Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

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

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

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

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

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

so-called great risk shift, through which corporate America has stabilized its own income statements over a generation by off-loading uncertainty onto workers; and the ways in which shareholders were running companies more and more for themselves, to the detriment of every other stakeholder.

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

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