Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

It was no longer rich versus poor but rather people who claimed to belong to everywhere versus people stuck somewhere—echoing

When a society solves a problem politically and systemically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen. It is saying what it believes through what it does. Cordelli argues that this right to speak for others is simply illegitimate when exercised by a powerful private citizen.

This is the compromise, the truce, distilled: Leave us alone in the competitive marketplace, and we will tend to you after the winnings are won. The money will be spent more wisely on you than it would be by you. You will have your chance to enjoy our wealth, in the way we think you should enjoy it. Here lay the almost constitutional principles tha

choices the society has made about how to treat them. This, in Walker’s view, made it important to go beyond Carnegie’s idea of temporary inequality as the price of progress. Wealthy individuals needed to ask themselves, “Is the playing field on which I accumulated my wealth level and fair? Does the system privilege people like me in ways that comp

The businessperson tended to see work in utilitarian terms, as something people do to feed themselves and acquire things. But there is a spiritual dimension, too: “That work might be the expression of the inner desire to be productive and to be of service to one’s community—and that the idea of denying someone the opportunity to fulfill that is lik

The nuance and inherent humility of the social sciences—the realization that development has to do with people, with human and social complexity, with cultural and traditional realities, and their willingness to struggle with the messy and multifaceted aspects of a problem—have no cachet in this metrics-driven, efficiency-seeking, technology-focuse

The phenomenon Drezner details matters far beyond the world of thinkers, because on issue after issue, the ascendant thought leaders, if they are positive, unthreatening, mute about larger systems and structures, congenial to the rich, big into private problem-solving, devoted to win-wins—these thought leaders will edge out other voices, and not ju

an idea that gives hope while challenging nothing.

Porter spoke of how companies over the last generation had pursued a vision of globalization in which they owed nothing to any community. This was simply because those taught by professors like him at places like Harvard Business School, groomed by consulting and Wall Street and other training grounds, tended to be agnostic about place. You analyze