Clinton said he had made 649 speeches for money, by his last count, and paid nearly half of the income in taxes, and donated some of it to charity, and helped aging friends and relatives with medical bills. (He pointed out that you don’t owe any gift tax if you pay the health care provider directly.) “If somebody wants to think I was corrupted by that, I largely took money from rich people and gave it to poor people,” he said. “And, unlike Robin Hood, I didn’t have to hold an arrow on ’em.”
Was there really no validity to the anger?
“Keep in mind, we are living in a period of extreme resentment,” Clinton said. He argued that part of that feeling was over the financial crisis: “The public’s anger over what happened to them was insufficiently sated by the number of rich people that went broke and by the number of people who went to prison.” Part of the feeling was over the dislocations of globalization, technology, and other changes. In other words, he didn’t think there was anything wrong with what he and others had done. He just thought that people were bitter and seeking scapegoats because their own lives had been hard. “These people,” as his Lazard panelist had called them, were, after all, being “led down a path of the politics of fear,” as Sadiq Khan had put it; and as Clinton himself had said, a lot of the angry people these days “had no idea what they were doing” and were succumbing to a “visceral us-and-them mentality.”
Clinton knew, however, that the bitterness toward the globalists threatened their One World dream. One possible response was to be educated by such widespread bitterness and rewrite the dream—to reverse the long-standing habit that Dani Rodrik described of “putting democracy to work for the global economy, instead of the other way around.” This was not Clinton’s favored approach. The One World dream was nonnegotiable for globalists. The challenge, Clinton said, was to figure out how “to take care of America first, but don’t run away from the rest of the world.” It could be, he was sure, a win-win. The anger had not deterred his modus operandi.
Clinton had been one of the great shapers of an age defined by globalization and rapid change and market hegemony, and he was also a product of that age. He had long believed in the pursuit of reform, and he was also a pragmatist who was said, by friends and critics alike, to know which way the wind was blowing. And over the course of his political career, the wind had blown in an ever more market-friendly way. In 1964, the year he graduated from high school, 77 percent of Americans reported a high degree of trust in government, according to the Pew Research Center; that number had since fallen into the teens. Clinton, believing in the power of politics to improve lives, having shown the possibilities of politics with his own life, had accepted the shift. He had accepted that businesses must make their returns, and that children must at times have their interests balanced against the imperative of those returns. He had in his post-presidency done more real good and saved more lives than perhaps any of his predecessors; and at the same time he had accepted certain limitations on how good is done nowadays. MarketWorld had so triumphed that even a man who once led the most powerful machinery of state in the history of civilization could now say of private, plutocratic social change, “This is all that does work in the modern world.”
For people to question this view is not to deny the good it is capable of doing, any more than to question monarchy is to say that kings always botch up the economy. It is to say that it does not matter what kind of a job the king is doing. It is to say that even the best he can do is not good enough, because of how it is done: the insulation, the chancing of everything on the king’s continued beneficence, the capacity of royal mistakes to alter lives they should not be touching. Similarly, to question the doing-well-by-doing-good globalists is not to doubt their intentions or results. Rather, it is to say that even when all those things are factored in, something is not quite right in believing they are the ones best positioned to effect meaningful change. To question their supremacy is very simply to doubt the proposition that what is best for the world just so happens to be what the rich and powerful think it is. It is to say you don’t want to confine your imagination of how the world might be to what can be done with their support. It is to say that a world marked more and more by private greed and the private provision of public goods is a world that doesn’t trust the people, in their collective capacity, to imagine another kind of society into being.
Through it all, Clinton saw truths in the anger bubbling up around him. He saw how MarketWorld-style change crowded out the habit of democracy. He genuinely worried about young people seeing social problems and, unlike in his activist-prone generation, confining their questioning to what socially minded business they could start up. He accepted that the comfortable had oversold their definition of progress in our globalizing, digitizing age. He had regrets that the winners from change had not invested enough in the losers.
Clinton could see and admit all these things. But he would not 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. Someone will have to.
EPILOGUE
“OTHER PEOPLE ARE NOT YOUR CHILDREN”
Two months after Clinton’s CGI swan song and just three weeks after the victory of Donald Trump, in an august apartment tower twenty-six blocks north of the president-elect’s Fifth Avenue penthouse, a gathering of people who loathed him were toasting the holidays over cocktails and Peking duck rolls. A woman whom we will call Nicola hovered in the living room, surrounded by elegant dresses and crisp suits, prominent editors and chief executives and even the television doctor Mehmet Oz. Nicola was depressed. Everyone at the party seemed depressed. Everyone was wondering what they could do.
