Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  Giussani had heard rich men do this kind of thing so often that he had invented a verb for the act: They were “Pinkering”—using the long-run direction of human history to minimize, to delegitimize the concerns of those without power. There was also economic Pinkering, which “is to tell people the global economy has been great because five hundred million Chinese have gone from poverty to the middle class. And, of course, that’s true,” Giussani said. “But if you tell that to the guy who has been fired from a factory in Manchester because his job was taken to China, he may have a different reaction. But we don’t care about the guy in Manchester. So there are many facets to this kind of ideology that have been used to justify the current situation.”

  Here is an expert example of Pinkering, from the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Notice how accurate observations about human progress between the time of hunter-gatherers and the present creep into criticism-shaming:

  We’re this little, tribal species that was basically just sort of beating each other up, and competing with each other in all these ways, and somehow or other, we’ve risen so vastly far above our design specifications. I look around at us and I say, go humanity. We are fantastic. Yeah, there’s ISIS, there’s a lot of bad stuff, but you people who think that things are bad, you are expecting way too much.

  As a TED curator, Giussani was one of many people who had helped to build a new intellectual sphere in recent decades. It turned thought leaders into our most heard philosophers. It put many on the payroll of companies and plutocrats as their means of making a living. It promoted a body of ideas friendly to the winners of the age. It beamed out so many thoughts about why the world was getting better in recent years that its antennae failed to detect all the incoming transmissions about all the people whose lives were not improving, who didn’t care to be Pinkered because they knew what they were seeing, and what they were seeing was a society in which a small number of conference-going people and their friends were hoarding much of the progress they claimed to be inevitable, abundant, and beneficial to all.

  Now in America, in Europe, and beyond, revolts were under way. People were rejecting the winners’ consensus that Giussani had described. Had MarketWorld’s commandeering and distortion of the realm of ideas contributed to the anger that so disturbed him? “Of course that distortion contributed,” he said. “I believe even that it is one of the biggest engines of it.” MarketWorld elites spun an intellectual cocoon for themselves, and kept repeating the stories that insured against deep change. Meanwhile, Giussani said, millions around the world were “feeling that a big chunk of their reality was being ignored at best, censored, or ridiculed even.”

  Eventually, they would do something about it.

  CHAPTER 5

  ARSONISTS MAKE THE BEST FIREFIGHTERS

  No one knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.

  —DONALD J. TRUMP

  The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

  —AUDRE LORDE

  As the win-win approach to social change spread around the world, George Soros had been something of a holdout. With a net worth in the double-digit billions, Soros was one of the richest men on earth. He was also one of the most generous and influential, having set up a philanthropic empire that planned to give away $931 million in 2016. Until lately, his giving had been guided by assumptions that somewhat clashed with those of MarketWorld. Soros, who in his youth in Hungary had lived as a Jew under Nazism and a would-be capitalist under communism, was more interested than many rich people in justice and movements, rights and good government. His Open Society Foundations described their mission as being “to build vibrant and tolerant societies whose governments are accountable and open to criticism, whose laws and policies are open to debate and correction, and whose political institutions are open to the participation of all people.” In 2016 the foundations were planning to give $142 million for human rights and democratic practice, $21 million for journalism, and $42 million for justice reform and the rule of law. Soros was giving much of his money to the kinds of non-market-oriented causes that don’t necessarily benefit winners.

  But as the win-win gospel conquered ever more territory, it had come to be believed in many quarters that the best way to help people was through the marketplace; there were new demands for new kinds of change. In the course of their work, Soros’s team reported encountering a young Roma woman in Europe whose attitude was emblematic of a shift in the culture. She told them that the older generation of Roma in Europe wanted rights, but the rising generation wanted to be social entrepreneurs. The woman’s either/or schema was dubious, for social enterprises might well be said to depend on underlying rights, but it bespoke the era. In a time of market supremacy, an organization that fought for people’s rights and equality under the law was in danger of disappointing them by failing to invest in their for-profit social justice businesses.

  The foundations’ Economic Advancement Program was born in 2016 as an answer to this hunger of the age. Embracing win-win language, the foundations said the program would “work at the nexus of economic development and social justice,” and “encourage economic transformation that increases material opportunity in ways that promote open and prosperous societies.” Soros’s foundations had largely avoided this kind of work in the past, out of concern that it might be viewed as a conflict of interest—a man still active in the markets advocating to countries how their markets should be arranged and regulated. But avoidance was no longer an option. The new program could make traditional philanthropic grants, fund research into what fosters more just and inclusive economies, lend money to other organizations, and advise governments on policy; moreover, in the ultimate win-win, the program would administer an impact investment fund whose task was to make investments in for-profit companies that promote more open societies and “advance the interests of underserved populations.”

