Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Before you read this book, read the author’s bio. For someone who is so critical of elites hiding in their hobbit holes, he waits until the acknowledgments section at the end to let you know that he is one of them. I found this incredibly bizarre. He says the reason is because he didn’t want to make the book about him, but at the same time he states, “The best way to know about a problem is to be a part of it.” I think the premise of the work would have been infinitely more powerful had he started by being transparent with his “insider-out” perspective. He has no problems criticizing Bill Clinton later in the book for not understanding people’s lack of trust with elites, yet how does he expect to gain that trust himself from readers by not owning his own privilege from the onset?<br /><br />He states the purpose of his book is: “among other things, a debate with my friends. It is a letter, written with love and concern, to people whom I see yielding to a new Faith, many of whom I know to be decent.”<br /><br />This makes him sound like Darren Walker, one of the examples of the do-gooders-by-doing-well he gives in his analysis. Walker is an African American who managed to climb the social ladder and now collaborates with MarketWorld and its elites in an effort to create positive change. He does this by catering to their sensibilities, balancing his own ideals of social justice (which require acknowledgment of the elite’s complicity in the global problem of inequality) with the gentler language of opportunity and win-wins for all (which soothe the rich man’s conscience and his entrepreneurial interests).<br /><br />Giridharadas spends his book criticizing Darren Walker, Amy Cuddy, and others for trying to catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but then thought he would be more effective by writing them a book? He does this, knowing that that one of the elites he writes about, Simon Sinek, doesn’t even read but rather has other people read for him. (To be fair, Sinek has a learning disability - but still. Know your audience, dude). <br /><br />I really started to lose my patience when a quote from Audre Lorde got juxta-positioned next to a quote from Donald Trump at the beginning of chapter 5. That’s just blasphemy. The chapter is titled “Arsonists make the best firefighters” and focuses on Sean Hinton, a former adviser to Goldman Sachs and Rio Tinto who long ago studied love songs in Mongolia. Hinton seems to sense some of the cognitive dissonance between his participation in the system and his internal criticism of it. Ultimately though, he believes his values are personal and separate from the job he is hired to do. End chapter. So... arsonists don't make the best fire fighters? Therefore, you don't make the best fire fighter, Mr. Writer? <br /><br />Then I got to chapter 7 and was met with Bill/Hillary conflation and Bernie proselytizing and criticism of “globalists” – a term that I only hear used in creepy, far/alt right Nazi circles on the Internet to explain their conspiracy theories about people on the left. It’s not that there isn’t legitimate criticism in this chapter of the political left’s failing to advocate for government’s role and instead pandering to capitalist philanthropists and corporate sponsors. That’s totally valid. But the author spends almost 50 pages taking folks like Bill Clinton to town for his complicity. Meanwhile, George Bush gets called out once, maybe twice the whole book for dick things his administration did (like enabling the Sackler's Oxycotin-induced opium epidemic) and Donald Trump actually gets credit for understanding the anger the masses feel toward elites. <br /><br />What is the reasoning here? Try and get the rich people who aren't just flat-out malicious and evil to see how they are also problematic? Is this book like A Christmas Carol - meant to serve as the ghosts of Past, Present and Future for the Ebenezer Scrooges of the world to be persuaded by it? <br /><br />In addition to "who is this book for, exactly?" one of my other major complaints is how the elite becomes interchangeable with MarketWorld, a term encapsulating a blurry entity of rich people who mean well, but are too afraid to confront the real problem of inequality and their involvement in it. There's really no distinguishing between them other than they're all rich and they are okay people who care, at least to some extent. The political divide between them, left or right, isn't ever really explored and eventually becomes irrelevant. <br /><br />To me, THAT is a gross oversight. Because yes, George Soros and Bill Clinton may be misguided in their good intentions, but what about the Koch Bros? You compare the elite on the left vs the elite on the right: you have folks that at least feel a little bit guilty that there's inequality vs. folks who are beyond the comical caricature of Mr. Burns and totally okay with pouring their money into the new Nazi world order. Some winners are worse than others, okay? And some winners have more money than others. A lot of the big, BIG winners are old white dudes on the right sincerely invested in harming everyday people - not Oprah. That needs to be acknowledged. Giridharadas fails to do that. <br /><br />Honestly, when I picked up this book, I thought I would sail through it like a ship on a breezy day over a sea of populist rage. Instead, it was grueling, slogging read – one in which I learned way more about just how oblivious and ignorant the upper class really is than I ever wanted or needed to know. I also learned just how obstinately committed this same elite group is in refusing to acknowledge their complicity and/or using the power they have co-opted to make the changes necessary to redistribute wealth for the betterment of society. The more I read, the more hopeless I felt for the future.