Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World - Paperback

by Anand Giridharadas (Author)NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year | One of NPR's Best Books of the Year | One of the Financial Times "Books of the Year" | One of The Washington Post's "50 Notable Works of Nonfiction" | One of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Best International Nonfiction” Books | One of the GreenBiz “10 Best Climate and Business Books” of the Year | 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year The groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve. An essential read for understanding some of the egregious abuses of power that dominate today's news “In this trenchant and timely book, Anand Giridharadas shows how the winners of global capitalism seek to help the losers, but without disturbing the market-friendly arrangements that keep the winners on top. He gives us an incisive critique of corporate-sponsored charities that promote frictionless ‘win-win’ solutions to the world’s problems but disdain the hard, contentious work of democratic politics. An indispensable guide for those perplexed by the rising public anger toward ‘change-making’ elites.” - Michael J. Sandel, author of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets “Entertaining and gripping . . . For those at the helm, the philanthropic plutocrats and aspiring 'change agents' who believe they are helping but are actually making things worse, it’s time for a reckoning with their role in this spiraling dilemma. I suggest they might want to read a copy of this book while in the Hamptons this summer.” - Joseph E. Stiglitz, The New York Times Book Review “The past years have seen some outstanding books on how philanthropists and their dollars have shaped public policy . . . [Anand Giridharadas] zeros in on what he sees as a glaring hypocrisy among affluent elites: that while many well-meaning (and well-off) Americans claim to want to improve society's inequalities, they don't challenge the structures that preserve that inequality, not wanting to jeopardize their own privileged positions.” - Jessica Smith, NPR Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can--except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. They rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; they lavishly reward "thought leaders" who redefine "change" in ways that preserve the status quo; and they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? His groundbreaking investigation has already forced a great, sorely needed reckoning among the world's wealthiest and those they hover above, and it points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world--a call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike. Author Biography ANAND GIRIDHARADAS is the author of Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. He is an editor-at-large for TIME and was a foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times from 2005 to 2016. He has also written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and a former McKinsey analyst. He has spoken on the main stage of TED. Anand's writing has been honored by the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Poynter Fellowship at Yale, the 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year award, Harvard University's Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.