Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  Under the new theory, entrepreneurship can become synonymous with humanitarianism—a humanitarianism that greases the wheels of entrepreneurship. “In the last decade, ‘doing good’ became a driving force for building successful, impactful businesses,” writes Craig Shapiro, the founder of the Collaborative Fund, a venture capital firm in New York. “Once seen as sacrificial to growth and returns, pursuing a social mission now plays a big role when attracting both customers and employees.” Shapiro used a Venn diagram to illustrate the investment thesis that his firm had created in view of this trend. One circle was labeled “Better for me (self-interest)”; the other was labeled “Better for the world (broader interest).” The overlap was labeled “exponential opportunity.” A charitable interpretation of this idea is that the world deserves to benefit from flourishing business. A more sinister interpretation is that business deserves to benefit from any attempt to better the condition of the world.

  Nowhere is this idea of entrepreneurship-as-humanitarianism more entrenched than in Silicon Valley, where company founders regularly speak of themselves as liberators of mankind and of their technologies as intrinsically utopian. After all, even a workplace software company like Rosenstein’s Asana could claim that “we’ll improve the lives of every person on the planet.” A friend of Rosenstein, Greg Ferenstein, set out years ago to chronicle these grand claims and make sense of this new mentality radiating from the Valley. He was a reporter in the Bay Area who had written for various outlets, notably TechCrunch, the booster newsletter of Silicon Valley. He had become interested in the bigger ideas animating the people he covered—what win-win-ism imagines for the world and what, at times, it obscures.

  Ferenstein interviewed many technology founders and distilled their ideas into a working philosophy. He calls this philosophy Optimism, though it seems to be just a slightly tech-inflected version of standard-issue neoliberalism. The ideology’s central thrust, he said, is a belief in the possibility of the win-win and the harmony of human interests. “People typically think of government and market working in opposition to each other—and regulation being the tool by which government constrains the market,” Ferenstein said. “This new ideology believes that government is an investor in capitalism. The government works not as a check on capitalism but for capitalism—to make capitalism successful, to ensure that the conditions for its success are in place”: that there is a decent education system to produce the requisite number of workers, that trade agreements get written so as to allow companies to buy from and sell to far-off places, that the infrastructure allows trucks to get produce to the supermarket before it rots, that the air is clean enough that people live long and (more important) productive lives.

  “The basis of old government is the notion of a zero-sum relationship between different classes—economic classes, between citizens and the government, between the United States and other countries,” Ferenstein said. “If you assume that inherent conflict, you worry about disparities in wealth. You want labor unions to protect workers from corporations. You want a smaller government to get out of the way of business. If you don’t make that assumption, and you believe that every institution needs to do well, and they all work with each other, you don’t want unions or regulation or sovereignty or any of the other things that protect people from each other.

  “Most politics and most institutions are built on a zero-sum relationship between some people in the group,” Ferenstein went on. “This ideology is unique—and the reason I call it Optimism is because of the belief that everyone can get along. Or everyone has, to be more specific, overlapping preferences.”

  This idea seeks to push back against the modern democratic vision of society in which citizens are equal before the law, are understood to have divergent interests, and compete on the basis of those interests for resources and power, with different organs of the state designed to represent different kinds of needs. Optimism harkens back to a vision of harmony-as-progress that dominated the Middle Ages. It was distilled in “The Fable of a Man, His Belly, and His Limbs,” a twelfth-century poem by Marie de France about human body parts that resent each other until they realize their interdependence. At first, the hands and feet and head (representing the laborers) are enraged at the belly (representing the lords) for “their earnings that it ate.” They cease to work, so as to deprive the belly of food—only to wither themselves when the belly has no material to digest and pass back to them as nutrients. The poem concludes:

  From this example one can see

  What every free person ought to know:

  No one can have honour

  Who brings shame to his lord.

  Nor can his lord have it either

  If he wishes to shame his people.

  If either one fails the other

  Evil befalls them both.

  The fable allows that the hands and feet and head must thrive. But, it insists, they cannot thrive when the belly isn’t thriving, too. To believe in this vision is not to cast the meek away. It is, rather, to say that their success can never be oppositional to that of the strong.

  There is no discounting the audacity of this MarketWorld idea. It rejects the notion that there are different social classes with different interests who must fight for their needs and rights. Instead, we get what we deserve through marketplace arrangements—whether fantasy football to help African orphans or office software to make everyone more productive or the sale of toothpaste to the poor in ways that increase shareholder value. This win-win doctrine took on a great deal more than Adam Smith ever had, in claiming that the winners were specially qualified to look after the losers. But what do they have to show for their efforts, given that the age of the win-win is also, across much of the West, the age of historic, gaping inequality?

