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FORTUNE.COM // SEPTEMBER 2019
creating the Office of Social Innovation and
Civic Participation. The founding charter says
that top-down programs from Washington
don’t work anymore. Really? Barack Obama
only could vote because of a top-down program
from Washington”—the Voting Rights Act of
1965—“that worked pretty well.”
Why pick on rich people and companies that
sincerely are trying to help? When “the modest
act of do-gooding abets harm-doing on a much
bigger scale, the net effect of the do-gooding
may be negative,” he retorts. An example he
cites is the attention paid to Mark Zucker-
berg’s philanthropy even as journalists were
slow to catch on to Facebook’s data- privacy
misdeeds. “If you took away all of the coverage
that resulted from that moral do-gooding,” he
says, “I think the guy would have been busted
by journalists and regulators, like, eight years
ago.” Goldman Sachs, guilty according to
Giridharadas of helping cause the Great Reces-
sion, runs an initiative called 10,000 Women
to help women entrepreneurs. “If they really
loved women that much, they would have
not done what they did in the financial crisis,
which hurt way more than 10,000 women,” he
says. Philanthropy can “douse public anger,” he
argues, which in turn “prevents public action
that would really make lives better.”
Some plutocrats get off easier than others.
Giridharadas has kind words, for instance, for
Bill Gates, notably the work his foundation has
done in Africa, where some governments don’t
have the capacity to solve intractable problems.
But all the same, Giridharadas questions the
power that wealth confers on Gates and his ilk,
particularly in the U.S.: “I really don’t think the
Founders envisioned you setting public policy
agendas at the level that someone like Gates
does. That was one of the objections that a
hundred years ago used to be much more com-
mon, which is, ‘Who are these people to make
decisions about public life?’ ”
The century-old objections he is referring to
gave rise to the Progressive movement, a direct
reaction to the political power amassed by the
Dead White Men on the walls of the Big 4’s bar.
The critic clearly yearns for a similar develop-
ment, a time of muscular governing to help the
needy and to rein in the powerful. For now, the
portraits of those plutocrats—and the position
of their successors—remain firmly in place.if those arguments aren’t changing the practices
of those insiders’ employers.
He’s got no issue per se with well-heeled
do-gooders trying to change the world. His
beef is with how rich and influential people
and corporations bestow their gifts and the
implications for governmental organizations
that could otherwise have far greater impact.
Elites, he says, are happy to help so long as
the results are a “win-win” —provided that the
benefactors themselves don’t suffer, whether
from higher taxes or from policies that would
restrain rapacious behavior. But Giridhara-
das argues that the only way to solve society’s
biggest problems is for “some people to do
worse”—a solution for which the privileged
have little or no appetite.
Few escape Giridharadas’s ire. Former
President Bill Clinton gets most of a chapter in
Winners Take All for his now defunct Clinton
Global Initiative conference, which offered
a platform for the powerful to promote pet
philanthropic projects, regardless of their past
misdeeds or the merits of their proposals. Pious
tech leaders particularly bother Giridhara-
das—precisely because they wield power under
the flag of idealism. Each has a self-serving
narrative, he argues: “Uber just wants to create
micro-entrepreneurship in America. Google
just wants to organize all the world’s informa-
tion. Facebook just wants to build a universal
community of mankind. And I really think
they believe it ... Our society is way more de-
fenseless against the idealists than the realists.
We don’t regulate the idealists well, because to
some degree we are sucked in by their story.”
Research for his book predated the rise of
left-wing Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, with whom he clearly sympathizes.
And Giridharadas doesn’t much dwell on
Donald Trump, with whom he clearly doesn’t.
If anything, he’s fed up with both U.S. politi-
cal parties. He blames Republicans for having
denigrated government for decades, though
he gives them points for transparency. “It has
been one of the most successful intellectual
campaigns in the history of the world,” he says.
“It spread globally as a kind of theory in which
government is bad and entrepreneurs are
the only good thing.” But he reserves special
scorn for Democrats who have bought into
anti-government orthodoxy: “You have Obama
A GAP
CHARITY
CAN’T
FILL
187%
Increase in
U.S. philan-
thropic
giving,
1979–2017
Includes
corporate giving
and individual
philanthropy.
[SOURCE: GIVING
USA]22%
Increase in
the average
earnings of
the bottom
90% of U.S.
earners over
that span343%
Increase in
the earnings
of the top
1%
In 2017 dollars.
[SOURCE: ECONOMIC
POLICY INSTITUTE]