth of wondrous, head-spinning change with zero
impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans. Globally, over the same
period, according to the World Inequality Report, the top 1% captured 27% of
new income, while the bottom half of humanity – presently, more than 3 billion people
– saw 12% of it.
That vast numbers of Americans and others in the west have
scarcely benefited from the age is not because of a lack of innovation, but
because of social arrangements that fail to turn new stuff into better lives.
For example, American scientists make the most important discoveries in
medicine and genetics and publish more biomedical research than those of any
other country – but the average American’s health remains worse and
slower-improving than that of peers in other rich countries, and in some years
life expectancy actually declines. American inventors create astonishing new
ways to learn thanks to the power of video and the internet, many of them free of
charge – but the average US high-school leaver tests more poorly in reading
today than in 1992. The country has had a “culinary renaissance”, as one
publication puts it, one farmers’ market and Whole Foods store at a time – but
it has failed to improve the nutrition of most people, with the incidence of
obesity and related conditions rising over time.
The tools for becoming an entrepreneur appear to be more
accessible than ever, for the student who learns coding online or the Uber
driver – but the share of young people who own a business has fallen by
two-thirds since the 1980s. America has birthed both a wildly successful online
book superstore, Amazon, and another company, Google, that has scanned more
than 25m books for public use – but illiteracy has remained stubbornly in
place, and the fraction of Americans who read at least one work of literature a
year has dropped by almost a quarter in recent decades. The government has more
data at its disposal and more ways of talking and listening to citizens – but
only a quarter as many people find it trustworthy as did in the tempestuous
1960s.
Meanwhile, the opportunity to get ahead has been transformed
from a shared reality to a perquisite of already being ahead. Among Americans
born in 1940, those raised at the top of the upper middle class and the bottom
of the lower middle class shared a roughly 90% chance of realising the
so-called American dream of ending up better off than their parents. Among
Americans born in 1984 and maturing into adulthood today, the new reality is
split-screen. Those raised near the top of the income ladder now have a 70%
chance of realising the dream. Meanwhile, those close to the bottom, more in
need of elevation, have a 35% chance of climbing above their parents’ station.
And it is not only progress and money that the fortunate monopolise: rich
American men, who tend to live longer than the average citizens of any other
country, now live 15 years longer than poor American men, who endure only as
long as men in Sudan and Pakistan.
Thus many millions of Americans, on the left and right, feel
one thing in common: that the game is rigged against people like them. Perhaps
this is why we hear constant condemnation of “the system”, for it is the system
that people expect to turn fortuitous developments into societal progress.
Instead, the system – in America and across much of the world – has been
organised to siphon the gains from innovation upward, such that the fortunes of
the world’s billionaires now grow at more than double the pace of everyone
else’s, and the top 10% of humanity have come to hold 85% of the planet’s
wealth. New data published this week by Oxfam showed that the world’s 2,200
billionaires grew 12% wealthier in 2018, while the bottom half of humanity got 11%
poorer. It is no wonder, given these facts, that the voting public in the US
(and elsewhere) seems to have turned more resentful and suspicious in recent
years, embracing populist movements on the left and right, bringing socialism
and nationalism into the centre of political life in a way that once seemed
unthinkable, and succumbing to all manner of conspiracy theory and fake news.
There is a spreading recognition, on both sides of the ideological divide, that
the system is broken, that the system has to change.
Some elites faced with this kind of gathering anger have
hidden behind walls and gates and on landed estates, emerging only to try to
seize even greater political power to protect themselves against the mob. (We
see you, Koch brothers!) But in recent years a great many fortunate Americans
have also tried something else, something both laudable and self-serving: they
have tried to help by taking ownership of the problem. All around us, the
winners in our highly inequitable status quo declare themselves partisans of
change. They know the problem, and they want to be part of the solution.
