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FORTUNE.COM // SEPTEMBER 2019
lobbying to squelch tax hikes that would keep
those schools funded, that’s MarketWorld in
action. “I felt there was a phenomenon of the
people who benefited most from the last four
decades entrenching their monopoly on the
future,” he says, “by claiming to be leading the
charge to fix our biggest shared problems.”
His list of privileged culprits and their en-
ablers is long. These include for-hire “thought
leaders,” as distinguished from nobler critics;
philanthropists and “impact” investors who
prescribe fixes for their benighted beneficiaries
without asking how they’d like to be helped;
and the merry band of attendees of what he
calls the “TED, Davos, and Aspen conference
circuit” who reinforce one another’s rarefied
conceptions of goodness. Where others see
noblesse oblige, in other words, Giridharadas
spies disingenuous self-dealing.
Giridharadas knows his subject because he’s
a full-fledged member of the club. Indeed, the
37-year-old journalist is that most dangerous
form of critic, the insider who bites the hand
that feeds him. An Ohio native with a vertical
shock of salt-and-pepper hair, Giridharadas
checks all the boxes of the global elite. Educated
at Harvard and launched into the working
world as a consultant at McKinsey, he has given
two TED Talks, was a Henry Crown Fellow
at the Aspen Institute, and is now an editor-
at-large for Time magazine. He gives paid
speeches and attends swell parties, rubbing
shoulders with the one percent. He is prolific
on Twitter, naturally, and is quick with substan-
tive rants as well as pithy put-downs like “Plutes
be pluting.” His arguments resonate with other
idealistic insiders (some of whose crises of con-
science he recounts in Winners Take All), evenThe setting is ironic for a late-afternoon
cocktail with Anand Giridharadas, the self-
appointed scourge of well-meaning plutocrats
everywhere. The author of the biting 2018
book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of
Changing the World has suggested the bar
at the Big 4 Restaurant in San Francisco’s
Huntington Hotel, where he is staying. And
so we sip drinks amid the dark wood paneling
and white tablecloths of a redoubt that quietly
screams plutocracy. Oil-painted portraits
of two of the bar’s namesake 19th-century
railroad magnates, Leland Stanford and Mark
Hopkins, gaze down sternly at us as we discuss
what Giridharadas believes to be the pernicious
impact of the 21st century’s own robber barons.
The villains in Giridharadas’s tale live in a
land Fortune readers will recognize. He calls it
MarketWorld, a place where any problem can
be solved by market forces—including issues
involving public health or primary education,
which common sense suggests only govern-
ments or massive publicly funded institutions
can possibly tackle. Giridharadas thinks the
MarketWorld ethos enables those in charge
to convey a sense of sacrifice while comfort-
ably calling the shots, thereby preserving their
place at the top. When a big company donates
thousands of computers to public schools whileCHANGE
THE
WORLD
OUR SOCIETY
IS WAY MORE
DEFENSELESS
AGAINST THE
IDEALISTS THAN
THE REALISTS.
WE DON’T
REGULATE
THE IDEALISTS
WELL, BECAUSE
WE ARE
SUCKED IN BY
THEIR STORY.”
An Insider Takes Aim at‘The Elite Charade’
As a conference-circuit regular and former McKinsey consultant, writer Anand Giridharadas
has seen firsthand corporate America’s efforts to solve social problems. Here’s why he’s
come to see those efforts as more self-serving than world-changing. By Adam Lashinsky