  A new approach to changing the world required a new leader, and so the foundations had hired Sean Hinton, late of McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and the mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, as the program’s chief executive. Hinton and his team had spent months coming up with a working theory of what makes for more inclusive and just economies, a theory that would guide their work. Now they needed feedback on it. They wanted people from outside the foundations to help them debate important underlying questions such as: How could they foster fast-growing economies that also promoted justice, governance, empowerment, social cohesion, and equality? How could traditional tools of economic progress be changed to help rather than harm the most vulnerable and marginalized people?

  Thus one day, in a conference room above West 57th Street in Manhattan, Hinton convened a group of people he respected in his personal network. There was Ruth, a senior adviser to a private equity firm that focused on financial industry investments. She had also put in time at Bridgewater, the massive hedge fund, and other such financial institutions, and had done a two-year stint as chief investment adviser to a large American city. There was Paul, who also worked in private equity, in addition to lecturing at an Ivy League management school. He was a former investment banker and management consultant. There was Aurelien, who led a boutique advisory firm that counseled corporations on strategy amid turbulent market conditions, was a venture partner in several Silicon Valley start-ups, and had earlier been a McKinsey partner. There was Albert, the head of brand and communications for Rio Tinto. There were a pair of World Bank/International Finance Corporation types who had professional knowledge of the topics at hand: One of them, Charlise, had stuck with such work; the other, Juan Pablo, had subsequently put in time with Cisco and the Boston Consulting Group. And there was Hinton, who until assuming this position had been an adviser to mining corporations, banks, and other businesses in China, Mongolia, and Africa.

  As the experts sank into red chairs around the leather-covered table, they turned their attentio
n to the three wall-mounted television screens, from which beamed a tool that has proven essential to MarketWorld’s conquest of social problem-solving: Microsoft PowerPoint. The questions of justice and equality before these visitors were among the hardest known to mankind, with the arguments over them responsible for tens of millions of deaths in the twentieth century alone. But the discussion would not be built around philosophical insights, or the express desires of the people to be helped, or an analysis of the power structures that inhibited the pursuit of justice and equality. Rather, the issues, having been put to a group of MarketWorld types, would be presented in the business way, in the form of slides with graphs and charts. The question of building more inclusive economies would be atomized into endless subcategories, until the human reality all but vanished. The fundamental problems would grow almost unrecognizable. Justice and inequality would be converted into problems the private equity executive was preeminently qualified to solve.

  This became especially apparent when, from time to time, as is common in meetings like this, the discussion became about the presentation itself. So complicated and attention-sucking are the waterfall charts, two-by-two matrices, and sub-subcategories that it all becomes about them. Move it to that slide. Can we go back to the previous slide? What is the direction of history in this chart? It is like when a couple’s fight ceases to be about the issue and becomes about the conduct of the fight itself, which can be a refuge from the underlying problem. Did the chart imply that economic advancement occupied a moderate position in between those pairs of polarities, or was it really the integration of all four things? The room begins to have a proxy discussion about graphic design elements that stand in only the vaguest ways for human challenges. And the private equity executive lights up, because now she can not only contribute but also lead. And the actual experts in the topic and those affected by these decisions often recede, tongue-tied. The problem has been reformatted for the operating system of MarketWorld.

  These business-trained problem-solvers, having recast the problem to be specially solvable by them, having sidelined those with more established ways of thinking about it, now stand before a blank canvas that they can paint with their own frameworks and biases. Thus in the Soros meeting, when the talk turned to farm supply chains in a remote region of India, the lingua franca was business language. It was said that there were too many intermediaries in the supply chain: too many traders and brokers and such between the Indian farmer and the Indian dinner plate. The corporate answer was to “disintermediate.” What did not appear to cross anyone’s mind on West 57th Street was the possibility of being wrong about rural India. What if the intermediaries in that area tended to be women, making the job inefficient but also a beachhead of social progress? What if the intermediaries ensured that fresh produce ended up in villages and hamlets along the route to the cities, whereas large trucks would bypass them and increase their reliance on processed food? What if there were other human facts that the Goldman–McKinsey–Rio Tinto–Bridgewater alumni in this room couldn’t see? What if these winners didn’t know everything? What if those outsiders who weren’t in the room knew a thing or two?

  * * *

  —

  Over the course of a generation, many people and institutions around the world decided that to make a dent in the problems of the poor and excluded, one needed the advice of the kinds of businesspeople that Hinton had pulled together. The best guides to change, the reasoning went, were those who designed and participated in and upheld the very power structures that need changing. But that view of the usefulness of the master’s tools in dismantling his house, to borrow the words of Audre Lorde, had not always reigned.

  Long before Hinton learned the protocols of business, he had been on a very different path, as a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. He had grown up in an artistic family and in the theater, and he was studying classical music and conducting. Somehow, in his fourth year, he came up with the idea of going to Mongolia. He says the only way he could figure to get into that closed country in the late 1980s was to study ethnomusicology there. So he signed up to do graduate work in the subject at Cambridge, and applied for and won a British Council scholarship to move to Mongolia and study its traditional music. It was meant to be a one-year stint. He would stay, with some breaks, for much of the next seven years.