Nicola sensed a great, dangerous turning in the world against everything her life had stood for. She was Mexican, and the new American president wanted to build a wall to keep her compatriots out of the United States. Her past work as a journalist made her an “enemy of the people” in the view of the new administration. She was a proud globalist: She had been a foreign correspondent; she had studied in London back when it was unthinkable that Britain would vote to secede from the European Union; she had spent years working for one of the major MarketWorld conferences; and now she worked for an international organization that the president-elect regularly deplored. Nicola was anguished by the spreading politics of anger. She and many other people at the party wanted to do something about it. Nicola said that globalization and trade and openness and “everything we all believe in”—she gestured at the MarketWorlders circling the buffet—must be explained to those mobs. Nicola said she could start a new initiative, which could be housed at the World Economic Forum, the organization behind the annual plutocratic reunion in Davos. In this thinking she was not alone. All across MarketWorld in that winter of revulsion, people were plotting solutions to the revolt against them that doubled down on the approaches that had gotten us here.
If anyone truly believes that the same ski-town conferences and fellowship programs, the same politicians and policies, the same entrepreneurs and social businesses, the same campaign donors, the same thought leaders, the same consulting firms and protocols, the same philanthropists and reformed Goldman Sachs executives, the same win-wins and doing-well-by-doing-good initiatives and private solutions to public problems that had promised grandly, if superficially, to change the world—if anyone thinks that the MarketWorld complex of people and institutions and ideas that failed to prevent this mess even as it harped on making a difference, and whose neglect fueled populism’s flames, is also the solution, wake them up by tapping them, gently, with this book. For the inescapable answer to the overwhelming question—Where do we go from here?—is: somewhere other than where we have been going, led by people other than the people who have been leading us.
* * *
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Late at night, An
drew Kassoy sits in the living room of his Brooklyn town house, thinking about the limits of his widely admired approach to changing the world. Is there another way? he wonders. And would another way have room for him?
Kassoy is a poster child for the MarketWorld method of social change. He is one of many people in our age who graduated from a long and successful career in business to a career in seeking to make the world more just and equal—and doing so using the tools and mentalities of his former life. He had spent sixteen years in what he calls “totally mainstream private equity”—DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners, Credit Suisse First Boston, and MSD Capital, where he helped the technology magnate Michael Dell invest his multibillion-dollar personal fortune. It was the kind of career people dreamed of, though Kassoy thought of it as a strange happenstance. “I came from a super-liberal, social justice, academic-oriented family and sort of accidentally ended up on this career,” he said. He had been ensnared, perhaps, by a dominant story of his age.
In 2001, he was chosen for the Henry Crown Fellowship of the Aspen Institute. The fellowship is a prestigious finishing school to assist the transition from making it in business to making the world a better place. Its mission is to mobilize a “new breed of leaders” to “tackle the world’s most intractable problems.” But it defines leader in a particular way: “All are proven entrepreneurs, mostly from the world of business, who have reached a point in their lives where, having achieved success, they are ready to apply their creative talents to building a better society.” Fellows meet for four one-week sessions over two years. They read and discuss important texts, debate what makes for a “good society,” and develop side projects to do good in ways that generally avoid denting their opportunities to do well. Kassoy attended his first fellowship meeting in Aspen that summer, and the readings and discussions cracked him open. The experience awakened him to his latent discontent with private equity. “It was quite an intense experience because it caused me to say, ‘I’ve been at this for ten, eleven years. It’s time to pick up my head and actually think about what my life is actually about,’ ” he said. “And then I came back, and 9/11 happened.”
Among former financiers, stories like this are not unusual: It can take some force majeure (cancer, divorce, death), and sometimes more than one of them, to be jolted out of a comfortable life. Yet, as Kassoy learned, even that jolt may not be enough. He began to think about what else he could do. “Frankly,” he said, “I lacked the courage to go do something about anything that I was actually interested in.”
The word “courage” suggested that Kassoy’s initial thinking about what he might do involved trading in his privilege for another kind of life. He assumed that any doing of good, to be genuine, would have to come at a cost to doing well—perhaps a legacy of his family’s politics. In other words, his early instincts defied the messages of MarketWorld—above all, that he could have his cake and give his cake back, too. That assumption came to chill him. “I pretty much ended up putting my head back down,” he said. Private equity would remain his meal ticket, and he would help others, at no risk, on the side. He came upon an organization called Echoing Green, which gave seed money to social entrepreneurs. “I ended up on the board because they were looking for people with money to be donors,” he said.
After his other flirtations, Kassoy found himself in familiar territory. Echoing Green was built by another private equity firm, General Atlantic. That firm’s leadership, according to Echoing Green’s website, “predicted that the venture capital investment model they employed so effectively at General Atlantic could also be utilized to drive social change.” The revolution would be leveraged; perhaps the master’s tools could dismantle the master’s house, after all. General Atlantic birthed Echoing Green in 1987, “naming it after a William Blake poem about creating a better world.”