<br /><br />If this guy can’t convince his own buddies at McKinsey and the Aspen Institute to listen to him, then what is the point of his book? According to Giridharadas, “it is also a letter to the public, urging them to reclaim world-changing from those who have co-opted it.” Oh, so now it’s on everyone else again to fix things. Cool.<br /><br />To his credit, in the last chapter Giridharadas brings in Chiara Cordelli, a scholar in political science who has a solution: that "[MarketWorlders] return, against their instincts and even perhaps against their interests, to politics as the place we go to shape the world." Going back to politics means restoring the power of political institutions, such as laws, courts, taxes, rights, etc.<br /><br />The real question then is: How do we do that (restoring power to our political institutions, our democracy) when "the elite" have invested so much money into undermining those political institutions? Especially now that we are seriously on the brink of the collapse of western democracy? Is the damage too far done? <br /><br />Giridharadas is right that the wealthy need to stop looking at themselves as the saviors of the world and acknowledge their hand in the problem. But counting on everyday people to read his book and "re-claim world changing" is so vague and unhelpful. People are already doing that. Consider: the Women's March. Black Lives Matter. March for Our Lives. Families Belong Together. These weren't protests led by paid George Soros' lackeys. These were real, angry people in the American public rallying and crying out against horrible injustices. They were exercising their right to free speech and to assembly. They were grasping onto the last vestiges of democratic power they had as non-billionaires. <br /><br />It's Cordelli, the political scientist Giridharadas cites, who ultimately offers the most promising solution. She suggests that elites are going to have to be the ones to stop making "foundations" or "charities" to name after themselves and seriously re-invest their undeserved wealth into public institutions, climb down the social ladder, rejoin the ranks of the majority of people in society, so that the rest of us can start having a say for ourselves again. <br /><br />Giridharadas seems to agree with that (otherwise he wouldn't have saved her for last and quoted her so thoroughly), but that means his expose is really just a depressing, detailed depiction about how greedy and willfully ignorant rich people are. I already knew that, dude. Sometimes the best way to know about a problem isn't to be a part of it, but rather, to be a victim of it. Then the problem persists because the perpetrators aren't listening to the victims. So, I say to Giridharadas - since you're in the "club," sounds like you need to have some tougher conversations with your friends to get them to start listening... otherwise, the world is going to be facing uglier alternatives to the one Cordelli is proposing.

<b>What Trump and Idealists Have in Common</b><br /><br />‘Making a difference’ could be the idealistic theme of my generation’s collective ethos - at least among those of us who survived the drug-culture of the 60’s and 70’s with intact minds. It is my generation’s term for religious faith. The world had been opened to us by cheap access to good education, a long post-war economic boom, a range of radical new philosophies and more or less guaranteed employment. Belief - in oneself, in society, in the perfectability of life - was the route to success and fulfillment.<br /><br />We had choices. And the right people appeared to be demonstrating how to exercise power around the world - environmental improvement (Jane Goodall), human rights (Martin Luther King), the status of women (Betty Friedan), the Church (Pope John XXIII). This was concretely personal not abstractly intellectual inspiration. Anything was possible for individuals with the courage to put themselves on the line; or at least for those with the determination to get others to put themselves on the line they had laid out.<br /><br />So we had an obvious moral duty: to improve the world. Our parents worked at corporate jobs in order to earn a living. Not us. We had corporate careers in order to make the world a better place. Ours was an enlightened self-interest which took the old-fashioned idea of vocation seriously. Our lives had to mean something. By which we meant we had to dedicate ourselves to a cause, something beyond ourselves as the gurus of the time phrased it. And that we did with diverse passion - in business, politics, and academia.<br /><br />For example, we simply presumed we would always have enough to eat. The question was how to make sure others did as well. Hence the popularity of things like the Hunger Project (which seriously aimed to eliminate global food deprivation entirely within 20 years) and Monsanto’s GM research. The world remained corporate, but it was no longer exploiting us; now we were exploiting it for the betterment of humanity. And, by the way, we made good money at it. But we were ‘adding value’ not just being avaricious, self-justifying social drones.<br /><br />Such smug bastards have always existed but perhaps never before or after in such naive density which made our conceits part of the air we breathed. We could afford these conceits because we were buoyed up, sustained, and insured by a social and economic system that wanted us to act based precisely on the basis of this ideology of ‘making a difference.’ We were an elite - the beneficiaries of a system we neither understood nor created. But our conversations and associations were almost solely with other members of the elite who spoke the same language of ‘vision,’ and ‘commitment,’ and ‘human potential.’ ‘Making a difference’ became the late 20th century’s post-industrial version of the 19th century’s technological Progress, a sort of moral neo-liberalism of the soul.