  In a country that is losing its middle class, in a wider world racked by anxiety about globalization and technology and displacement, what is the win-win theory’s response to the problem of suffering? “It’s not an emphasis of this ideology,” Ferenstein said. Suffering can be innovated away. Let the innovators do their start-ups and suffering will be reduced. Each entrepreneurial venture could take on a different social problem. “In the case of Airbnb, the way you alleviate housing suffering is by allowing people to share their homes,” Ferenstein said. An Airbnb ad campaign along these lines featured older black women thriving now that the entrepreneurs had helped them to rent out rooms and make extra money. Of course, many poor people don’t own homes or have a surplus of space to rent out. And many African Americans find it difficult to rent on the platform—hotels can no longer easily discriminate by race, but spare-room hoteliers often do. But what was even more striking than these blind spots was the notion, implied in Ferenstein’s idea, that the winners should receive a kickback from social change.

  Indeed, in the case of Airbnb and other so-called win-wins, the claim of a harmony of interests is hope masquerading as description. There are still winners and losers, the powerful and the powerless, and the claim that everyone is in it together is an eraser of the inconvenient realities of others. “This ideology radically overestimates who will benefit from change,” Ferenstein admitted. Then what will happen as believers in win-win change amass ever more power—and not only economic power but also the power to guide the pursuit of societal betterment, one start-up at a time? “People will be left behind,” Ferenstein said. “Unintelligent, poor, indigent, unmotivated—they will be left behind. The people who don’t like change will be left behind. The people who like suburban small towns will be left behind. The people who don’t want to work twenty-four hours a day will be left behind. The people who don’t live to invent and create—and can—will be left behind.” This list seemed to contradict the whole premise of Optimism—that we are all invested in each other’s success and will prosper together. In fact, Ferenstein now seemed to be saying that the better the Optimists did, the more people w
ould be beached. This claim jibed with what actually was going on in the world—the benefits of progress flowing primarily to the already fortunate; the widespread cutting loose of those on the wrong side of change.

  It is fine for winners to see their own success as inextricable from that of others. But there will always be situations in which people’s preferences and needs do not overlap, and in fact conflict. And what happens to the losers then? Who is to protect their interests? What if the elites simply need to part with more of their money in order for every American to have, say, a semi-decent public school?

  * * *

  —

  Not long after moving to the Bay Area to run the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Emmett Carson was told to drop his usage of the off-putting win-lose jargon of social justice. Given that social justice was his life’s work, this might have posed a problem. But Carson understood one of the implicit rules governing the entrepreneurial class’s contribution to change: It is more forthcoming when you frame problems in ways that make winners feel good.

  Carson was raised on the South Side of Chicago, the son of municipal workers, a black boy in a neighborhood statistically unkind to black boys. When he was eight, though, a shooting outside of the Carsons’ home prompted a move some thirty blocks south of the South Side to a better neighborhood called Chatham Village. Carson’s life turned onto a different track. He made his way to Morehouse College, then to Princeton for graduate school, then to prestigious positions at the Ford and Minneapolis foundations. Then he went to Silicon Valley, where he became one of the leading advisers to technology entrepreneurs wishing to make a difference in the world.

  That was when he was told to stop using the phrase “social justice.” It had worked fine for him at Ford and Minneapolis. In Silicon Valley, it rubbed people the wrong way. “I spent twenty-five years working on social justice,” he said to me one day, “and the first twenty years I thought it was important to use the term ‘social justice.’ ” In Silicon Valley, “people interpret social justice different ways,” often as win-lose thinking. “Some people say social justice is taking from the rich and giving to the poor,” Carson said. “Some people say social justice is giving to people who didn’t earn something.” And so Carson started using the word “fairness.”

  The winners of the Valley preferred that. Fairness seemed to be more about how people were treated by abstract systems than about the possibility of the winners’ own complicity. “I’m about getting to a solution,” said Carson. “If using the word ‘fairness’ allows us to say something is wrong and needs to be changed, that’s a better word for me. I’m about trying to minimize the distinctions and the splits, and creating frames that different people can say, ‘I can buy into that.’ ”

  Carson began to understand that if no one questioned the entrepreneurs’ fortunes and their personal status quo, they were willing to help. They liked to feel charitable, useful. They liked the chance to sign off on the help that the poor received, not to have that help organized through democracy and collective action (in the pre-Asana meaning). “If the view is I took it from you, versus you gave it, it changes the entire dynamics of conversation,” Carson said. Perhaps they had a feeling “that I’m being targeted because I’ve been successful, I’ve worked hard, I made it; and because I made it, I am now the target, that you think you deserve some of my success that you haven’t earned.” Carson made clear that he did not believe they were right in their sense of victimhood. But in order to get his job done, he decided to honor the feeling.