Actually, they want to lead the search for solutions. They believe their
solutions deserve to be at the forefront of social change. They may join or
support movements initiated by ordinary people looking to fix aspects of their
society. More often, though, these elites start initiatives of their own,
taking on social change as though it were just another stock in their portfolio
or corporation to restructure. Because they are in charge of these attempts at
social change, the attempts naturally reflect their biases.
For the most part, these initiatives are not democratic, nor
do they reflect collective problem-solving or universal solutions. Rather, they
favour the use of the private sector and its charitable spoils, the market way
of looking at things, and the bypassing of government. They reflect a highly
influential view that the winners of an unjust status quo – and the tools and
mentalities and values that helped them win – are the secret to redressing the
injustices. Those at greatest risk of being resented in an age of inequality
are thereby recast as our saviours from an age of inequality. Socially minded
financiers at Goldman Sachs seek to change the world through “win-win”
initiatives such as “green bonds” and “impact investing”. Tech companies such
as Uber and Airbnb cast themselves as empowering the poor by allowing them to
chauffeur people around or rent out spare rooms. Management consultants and
Wall Street brains seek to convince the social sector that they should guide
its pursuit of greater equality by assuming board seats and leadership
positions.
Conferences and ideas festivals sponsored by plutocrats and
big business – such as the World Economic Forum, which is under way in Davos,
Switzerland, this week – host panels on injustice and promote “thought leaders”
who are willing to confine their thinking to improving lives within the faulty
system rather than tackling the faults. Profitable companies built in
questionable ways and employing reckless means engage in corporate social
responsibility, and some rich people make a splash by “giving back” – regardless
of the fact that they may have caused serious societal problems as they built
their fortunes. Elite networking forums such as the Aspen Institute and the
Clinton Global Initiative groom the rich to be self-appointed leaders of social
change, taking on the problems people like them have been instrumental in
creating or sustaining. A new breed of community-minded so-called B
Corporations has been born, reflecting a faith that more enlightened corporate
self-interest – rather than, say, public regulation – is the surest guarantor
of the public welfare. A pair of Silicon Valley billionaires fund an initiative
to rethink the Democratic party, and one of them can claim, without a hint of
irony, that their goals are to amplify the voices of the powerless and reduce
the political influence of rich people like them.
This genre of elites believes and promotes the idea that
social change should be pursued principally through the free market and
voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems
that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of
capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that
the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the
status quo’s reform.
This is what I call MarketWorld – an ascendant power elite
defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world
while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened
businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia,
media, government and thinktanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls
“thought leaders”, its own language, and even its own territory – including a
constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are
reinforced and disseminated and translated into action. MarketWorld is a
network and community, but it is also a culture and state of mind.
The elites of MarketWorld often speak in a language of
“changing the world” and “making the world a better place” – language more
typically associated with protest barricades than ski resorts. Yet we are left
with the inescapable fact that even as these elites have done much to help,
they have continued to hoard the overwhelming share of progress, the average
American’s life has scarcely improved, and virtually all of the US’s
institutions, with the exception of the military, have lost the public’s trust.
One of the towering figures in this new approach to changing
the world is the former US president Bill Clinton. After leaving office in
2001, he came to champion, through his foundation and his annual Clinton Global
Initiative gatherings in New York, a mode of public-private world improvement
that brought together actors like Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation and
McDonald’s, sometimes with a governmental partner, to solve big problems in
ways plutocrats could get on board with.
After the populist eruption that resulted in Hillary
Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 US election, I asked the former president what he
thought lay behind the surge of public anger. “The pain and road rage we see
reflected in the election has been building a long time,” he said. He thought
the anger “is being fed in part by the feeling that the most powerful people in
the government, economy and society no longer care about them or look down on
them. They want to become part of our progress toward shared opportunities,
shared stability and shared prosperity.” But when it came to his proposed
solution, it sounded a lot like the model to which he was already committed: “The
only answer is to build an aggressive, creative partnership involving all
levels of government, the private sector and nongovernment organisations to
make it better.”