<br /><br />Not until decades later did the real consequences of our visions, and commitments, and potentials, show themselves - a more economically divided, a less environmentally sustainable, a more intensely politically fragmented and militarily hostile world than we could have ever imagined. The point of Anand Giridharadas’s book is <i>“to understand the connection between these elites’ social concern and predation, between the extraordinary helping and the extraordinary hoarding, between the milking—and perhaps abetting—of an unjust status quo and the attempts by the milkers to repair a small part of it. It is also an attempt to offer a view of how the elite see the world, so that we might better assess the merits and limitations of their world-changing campaigns.”</i><br /><br />‘Making a difference’ remains an abiding meme among today’s cultural elite. Giridharadas quotes a recent McKinsey &amp; Co. recruiting brochure, soliciting candidates who desire to: <br /><i>Change the world.<br />Improve lives.<br />Invent something new.<br />Solve a complex problem.<br />Extend your talents.<br />Build enduring relationships.</i><br />This is a more laconic but still an accurate replica of the pitch I received to join ‘The Firm’ in 1976. It is also a paraphrase of similar documents produced by companies like Goldman Sachs and hundreds of others from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. And it is in one form or another what every applicant to Harvard, or Stanford, or for that matter Oxford or Cambridge will be urged to consider. ‘If you are the best, you’ll want to be among the best’ is the bait that is hard to resist (See: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1848821662?book_show_action=false&amp;from_review_page=1">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1686715976">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a>).<br /><br />‘Making a difference’ is a subtle and destructive ideology, a spiritual rather than social or economic ideology and therefore far more convincing. Giridharada through his personal case studies shows how and why. ‘Making a difference’ is an insidious ideology because it taps into the best human impulses: empathy, charity, mercy. It then uses these to justify the acquisition of personal power - political, intellectual, organisational power. And since the first rule of power is the necessity to maintain power, it, not the virtues which motivated its acquisition, is the essential ideological thread. ‘Feed the world’ becomes indistinguishable from ‘Eliminate political resistance to the commercial bonanza of genetically modified crops.’<br /><br />Giridharada‘s kind of journalistic and academic melange is intriguing and produces some eye-opening observations about the paradoxes of power-seeking, especially among those with a social conscience. He certainly establishes the credibility of his thesis that: <i>“the powerful are fighting to ‘change the world’ in ways that essentially keep it the same.”</i> Nonetheless, I find it lacking. It doesn’t get to the core of our arrogance about the world on our affect on it. Our presumption that good intentions, backed by appropriate intellectual and practical skills will result in improved flourishing for humanity (or the planet) isn’t just ill-advised, it is evil.<br /><br />Sometimes the extent of this evil can only be captured in religious terms. ‘Making a difference’ is, at it turns out, a rather ancient Christian heresy not just a mistake in judgment. It’s called Pelagianism, the belief that it is possible to contribute to salvation - of oneself or of the world - unaided by something called grace. Whatever grace is and where it comes from - divine gift, genetic legacy, intellectual insight, or even cosmic luck - it can never be presumed upon. <br /><br />Pelagius, the eponymous monk whom Augustine targeted as arch-heretic, suffered neither from inadequate intellectual vision, nor lack of passionate conviction. His fatal flaw was a lack of humility, a lack we don’t normally associate today with grave sin. And yet, as Giridharadas notes, we have such an obvious example in our midst that hubris is indeed evil: <i>“Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of a culture that tasks elites with reforming the very systems that have made them and left others in the dust.”</i> ‘Making a difference’ is code for an ambition to power no matter who it comes from. <br /><br />To make the distinction between the good (my) and bad (his) use of power is nonsensical. Power is itself corrupt as as well as corrupting just as Lord Acton suggested. The human compulsion to power is the authentic Original Sin - can’t live with it, can’t do without it. But recognising it for what it is when it pops up among us is essential for healthy living. ‘Making a difference’ means ‘I want to make a grab for power’ when spoken by a young person. By the time he or she has said it, it’s probably too late to do anything about it. They’re doomed. Just as Augustine claimed, it appears that Original Sin gets passed along in mother’s milk.<br /><br />Postscript: I consider myself a social liberal. But I have a sensitive nose when it comes to many apparently liberal causes because they not infrequently stink of power-grabbing. This suspicion I share with the French conservative thinker, Bertrand de Jouvenel, who mistrusted all idealists as a matter of course. See: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2261253391">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a>.<br /><br />Postscript 30Jul20 on the personal cost of idealistic ambition: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/07/why-success-wont-make-you-happy/614731/">https://www.theatlantic.com/family/ar...</a>