  Carson had spent his life working on poverty, opportunity, and inequality. But now, living and working among the rising philanthrocapitalist class, he had decided to play by their rules. And what these winners wanted was for the world to be changed in ways that had their buy-in—think charter schools over more equal public school funding, or poverty-reducing tech companies over antitrust regulation of tech companies. The entrepreneurs were willing to participate in making the world better if you pursued that goal in a way that exonerated and celebrated and depended on them. Win-win.

  * * *

  —

  Think back to the Venn diagram of Craig Shapiro, the venture capitalist. There is, he tells us, a vast sphere of things that would make the world better for oneself and another vast sphere of things that would make the world better for others. Where they meet offers tremendous possibility. Moreover, “pursuing a social mission now plays a big role when attracting both customers and employees.” But what about the people with little and the world at large?

  The obvious gain is access to the resources, brains, and tools of the moneyed world. Suddenly its capabilities can be harnessed to address your problem. But in Shapiro’s Venn diagram, it is worth noting that the lion’s share of each circle remains outside the overlap of the win-win—what mathematicians call the relative complement. What becomes of those interests of others that do not jibe with the winners’ interests?

  That question hovered over Jane Leibrock as she sat behind the wheel of the rattling yellow Ford Bronco that was serving as the official vehicle of the start-up she had recently joined, cruising the Nimitz Freeway in the Bay Area.

  Leibrock had left Facebook, where she investigated such things as how people grapple with privacy settings, for a new company called Even. She was drawn to Even’s attempt to address a massive social problem: the growing volatility of millions of working-class Americans’ income, thanks to the spreading practice of employing people erratically, the rise in part-time jobs and gigs, and the new on-demand economy that left many eternally chasing work instead of building livelihoods.

  When your paychecks surge and dive willy-nilly, it is hard to pay bills, make plans, and create a future. Even came along offering a Silicon Valley–style solution to this problem, in the form of, naturally, a phone app. It would smooth the spiky incomes of working-class people, for a fee. The initial plan was to sell them a service, costing $260 a year, that squirreled away some of their money when they made more than the usual, and then in weeks when their pay fell short supplemented it with some of what was squirreled away. Say you made $500 a week on average, but with considerable swings. In a week when you earned $650, $500 would go to your regular bank account and $150 would be deposited into your virtual Even account. In a week when you earned $410, $500 would be placed in your bank account, courtesy of your former surpluses. Even would endeavor, with characteristic Silicon Valley ambition, to counteract the effects of a generation’s worth of changes in the lives of working-class Americans, rooted in policy choices and shifts in technology and the world situation—including outsourcing, stagnant wages, erratic hours, defanged unions, deindustrialization, ballooning debt, nonexistent sick leave, dismal schools, predatory lending, and dynamic scheduling—while doing nothing about those underlying problems. Like Rosenstein and other believers in win-wins, the founders of Even wanted very much to help, but thought it best to help in a way that would create some opportunity for them, too.

  Leibrock was among the Even founders’ first hires, and she was on the Nimitz that day driving from interview to interview, learning about the lives and needs of the working poor so that Even could most effectively serve them as customers. She is a graduate of Yale and the private schools of Austin, Texas, with no trace of an accent. She was part of the great brain rush to California that was turning the Bay Area into one of the most unaffordable, unequal, and tense parts of the country, with resentful locals famously throwing rocks at the Google buses that ferried employees to and from the South Bay. Leibrock and her colleagues at Even were awash in noble intentions, but it was still reasonable to ask if Even’s for-profit safety net was the most appropriate response to the problem its founders had identified. Could it be read as a lucrative bet that the new economy would inevitably entrap a permanent underclass, whose incomes could only be smoothed, not lifted—and smoothed not by restricting certain business practices by law (win-los
e) but by charging workers a fee for security (win-win)? “If you want to feel like you have a safety net for the first time in your life, Even is the answer,” the company’s website said. But this was a new kind of MarketWorld “safety net” that did not ask the public and government to help in any way.

  Here was Leibrock in a Starbucks, talking to a single mother about trying to balance her job and her education and her embarrassment at relying on free diapers from her parents. Here was Leibrock with an employee of a Nike store, who was explaining how her bosses kept her hours low to avoid paying her benefits, while requiring her to remain available most of the week, which prevented her from taking a second job. Here was Leibrock at a strip mall, asking a grocery stocker named Ursula about the mental gymnastics of managing too little money, working hours that fluctuated week to week, complicating the making of plans. Despite working thirty-six hours a week on average at the supermarket, she couldn’t afford the gas necessary for picking up her grandkids from school in San Francisco. Ursula talked of the depression that gripped her, her father’s Parkinson’s, and her mother’s dementia.

  Leibrock’s job brought her into contact with a section of America that the Valley mostly ignored. Interview by interview, Leibrock was cultivating a sense of this other country. One day she was interviewing via Skype a woman named Heather Jacobs about her life and finances. The conversation began awkwardly, because Jacobs had misunderstood what was on offer. Her husband had told her that Even provided free credit, which it didn’t.