In other words, the only answer is to pursue social change
outside of traditional public forums, with the political representatives of
mankind as one input among several, and corporations having the big say in
whether they would sponsor a given initiative or not. The public’s anger, of
course, has been directed in part at the very elites he had sought to convene,
on whom he had gambled his theory of post-political problem-solving, who had
lost the trust of so many millions of people, making them feel betrayed,
uncared for and scorned.
What people have been rejecting in the US – as well as in
Britain, Hungary and elsewhere – was, in their view, rule by global elites who
put the pursuit of profit above the needs of their neighbours and fellow
citizens. These were elites who seemed more loyal to one another than to their
own communities; elites who often showed greater interest in distant
humanitarian causes than in the pain of people 10 miles to the east or west.
Frustrated citizens felt they possessed no power over the spreadsheet- and
PowerPoint-wielding elites commensurate with the power these elites had gained
over them – whether in switching around their hours or automating their plant
or quietly slipping into law a new billionaire-made curriculum for their
children’s school. What they did not appreciate was the world being changed
without them.
Which raises a question for all of us: are we ready to hand
over our future to the plutocratic elites, one supposedly world-changing
initiative at a time? Are we ready to call participatory democracy a failure,
and to declare these other, private forms of change-making the new way forward?
Is the decrepit state of American self-government an excuse to work around it
and let it further atrophy? Or is meaningful democracy, in which we all
potentially have a voice, worth fighting for?
There is no denying that today’s American elite may be among
the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, by the cold
logic of numbers, among the more predatory. By refusing to risk its way of
life, by rejecting the idea that the powerful might have to sacrifice for the
common good, it clings to a set of social arrangements that allow it to
monopolise progress and then give symbolic scraps to the forsaken – many of
whom wouldn’t need the scraps if society were working right. It is vital that we
try to understand the connection between these elites’ social concern and
predation, between the extraordinary helping and the extraordinary hoarding,
between the milking – and perhaps abetting – of an unjust status quo and the
attempts by the milkers to repair a small part of it. It is also important to
understand how the elites see the world, so that we might better assess the
merits and limitations of their world-changing campaigns.
There are many ways to make sense of all this elite concern
and predation. One is that the elites are doing the best they can. The world is
what it is, the system is what it is, the forces of the age are bigger than
anyone can resist, and the most fortunate are helping. This view may allow that
elite helpfulness is just a drop in the bucket, but reassures itself that at
least it is something. The slightly more critical view is that this sort of
change is well-meaning but inadequate. It treats symptoms, not root causes – it
does not change the fundamentals of what ails us. According to this view,
elites are shirking the duty of more meaningful reform.
But there is still another, darker way of judging what goes
on when elites put themselves in the vanguard of social change: that doing so
not only fails to make things better, but also serves to keep things as they
are. After all, it takes the edge off of some of the public’s anger at being
excluded from progress. It improves the image of the winners. By using private
and voluntary half-measures, it crowds out public solutions that would solve
problems for everyone, and do so with or without the elite’s blessing. There is
no question that the outpouring of elite-led social change in our era does
great good and soothes pain and saves lives. But we should also recall Oscar
Wilde’s words about such elite helpfulness being “not a solution” but “an
aggravation of the difficulty”. More than a century ago, in an age of churn
like our own, he wrote: “Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were
kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised
by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so,
in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the
people who try to do most good.”
Wilde’s formulation may sound extreme to modern ears. How
can there be anything wrong with trying to do good? The answer may be: when the
good is an accomplice to even greater, if more invisible, harm. In our era that
harm is the concentration of money and power among a small few, who reap from
that concentration a near monopoly on the benefits of change. And do-gooding
pursued by elites tends not only to leave this concentration untouched, but
actually to shore it up. For when elites assume leadership of social change,
they are able to reshape what social change is – above all, to present it as
something that should never threaten winners. In an age defined by a chasm between
those who have power and those who don’t, elites have spread the idea that
people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset
fundamental power equations. Society should be changed in ways that do not
change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and
fostered many of the problems they seek to solve.