MarketWorlders make themselves feel great and look philanthropic by giving bread crumbs of their perverse wealth, accumulated by aggravating all problems thanks to lunatic neoliberal dogmas, to charity.<br /><br />That´s how once decent, purely theoretical, humanities, which didn´t claim or wished to be omniscient and infallible bad fringe science incubators, became obedient mouthpieces of the corpocracy, with research so bad that the replication crisis itself looks reputable in contrast.<br /><br />Conferences, from TED to all the other clones of it, often sponsored by megacorporations, want uncritical, entertaining, flow and productivity pushing, happy go lucky rainbow unicorn content at any cost and they just pay for what they wish. So if a politician, anyone from junior to emeritus professor, author, speaker, etc. wants that sweet, much extra cash, she/he should better just use fake pop science focused on weak humanities, avoid serious, controversial topics at any cost, and spend the rest of the career traveling the world and spreading the vicious, noxious word everywhere their corporate overlords command them to.<br /> <br />One can make many times the money than with real and important science, because in a dead democracy with controlled media, the manufacturing consent power is used to push the agendas of the chosen ones that give the best sockpuppet impressions. <br /> <br />Two of the weirdest examples of how mammon corrupts are Hans Rosling and Stephen Pinker. Rosling was first really helping people, did altruistic things like working as a doctor in Africa, until he started promoting his animations and software, by downplaying and relativizing the devastation the neoliberal exponential growth doctrine brings over planet and people, and wrote a book about it. <br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...</a><br />It´s very improbable that he didn´t know that his data and conclusions aren´t correct, although it might be that he was an optimist who didn´t want to see the truth or really believed in the good of what he did, no matter how many logical fallacies, bad statistics, etc. included.<br /> <br />But he is harmless in contrast to Pinker who once was a serious scientist, doing research, writing books, having a reputation in complex fields such as linguistics and evolutionary and cognitive psychology, but then he got severe Enlightenment now. <br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35696171-enlightenment-now">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...</a><br />It´s not just that he is misusing humanities, data, ignoring any implication of the replication crisis, etc., but he is even going full frontal aggression against anyone who doesn´t share his wrong mentality, he is attacking other people for not having the same, unproven, artificially constructed opinion he has. Dissecting this concoction brings to light so many problems of politics, economics, media, etc. because they are all acting that way, proselyting instead of enabling a public discourse, doing whatever propaganda machines are made for, making satire news websites like The Onion a better, deeper, and truer source of information and education than any established media channel. <br /><br />A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Charade_of_Changing_the_World">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners...</a><br />Check out Giridharadas`great argumentation in talks and live conversations, owning and destroying the ridiculous mainstream, pop psychology, fringe economy bigotry:<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Anand+Giridharadas">https://www.youtube.com/results?searc...</a>+<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Anand+Giridharadas+TED">https://www.youtube.com/results?searc...</a><br /> <br />And again, replication crisis time:<br /><br />Because of much talk and discussion about the replication crisis, I add these thoughts to nonfiction books dealing with humanities, so you might have already seen it. <br /><br />One could call the replication crisis the viral fake news epidemic of many fields of science that was a hidden, chronic disease over decades and centuries and has become extremely widespread during the last years, since the first critics began vaccinating against it, provoking virulent counterarguments. I don´t know how else this could end than with nothing else than paradigm shifts, discovering many anachronisms, and a better, fact- and number based research with many control instances before something of an impact on the social policy gets accepted.<br /><br />Some soft science books are nothing more than fairytales for adults who never had the chance to built a free opinion because most of the media they consume to stay informed and get educated avoids any criticism of the current economic system.<br /><br />Without having read or heard ideas by Chomsky, Monbiot, Klein, Ken Robinson, Monbiot, Peter Singer, William McDonough, Ziegler, Colin Crouch, Jeremy Rifkin, David Graeber, John Perkins, and others, humans will always react to people like me, condemning the manipulation practiced everywhere with terrifying success, with anger and refusal.<br /><br />These authors don´t hide aspects of the truth and describe the real state of the world, don´t predict the future and preach the one only, the true way, ignoring anything like black swans, coincidences, or the, for each small child logical, fact that nobody knows what will happen, and collect exactly the free available data people such indoctrinated people to ignore forever.<br />A few points that led to the replication crisis:<br /> <br />I had an intuitive feeling regarding this for years, but the replication crisis proofed that there are too many interconnections of not strictly scientific fields such as economics and politics with many humanities. Look, already some of the titles are biased towards a more positive or negative attitude, but thinking too optimistic is the same mistake as being too pessimistic, it isn´t objective anymore and one can be instrumentalized without even recognizing it.