When I moved to Nairobi, Kenya in 2010 to research women’s microfinance programs, I noticed that a social entrepreneurship craze had gripped the city — or at least, the predominantly white American crowd that had flocked to it.
Bridge International Academies, a low-cost private school chain that has received over $140 million in investment and now educates 100,000 students across Africa, had just opened its first school in Nairobi; M-KOPA Solar, which provides energy on credit through mobile phone payments to over 600,000 homes, had just launched. The microfinance craze, beginning to taper in South Asia, was reaching a fever pitch in East Africa.
People were moving to the “Silicon Savannah” to accomplish the creed of social entrepreneurs everywhere: “do well by doing good.” Make the world a better place, while also turning a profit.
Party conversations included lending to alleviate poverty, selling fertilizer made from human poop, and making money by educating girls. Meanwhile, traditional aid and Kenyan government programs were usually spoken of with a sneer and an eye roll.
It wasn’t until I read “Winners Take All,” Anand Giridharadas’ book released this week, that I realized that what had so bothered me during my first years in Kenya was part of a bigger trend: a modern “reverence for entrepreneurs, and the private sector, and Silicon Valley,” buoyed by the belief that governments were groaning dinosaurs incapable of tackling the world’s biggest problems. Nairobi was an outcropping of a belief that sprung from Silicon Valley but had taken hold across the globe, what Giridharadas calls “the elite charade of changing the world.”
That’s the subtitle of the book, a funny and searing exploration of the ways in which “doing good” has been co-opted by the wealthy — the same people benefiting off of the unequal systems that create poverty in the first place. Rich people today — the Zuckerbergs and Gates and Buffets of the world — are giving away more money than ever before, but the world is also more unequal than it ever was. Believing the wealthy are in the best position to change a system they’re benefitting from, and often responsible for, is to Giridharadas as absurd as deciding that “arsonists are the best firefighters.”
He writes about a woman working for a tech start-up who peddles an app to help Silicon Valley’s poor manage their unstable incomes. Like most of his examples, the anecdote is expertly chosen and thick with irony. Tech start-ups are to blame, after all, for introducing a fickle and benefit-less gig economy and were the cause of rent prices and homelessness soaring in their own backyards. He writes about the Sackler family, who donate millions to museums and universities — millions made off OxyContin and a company whose exploitative marketing and predatory de-regulation fueled the opioid crisis.
“There is no denying that today’s elite may be among the most socially concerned elites in history,” Giridharadas writes. “But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory in history.”
In another chapter, he skewers Silicon Valley-style feminism, noting that we already know how to increase women’s participation in the workforce: paid maternity leave, paid family leave, and universal daycare, to name a few. Instead, companies “leaned in” to Sheryl Sandberg’s call for women to raise their hands more, a cheaper and decidedly less effective alternative.
We know how to increase gender equality and stem the tide of the opioid crisis, but it’s pricey. It requires companies to lower their bottom lines and for wealthy individuals and corporations to pay significantly more in taxes. Giridharadas is poetic and his turns of phrase memorable: it’s much easier for elites to give “symbolic scraps to the forsaken — many of whom wouldn’t need the scraps if the society were working right,” he says.
Giridharadas takes on elite “change-maker” conferences, like the Aspen Ideas Festival and Davos World Economic Forum. He was a 2015 Aspen Institute Fellow, during which he gave a talk that turned on the attendees, accusing them of perpetuating and benefitting from the problems they claimed to be solving. From his divisive talk sprung this book.
Giridharadas is a member, or at the very least an interloper, of the world he maligns; he mines his experiences in private jets and billionaire’s pools in interviews about the book, but sometimes fails to implicate himself.
And while it may be in deference to the grandiosity of the problem, the book could do with a few more concrete solutions for combating wealthy do-gooders gone wild. Are there companies that have sacrificed their bottom line to support tax reform? CEOs who have pledged to stop corporate lobbying against paid maternity leave? Pharmaceutical companies that have converted their profits into meaningful progress against the opioid crisis?
Still, the book gives critical language to a problem I long struggled to identify — and that, I worry, may have been identified too late. I went to a “change-maker” conference this summer, Devex World, and my discomfort at the zealous belief in the private sector’s unique ability to transform society for the better felt almost antiquated.
A representative from Cargill, a corporate sponsor, spoke about trade as a development tool — without mentioning that the company helped design (and profit off of) trade policies that contributed to the 2008 world food crisis. A Pfizer representative talked about the $3 million it donated for immunizations in Asia and Africa, but failed to mention the $25 million the pharma industry spent last year lobbying U.S. Congress on issues like drug pricing and generic drug approvals. Trump appointee Ray Washburne proudly declared that he “didn’t come in from the bureaucratic side or the academic side,” but from “the practical business side.”
Each speaker seemed more desperate than the next to prove that netting maximum profit and making the world a better place are not inherently opposed. All this while dancing around an obvious, albeit less glamorous, solution: building a world where rich people have less money because they pay higher taxes and where corporations are regulated to protect the vulnerable.
I knew it all made me uncomfortable, but it took Giridharadas’ book to realize how justified that discomfort was. I doubt I’m the only one.
