That’s even true-maybe especially so-when hawking ideas for social change within MarketWorld. With one story after the other, Giridharadas suggests that the price of admission to today’s elite is that you keep your mouth shut about how fundamentally unjust American society really is. The book offers a revealing look at the moral compromises that come with life in the Acela Corridor and similar precincts. This is “fake change” to improve “the image of the winners” and prop up a rapacious status quo that benefits the upper class at the exclusion of everyone else. wealthy elites-whether in the form of philanthropy, social investing, or corporate responsibility-are basically a con job. In Giridharadas’s telling, the social change efforts of so-called “MarketWorlders” help keep things as they are by creating the illusion that today’s elites actually care about anyone other than themselves. Winners Take All paints a brutal portrait of well-paid elites who talk more than ever about improving society-while presiding over a system of predatory capitalism that shafts a majority of Americans. The real story-along with workings of the upper class itself-is much more complicated. It’s just silly to imply that all elite efforts to change the world are a “charade.” Full stop. The provocative subtitle of Winners Take All is a tip-off to the problems that lie inside. The books feels like a hit job in places, failing to wrestle with nuances that might weaken its polemical force.

It offers an incomplete look at America’s upper class and its role in social change. While the hypocrisies he exposes are familiar, nobody else has written about them with such scathing brilliance.īut Winners Take All is also a frustrating book. Giridharadas taps an insider’s access to skewer a wealth elite that exists in a self-congratulatory bubble. It’s about time that someone came along and wrote a takedown of the corporate-friendly world of milquetoast social change efforts.Īnand Giridharadas’s much talked about book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, aims to be that takedown, and at one level, it’s a very satisfying read.

Charade winner