<br /> <br />In natural sciences, theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, physicians… that were friends of a certain idea will always say that there is the option of change, that a discovery may lead to a new revolution, and that their old work has to be reexamined. So in science regarding the real world the specialists are much more open to change than in some humanities, isn´t that strange?<br /> <br />It would be as if one would say that all humans are representative, similar, that there are no differences. But it´s not, each time a study is made there are different people, opinions, so many coincidences, and unique happenings that it´s impossible to reproduce it. <br />Scandinavia vs the normal world. The society people live in makes happiness, not theoretical, not definitive concepts. <br />One can manipulate so many parameters in those studies that the result can be extremely positive or negative, just depending on what who funds the study and does the study wants as results. <br /> <br />One could use the studies she/ he needs to create an optimistic or a pessimistic book and many studies about human nature are redundant, repetitive, or biased towards a certain result, often an optimistic outcome or spectacular, groundbreaking results. Do you know who does that too? Statistics, economics, politics, and faith. <br /> <br />I wish I could be a bit more optimistic than realistic, but not hard evidence based stuff is a bit of a no go if it involves practical applications, especially if there is the danger of not working against big problems by doing as if they weren´t there.<br /> <br />A few points that lead away from it:<br /> <br />1. Tech<br />2. Nordic model<br />3. Open data, open government, <br />4. Blockchains, cryptocurrencies, quantum computing, to make each financial transaction transparent and traceable.<br />5. Points mentioned in the Wiki article<br />6. It must be horrible for the poor scientists who work in those fields and are now suffering because the founding fathers used theories and concepts that have nothing to do with real science. They worked hard to build a career to just find out that the predecessors integrated methods that couldn´t work in other systems, let's say an evolving computer program or a machine or a human body or anywhere except in ones´ imagination. They are truly courageous to risk criticism because of the humanities bashing wave that won´t end soon. As in so many fields, it are a few black sheep who ruin everything for many others and the more progressive a young scientist is, the more he is in danger of getting smashed between a hyper sensible public awareness and the old anachronism shepherds, avoiding anything progressive with the danger of a paradigm shift or even a relativization of the field they dedicated their career to. There has to be strict segregation between theories and ideas and applications in real life, so that anything can be researched, but not used to do crazy things.<br /><br />The worst bad science practice includes, from Wikipedia, taken from the article about the replication crisis<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replica...</a><br />1. The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis) is, as of 2020, an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis affects the social sciences and medicine most severely.[<br />2. The inability to replicate the studies of others has potentially grave consequences for many fields of science in which significant theories are grounded on unreproducible experimental work. The replication crisis has been particularly widely discussed in the field of psychology and in medicine, where a number of efforts have been made to re-investigate classic results<br />3. A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist's experiment (50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments).[8] In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once and 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did.<br />4. „Psychological research is, on average, afflicted with low statistical power."<br />5. Firstly, questionable research practices (QRPs) have been identified as common in the field.[18] Such practices, while not intentionally fraudulent, involve capitalizing on the gray area of acceptable scientific practices or exploiting flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting, often in an effort to obtain a desired outcome. Examples of QRPs include selective reporting or partial publication of data (reporting only some of the study conditions or collected dependent measures in a publication), optional stopping (choosing when to stop data collection, often based on statistical significance of tests), p-value rounding (rounding p-values down to 0.05 to suggest statistical significance), file drawer effect (nonpublication of data), post-hoc storytelling (framing exploratory analyses as confirmatory analyses), and manipulation of outliers (either removing outliers or leaving outliers in a dataset to cause a statistical test to be significant).[18][19][20][21] A survey of over 2,000 psychologists indicated that a majority of respondents admitted to using at least one QRP.[18] False positive conclusions, often resulting from the pressure to publish or the author's own confirmation bias, are an inherent hazard in the field, requiring a certain degree of skepticism on the part of readers.[2<br />6. Secondly, psychology and social psychology in particular, has found itself at the center of several scandals involving outright fraudulent research,<br />7. Thirdly, several effects in psychological science have been found to be difficult to replicate even before the current replication crisis. Replications appear particularly difficult when research trials are pre-registered and conducted by research groups not highly invested in the theory under questioning.