This makes him sound like Darren Walker, one of the examples of the do-gooders-by-doing-well he gives in his analysis. It is a letter, written with love and concern, to people whom I see yielding to a new Faith, many of whom I know to be decent.” He states the purpose of his book is: “among other things, a debate with my friends. He has no problems criticizing Bill Clinton later in the book for not understanding people’s lack of trust with elites, yet how does he expect to gain that trust himself from readers by not owning his own privilege from the onset? He says the reason is because he didn’t want to make the book about him, but at the same time he states, “The best way to know about a problem is to be a part of it.” I think the premise of the work would have been infinitely more powerful had he started by being transparent with his “insider-out” perspective. For someone who is so critical of elites hiding in their hobbit holes, he waits until the acknowledgments section at the end to let you know that he is one of them.

A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.īefore you read this book, read the author’s bio. Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity. We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor how they lavishly reward 'thought leaders' who redefine 'change' in winner-friendly ways and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. An insider's groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to 'change the world' preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve.įormer New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can-except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it.

Winners take all the elite charade