The broad fidelity to this law helps make sense of what we
observe all around: powerful people fighting to “change the world” in ways that
essentially keep it the same, and “giving back” in ways that sustain an
indefensible distribution of influence, resources and tools. Is there a better
way?
The secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD), a research and policy organisation that
works on behalf of the world’s richest countries, has compared the prevailing
elite posture to that of the fictional 19th-century Italian aristocrat Tancredi
Falconeri, from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, who declares:
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” If this
view is correct, then much of today’s charity and social innovation and
buy-one-give-one marketing may not be measures of reform so much as forms of
conservative self-defence – measures that protect elites from more menacing
change. Among the kinds of issues being sidelined, the OECD leader wrote, are
“rising inequalities of income, wealth and opportunities; the growing
disconnect between finance and the real economy; mounting divergence in
productivity levels between workers, firms and regions; winner-take-most
dynamics in many markets; limited progressivity of our tax systems; corruption
and capture of politics and institutions by vested interests; lack of transparency
and participation by ordinary citizens in decision-making; the soundness of the
education and of the values we transmit to future generations.” Elites, he
wrote, have found myriad ways to “change things on the surface so that in
practice nothing changes at all”. The people with the most to lose from genuine
social change have placed themselves in charge of social change – often with
the passive assent of those most in need of it.
It is fitting that an era marked by these tendencies should
culminate in the election of Donald Trump. He is at once an exposer, an
exploiter and an embodiment of the cult of elite-led social change. He tapped,
as few before him successfully had, into a widespread intuition that elites
were phonily claiming to be doing what was best for most Americans. He
exploited that intuition by whipping it into frenzied anger and then directing
most of that anger not at elites, but at the most marginalised and vulnerable
Americans. And he came to incarnate the very fraud that had fuelled his rise,
and that he had exploited. He became, like the elites he assailed, the
establishment figure who falsely casts himself as a renegade. He became the
rich, educated man who styles himself as the ablest protector of the poor and
uneducated – and who insists, against all evidence, that his interests have
nothing to do with the change he seeks. He became the chief salesman for the
theory, rife among plutocratic change agents, that what is best for powerful
him is best for the powerless too. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of a
culture that tasks elites with reforming the very systems that have made them
and left others in the dust.
One thing that unites those who voted for Trump and those
who despaired at his being elected – and the same might be said of those for
and against Brexit – is a sense that the country requires transformational
reform. The question we confront is whether moneyed elites, who already rule
the roost in the economy and exert enormous influence in the corridors of
political power, should be allowed to continue their conquest of social change
and of the pursuit of greater equality. The only thing better than controlling
money and power is to control the efforts to question the distribution of money
and power. The only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch
over hens.
The trouble with charitable billionaires
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What is at stake is whether the reform of our common life is
led by governments elected by and accountable to the people, or rather by
wealthy elites claiming to know our best interests. We must decide whether, in
the name of ascendant values such as efficiency and scale, we are willing to
allow democratic purpose to be usurped by private actors who often genuinely
aspire to improve things but, first things first, seek to protect themselves.
Yes, the American government is dysfunctional at present. But that is all the
more reason to treat its repair as our foremost national priority. Pursuing
workarounds of our troubled democracy makes democracy even more troubled. We
must ask ourselves why we have so easily lost faith in the engines of progress
that got us where we are today – in the democratic efforts to outlaw slavery,
end child labour, limit the workday, keep drugs safe, protect collective
bargaining, create public schools, battle the Great Depression, electrify rural
America, weave a nation together by road, pursue a Great Society free of
poverty, extend civil and political rights to women and African Americans and
other minorities, and give our fellow citizens health, security and dignity in
old age.
Much of what appears to be reform in our time is in fact the
defense of stasis. When we see through the myths that foster this
misperception, the path to genuine change will come into view. It will once
again be possible to improve the world without permission slips from the
powerful.
This is an edited extract from Winners Take All: The Elite
Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas, published by Allen Lane on
24 January and available to buy at guardianbookshop.com
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