Kassoy began to moonlight as an adviser to Echoing Green fellows, who tended to be social entrepreneurs seeking to scale their ideas. He began to notice a common problem afflicting them. Some people start businesses to make a big profit. But others, of the bent of mind that Echoing Green sought out, “were creating a for-profit business because they recognized it was a better way to scale a solution to a problem that they were interested in.” He gave the example of his advisee Sara Horowitz, who founded the Freelancers Union, which represents independent workers such as Uber drivers and magazine writers. She originally wanted to serve as a broker to help these workers buy health insurance as a group. Then she realized it would be easier and more effective if she simply created the health insurance company herself. But the economy wasn’t set up for people like Horowitz. A company not run purely in shareholders’ interests risked lawsuits from its investors. The dominant interpretation of corporate law, as we’ve seen, has since the 1970s come to regard companies’ first duty as being to earn a profit for shareholders. A company that put social goals ahead of business ones had no clear place in this regime.
Thus Kassoy came to be interested, as he put it, in “how you build the market infrastructure for people to be able to do business in a different way.” This interest began to occupy more and more of his time, at Michael Dell’s expense. “I started to realize I was pretty much spending half my day, every day, sitting in my office meeting with these people and not really doing my day job, which didn’t seem like a very good thing for me or for my employer or my partner,” he said. Kassoy had gone from the “head down” pursuit of private equity success, to an awareness of his duties to others, to the discovery of safe, Wall Street–backed ways of fighting for social change—and now he was ready to do MarketWorld-style change full-time.
He had remained close to a pair of friends from his days as a Stanford undergraduate, Jay Coen Gilbert and Bart Houlahan, who were wrestling with the same problem. They had built a footwear company, in which Kassoy had invested, and were selling it after several years. The company had distinguished itself with socially responsible production methods. Now, though, the venture capitalists who had backed the company wanted their payout, and that risked destroying the responsible practices. “Time to sell,” the investors effectively said, according to Kassoy. “Seven years is up, and you’re going to sell to the highest bidder.” The problem, he said, was that the buyer “who was willing to pay the most for the business was the person who saw the most opportunity to get rid of all of those things”—the responsible practices—“in order to make more money.”
The trio batted around ideas for addressing this problem, and at last alighted on the vision of creating a parallel capitalist infrastructure, next to the traditional one, in which companies could be more responsible and conscious, and nonetheless raise money from capital markets and comply with the law. Thus was born the B Corporation, or benefit corporation, as it is also known. The three men started a nonprofit called B Lab, which gives better-behaved businesses a certification based on a rigorous analysis of their social and environmental practices. Kickstarter, King Arthur Flour, Ben & Jerry’s, and the Brazilian cosmetics company Natura are all B corps.
Kassoy and his cofounders wanted to make the world a better place, and they found a way of doing so in line with MarketWorld values. They made it easier for companies that were willing to do good, while all but ignoring the companies that wanted to do harm. “The basic theory was ‘make good easy,’ ” Kassoy said. “Make it easy to identify what’s a good business, codify that with a brand that people will understand, and then get the leaders to adopt that brand and speak loudly about their values. And, somehow or other, in doing that we will create a new sector of the economy. And, eventually, everybody else will see that that’s a really successful sector of the economy and do the same thing.”
Kassoy and his colleagues hoped that by certifying conscious companies, they could change the larger system of business. “I do think that we thought, and still do, that this is a systems-change model,” he said. But in the MarketWorld way, they didn’t take on the sy
stem directly. They simply sought to cultivate examples of a different way. Part of why they didn’t do that systemic work, he said, was that they “had no real sense of how to get from here to there. And I think, in particular, all three of us, coming from the private sector, didn’t have a great sense of, like, what really public policy is.” He said the trio “had some vague notion that you prove something out and eventually government adopts it, was kind of the general idea.”
In ten years, they had converted hundreds of companies to B Corps. But now, sitting in his living room, Kassoy said that B Lab was in the midst of a rethinking process, which was guided by his conviction that “what got us here is not going to get us where we’re going.” And where was it, exactly, they wanted to go? Toward that system change they had neglected. Kassoy said they knew they had done a better job of proving a model than changing how business itself works, and they wanted to switch gears.
This moment of rethinking was stirring up many questions, such as whether there should be a kind of “B Corps lite,” a scoring system for companies that do not qualify as proper B Corps but would like a transparent rating of their practices. The thorniest questions, and the ones that seemed to anguish Kassoy, involved whether to stick to the MarketWorld mantra of “make good easier,” or whether instead to seek to make those who commit harm pay a higher price—which meant changing the system of business for everyone, fighting in the arena of politics and law rather than the market, and elevating the stopping of bad business over the encouragement of good business. Kassoy was wrestling with whether to cling to the assumptions and dreams of MarketWorld and its win-win theory of change, or whether to pursue another genre of change that seemed to feel truer, if more elusive, to him.
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World Page 28