<br />8. Scrutiny of many effects have shown that several core beliefs are hard to replicate. A recent special edition of the journal Social Psychology focused on replication studies and a number of previously held beliefs were found to be difficult to replicate.[25] A 2012 special edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science also focused on issues ranging from publication bias to null-aversion that contribute to the replication crises in psychology.[26] In 2015, the first open empirical study of reproducibility in psychology was published, called the Reproducibility Project. Researchers from around the world collaborated to replicate 100 empirical studies from three top psychology journals. Fewer than half of the attempted replications were successful at producing statistically significant results in the expected directions, though most of the attempted replications did produce trends in the expected directions.<br />9. Many research trials and meta-analyses are compromised by poor quality and conflicts of interest that involve both authors and professional advocacy organizations, resulting in many false positives regarding the effectiveness of certain types of psychotherapy<br />10. The reproducibility of 100 studies in psychological science from three high-ranking psychology journals.[44] Overall, 36% of the replications yielded significant findings (p value below 0.05) compared to 97% of the original studies that had significant effects. The mean effect size in the replications was approximately half the magnitude of the effects reported in the original studies.<br />11. Highlighting the social structure that discourages replication in psychology, Brian D. Earp and Jim A. C. Everett enumerated five points as to why replication attempts are uncommon:[50][51]<br />1. "Independent, direct replications of others' findings can be time-consuming for the replicating researcher"<br />2. "[Replications] are likely to take energy and resources directly away from other projects that reflect one's own original thinking"<br />3. "[Replications] are generally harder to publish (in large part because they are viewed as being unoriginal)"<br />4. "Even if [replications] are published, they are likely to be seen as 'bricklaying' exercises, rather than as major contributions to the field<br />5. "[Replications] bring less recognition and reward, and even basic career security, to their authors"[52]<br />For these reasons the authors advocated that psychology is facing a disciplinary social dilemma, where the interests of the discipline are at odds with the interests of the individual researcher<br />12. Medicine. Out of 49 medical studies from 1990–2003 with more than 1000 citations, 45 claimed that the studied therapy was effective. Out of these studies, 16% were contradicted by subsequent studies, 16% had found stronger effects than did subsequent studies, 44% were replicated, and 24% remained largely unchallenged.[58] The US Food and Drug Administration in 1977–1990 found flaws in 10–20% of medical studies<br /><br />Continued in comments

<br />Did you watch Zuckerberg testify before the Senate committees about Facebook and the 2018 election? Were you struck by how blithely unrepentant he seemed, how convinced that his titanic, poorly monitored data base—which he habitually describes as “a community”—is an unalloyed benefit to us all? “Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” Zuckerberg claims, “It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.” <br /><br />So how is it that a billionaire like Zuckerberg can presume to appear so smugly virtuous? Although a few reasons come immediately to my mind—a poorly chosen defense strategy, the habitual arrogance of wealth, some personality or character defect—I believe the truer explanation is more universal. It lies in the philosophical attitude toward wealth and social change of all the Silicon Valley billionaires, which is shared in large part by the Wall Street/Clinton Foundation crowd too. Such people inhabit a distinct intellectual universe, and an excellent way to learn about their world is to read <i>Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World</i> by Anand Giridhardas.<br /><br />Giridhardas calls this universe “MarketWorld”, and he encountered it up close and personal when, in 2011, he was chosen as a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, an “’organization of leaders’ that seeks to deploy a “new breed of leaders’ against ‘the world’s most intractable problems.’” It involved an inspiring series of one-week seminars, held in luxurious places, where he “mingled with the ultra-rich in decorated mansions.” Still something made Anand uneasy about the whole thing:<blockquote> <i>Even as I savored these luxuries and connections, I found something amiss about the Aspen institute. Here were all these rich and powerful people coming together and speaking about giving back, and yet the people who seemed to reap most of the benefits of this coming together were the helpers, not the helped. I began to wonder what was actually going on when the most fortunate don’t merely seek to make a difference but also effectively claim ownership of “changing the world.” . . .<br /><br />I began to feel like a casual participant in . . . a giant, sweet-lipped lie. . . . Why were we coming to Aspen? To change the system, or to be changed by it? To speak truth to power, . . . or to help make an unjust, unpalatable system go down a little more easily? Could the intractable problems we proposed to solve be solved in the way that we silently insisted—at minimal most to elites, with minimal distribution of power?