  Hinton moved to Ulaanbaatar in December 1988. Initially, he was forced to live under the tight strictures of the country’s authoritarian government. He wasn’t allowed to stray more than twenty kilometers out of the capital without minders, which made him a musicologist of limited efficacy. But soon a democracy movement erupted, and before long, seven decades of communist rule ended. The revolution freed Hinton to roam the country. He moved to the farthest western reaches of Mongolia and lived with a nomadic family in the mountains. He focused his research on the love songs and marriage rituals of the western Mongolian tribes.

  He liked the country enough to stay after his studies, and the revolution permitted that, too. The burgeoning market economy made it possible to start a business. Tourists were interested in the newly opened country, so Hinton decided to start a travel company to help people have the kinds of Mongolian experiences he had had. There weren’t many foreign-owned businesses at the time, and so, Hinton says, he became a go-to expert on the topic. When American embassy officials in Ulaanbaatar received queries about starting a local company, they would sometimes direct them to Hinton. He soon realized he could charge money for this advice-giving and did. He had become a consultant of a particular kind, working not with spreadsheets and PowerPoint, but rather helping people navigate a society in flux.

  Seven years after arriving in Mongolia, married, and with his thirtieth birthday nearing, he left Mongolia and went job hunting. “Everybody wanted to take me out for a beer and hear my story about living with the nomads,” he says. “But everyone was like, ‘Obviously, we can’t give you a job.’ ” The Sydney office of McKinsey was the exception. This was not entirely accidental. Hinton’s mixture of intelligence and impressionability made him an ideal McKinsey hire.

  Perhaps the most dizzying aspect of the new job was learning an almost opposite way of relating to alien environments. Hinton’s task at McKinsey shared a basic commonality with his work in Mongolia: He was to show up as an outsider and try to make good. But the experiences diverged starkly from there.

  In Mongolia, Hinton’s approach was to learn from the people he was studying by hanging back, observing, realizing all he didn’t know. Success required letting other people lead him, as he remembers it: “The tools that I was used to bringing were largely to do with perceiving and sensing; they were largely to do with intuition; they were largely to do with creativity and looking for connections; and they were very much to do with people.” For years on end, Hinton had had the experience of resisting easy assumptions, avoiding certitude, hunting for cues, letting others lead. “You turn up in a tent in Mongolia,” he said, “and just the whole thing of where you sit, where you put your legs, when you give the gift that you’ve brought with you—I just became so attuned to all of those things. The body language—am I doing it right? What are other people doing? You become just absolutely, completely attuned to reading those signals from people around you.” This approach to an alien environment was what he called humility. “If you think about the skills of living in a tent, in a foreign culture, in a foreign language, in a certainly foreign environment, you don’t have a choice but to get taught humility every day,” he said. “You’re surviving on that, and your very survival is based on recognizing that you don’t know, and being absolutely open to everything—being absorptive of every influence around you and listening.”

  At McKinsey, he realized, he was expected to operate very differently. “Some months later,” he said, “I’m sitting next to the chief executive of a very significant business in Australia, and I’m expected to have a point
of view and an opinion—a Day One hypothesis about this problem that we’re talking about.” Instead of listening, absorbing, trying to decipher slowly and respectfully the dynamics of the space one had entered, the high-flying, high-priced consultant was expected to jump in and know things. And even a consultant like Hinton, trained in music and expert in western Mongolian love songs, could be expected to do this, because of the protocols that McKinsey taught its consultants. They offered a powerful way of stepping into a world you didn’t know and reconstituting its reality so that the solution became more obvious to you than it was to the client’s native executives. The protocols allowed for a strange kind of earned presumptuousness. Equipped with a special way of chopping up problems, parsing data, and arriving at answers, the consultant constructed authority. His job was, as Hinton put it, “the bringing to bear and the championing of the religion of facts—incontrovertible, scientific, unemotional, unencumbered-by-people facts.”

  The protocols that allowed for this certitude were, as Latin once was, a mother language that had birthed many vernaculars. These vernaculars shared a common purpose: Having arisen not so much within industry as among the insider-outsiders of the business world—consultants, financiers, management scholars—they offered a way to get smart on other people’s situations. The banker trying to come up with the initial share price of a soon-to-be-listed chemical company wasn’t necessarily an expert in fertilizer. The hired-gun corporate strategist for a pharmaceutical company wasn’t necessarily an expert on drug delivery vehicles. The protocols—some specific to domains like finance or consulting, some more cross-cutting—allowed such figures to sweep in and break down a problem in a way that surfaced new realities, produced insight, sidelined other solvers, and made themselves essential.