Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

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 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

It helped people to see that things that happened in the quiet of personal life, and yet happened over and over again at the scale of the system, and happened because of forces that no individual was powerful enough to counteract alone—that these things had to be seen as and acted on politically, grandly, holistically, and, above all, in the places

And while this is highly questionable as social theory, it is a shrewd posture, because if the problem is a lack of linkages, those who are good at making these kinds of linkages are elevated as solvers. Those who propose to solve problems in other ways—especially by looking at power and resources and other things unsettling to winners—are sideline

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.

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 bearers of these protocols were, ironically, rushing in to shape the solution of problems that their methods were complicit in causing. Corporate types from the energy and financial industries were drafted into charitable projects to protect the world from climate change, even if their way of thinking about profit, as practiced in their day job

The only thing better than controlling money and power is to control the efforts to question the distribution of money and power.

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