</i> </blockquote> Giridharadas continued to think about these matters, and five years later, at his Aspen Institute summer reunion, he delivered a speech in which he summed up what he called the Aspen Consensus: “The winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm.”<br /><br />This, essentially, is the philosophy of “MarketWorld.” We can all—especially the rich--”do good by doing well.” Apply market solutions, empower a few, attempt to solve a few isolated social problems, and—guess what?—we can make ourselves even more money and feel better about ourselves while we do it. We’ll work with governments, sure, but only if necessary (for democracy is messy and difficult to control), but please don’t speak to us about increasing corporate regulations, or raising marginal tax rates, or increasing estate taxes, and—while you’re at it—leave that deduction for the purchase of private jets alone too.<br /><br />Giridharadas attends and takes notes on many MarketWorld events, conducts interviews with a few of the ultra-rich and many of their minions (an interview near the end of the book with Bill Clinton is particularly illuminating), and in addition he speaks with a number of aspiring entrepreneurs who adopt the MarketWorld philosophy. <br /><br />But he speaks with critics of MarketWorld too, one of the most incisive being Chiara Cordelli, professor of political philosophy at the university of Chicago. She argues that one of the most dangerous things about the MarketWorld method is that it not only routinely marginalizes government institutions but also insists on benefits (tax breaks, elimination of regulations) which damage and hamper its mechanisms, and that as a result these institutions are becoming more and more ineffective. And after all, Cordelli says, “The government is us.”<blockquote> <i></i> </blockquote>

I really enjoyed this but it might be just because fundamentally I'm ideologically opposed to people being that wealthy. I think it does a really good job of what the intended purpose is, to show that a lot of times philanthropy itself is just a way to ameliorate problems caused by the same people doing the philanthropy and that much of the philanthropy can not make up for the systemic issues we have created by letting people accumulate as much wealth at the expense of others as we do. I think its fair to express the desire to read other books that go through it much more numerically/or in a data oriented way to show a larger trend but I think that wasn't the purpose of the book so it didn't bother me as much as some of the people who didn't like the book. I do think it can be repetitious and just hits on one theme over and over again through a lot of interviews/anecdotes so avoid this if that's not what you're looking for. I do think it's important though for pointing out the hypocrisy inherent in a lot of the giving back rich people do. I also don't see why the author should have to provide solutions because I do think it's a hard complex problem. Like I think there is a place for books that just point out and describe a problem that exists, it doesn't have to be prescriptive. Anyways, personally I really enjoyed it but I have my own biases and ideology so take what I say with a grain of salt.<br /><br /><br />

Winners Take All is the hardest book I have ever read. Not because it was inaccessible or esoteric, but because it forced a long overdue look in the mirror. <br /><br />Being in the tech industry I’ve been swept up in thought leadership, heroic philanthropy, and the promise of innovation to impact lives at scale. For a moment I was becoming more convinced that maybe the market place was in fact the best place to solve our social ills. Maybe the right combination of philanthropies and technology could fix most of our biggest issues. With each page, I slowly realized the lie I was telling myself to justify my newfound privilege in society. <br /><br />I saw myself in the story of Hilary Cohen, a young idealistic college grad swept by corporate furor over a desire to change the world and make impact at scale through the marketplace. I rationalized momentarily selling out with the promise of building skills so one day I may be better suited to truly make the impact I desired in the public sector. I could have my cake and eat it too.<br /><br />I saw myself in the story of Darren Walker, the philanthropist who against all odds went from poverty to riches. We share the same central questions. How do you reconcile the incompatible identity transition from a poor upbringing to another of riches and opportunity? How do you navigate the new elite social circles life throws you in? Am I too comfortable in my newfound privilege?<br /><br />How do you respond to the uncomfortable cooing and admiration? “Look at Cesar… Why can’t they all be like him? He had a single mother. He put himself through school.” Even the most well-meaning, do not understand the selfish ways we contribute to a society where we increasingly make stories like mine and Darren’s impossible to continue to emerge. The largest or most frequent donors to charity won’t change the fact that for my story to emerge again, the stars would need to align yet again, but in a more unlikely way. <br /><br />When you join the club of winners in society and you champion causes that ignore the fundamental structures and systems in place that led to your victory, you become complicit in the oppression that makes your success possible. The slaveholder who would rather treat his property with love and care instead of working to live in a free world was every bit as complicit as the most brutal slaveowners. True progress demands a sacrifice of privilege and power.<br /><br />Those of us who ride the wave of prosperity have a responsibility to think of the people for whom this change systemically fails. We have a shared moral obligation and commitment to the public good. My promise to the world is to never lose sight of that.

