• Listen to the whole of Merryn’s interview with Anand Giridharadas on the MoneyWeek Podcast
When I spoke to Anand Giridharadas about his new book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World last month, it was Davos week. Neither of us were there. My absence went entirely unnoted. Not so Giridharadas’s. Had I noticed, he said, that both Bill Gates and Tony Blair had had a dig at him, “something that was sort of fun.” I bet it was: after all, get a rise out of the likes of Gates and Blair and you can be pretty sure you’ve touched a nerve or two. It also makes sense: Davos is the place where the people being criticised in Giridharadas’s book – very rich do-gooders – are most likely to gather; or as he puts it himself, “a family reunion for the plutocrats who broke the modern world.” These billionaires and CEOs “are the people who pushed a generation of insecurity on the advanced economies, who have benefited from the cataclysmic shifts of our age, who have benefited from globalisation and trade…”
Think, he says, about the great forces of change in our lifetime. There has been globalisation – this great “mingling of the world.” There has been the extraordinary rise of India and China and the rise of both women and people of colour in many countries. These things alone represent huge changes to people’s lives. But on top of that we have also had the tech revolution. It’s all great on paper but one effect is that those who have been on the right side of it all have become extreme winners. Many of those who have not, “have actually lost ground”. This losing of ground has not been a necessary part of the change – it is government policy that shapes how new forces actually play in people’s lives. Germany has, for example, been subject to most of the same forces as the US “but because of policies it has in place, people don’t die on the street because they don’t work enough hours to have healthcare, right? In the United States we haven’t made that choice”.
“Richsplaining” and the erosion of democracy
Why not? Giridharadas reckons it has a lot to do with the policies the winners have pushed for in taxation, labour law and education – policies that keep them winning. They talk “incessantly about changing the world but … the kind of change they want to talk about in places like Davos and the Aspen Ideas Festival is change that changes everything except their power and privilege”. They want to be seen to alleviate the effects of their power (and wealth) but in such a way that that power remains undiminished. Look at any issue, says Giridharadas, and you can easily see “what’s the real thing and what’s the fake thing”.
Take the empowerment of women. We know what really empowers them – “policies such as maternity leave”, for example. But these kinds of things “cost the winners a lot, cost men a lot… so, what do the plutocrats offer? ‘Lean In Circles’… a phoney empowerment kind of thing that does nothing to change structural power”. It’s the same with poverty. “These people love to talk about microcredit” but they certainly don’t want to help alleviate poverty by stopping using tax structures that “cost the world billions and billions” or even paying a wealth tax. The rich and powerful get a lot of attention. They “get to kind of richsplain change to the rest of the world”. But it’s change that works for them, not us: we’ve allowed ourselves to believe it’s OK to let the people who burned our structures down to be its firefighters.
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