An excellent exposé of the wealthy and powerful who aim to do "good" and just perpetuate systems of injustice. Anand Giridharadas creates a compelling argument about how elites who work at corporations and companies like McKinsey and Goldman Sachs say they "work for social change," yet never address the core of what causes inequality in the first place. He provides several detailed anecdotes of young adults who get swept up into these corporations based on the ideal that they will learn a skill set that will later help them do good, or that through these firms they will work on projects that benefit all of society, even when these firms often drive the marginalized further downward. The book carries valuable implications, ranging from how business will not solve society's pressing problems, to why some disenfranchised folk distrusted Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and more. A quote from the end of the book I liked a lot:<br /><br /><i>"But that is a choice, Cordelli tells us. To do a modest bit of good while doing nothing about the larger system is to keep the painting. You are chewing on the fruit of an injustice. You may be working on a prison education program, but you are choosing not to prioritize the pursuit of wage and labor laws that would make people's lives more stable and perhaps keep some of them out of jail. You may be sponsoring a loan forgiveness initiative for law school students, but you are choosing not to prioritize seeking a tax code that would take more from you and cut their debts. Your management consulting firm may be writing reports about unlocking trillions of dollars' worth of women's potential, but it is choosing not to advise its clients to stop lobbying against the social programs that have been shown in other societies to help women achieve the equality fantasized about in consultants' reports."</i><br /><br />A limitation of the book includes that Giridharadas did not include the perspectives of the marginalized people he purports to care about. It would have been helpful to read more from the perspectives of those with less privilege, to read what they think we should all do. I wish Giridharadas focused more on tangible actions toward the end of the book. Instead of just pointing out the problem with rich people engaging in philanthropy that maintains economic inequality, perhaps providing steps to dismantle capitalism or work toward reparations would have made the book feel more aligned with its stated mission. I would still recommend it though, as it has made me examine my own class privilege and complicity in these systems of oppression.

This is another book recommended to me by Richard. In many ways this is a similar and perhaps an even better book than ‘Small Change: Why business won’t save the world’ by Michael Edwards. Under my review of that book Jan-Maat mentions Andrew Carnegie – and he gets quite a run in this book, although, I wouldn’t be able to say he comes out of that looking particularly good. In fact, he is presented, as Jan-Maat says, as the classic case of what philanthropists are like. Their point is to not pay their workers too much, given workers will only likely spend it on wine, women and song – so it is much better to keep most of the money for yourself and then distribute it properly and rationally according to a rational plan involving various tributes named after yourself. <br /><br />In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that I’m not particularly fond of the ‘third economy’ – or philanthropy more generally – and I would ban charities and replace them with government run welfare funded by higher rates of taxation. I’ve never had too much trouble understanding the preferences of my fellow Irishman, Oscar Wilde, around the nature of charity. He made it abundantly clear that charity is more an evil than a virtue – despite the King James Bible’s:<br /><br />“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” <br /><br />As Wilde says: “Charity they (those in receipt of it) feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives.” As you see, nothing ever changes – charity still remains a ‘gift’ and is distributed according to the ‘morality’ of those giving. It is soul crushing and debasing of our common humanity, for both the giver and receiver.<br /><br />Edwards’ book is good since it focuses on the question of the extent to which the skills of business people match those necessary to address social problems such as urban poverty, the achievement gap in schools, drug addiction, and so on. Given that these are mostly social issues requiring community solutions, and the philanthropists are mostly skilled in providing market solutions to all problems, there is a clear disconnect.<br /><br />This book is better, because while Edwards does note that those able to act as philanthropists are also those who have made their fortunes benefiting from a system that has played no small part in the creation and existence of social problems in the first place, this book goes further in making the extent of this clear. So that the employment practices of the companies such philanthropists make their money in - that slash wages, eliminate benefits and increase the precarity of employment - are highlighted as causal to many of the problems these charities then seek to ‘fix’.<br /><br />The question is raised as to whether or not charities do more harm than good – it is too easy to think, ‘well, charities might not be perfect, but they are better than nothing at all – and anyway, isn’t it better that the rich do something for the poor?’ It isn’t at all clear that philanthropists do more good than harm. In fact, to the extent that charities are used to cover the built-in failings of the system – and are run by people who depend on how the system is currently set up for their wealth, that is, people least likely to want to change those aspects of the system – all that such charity is likely to achieve is to sate the consciences of those who will otherwise fight tooth and nail to perpetuate the injustices of the current world. All of this is extensively documented here.<br /><br />Since the end of the 1970s we have seen a shift away from a welfare state – where the poor had rights to assistance, rather than being forced to become mendicants for crumbs, and where social inequality was not at its astronomical levels we are witnessing today. The market has been presented as the sole solution to all problems and this has exacerbated the problems, rather than fixed them. The question raised here is where is this all likely to end? The movement towards greater inequality, with higher levels of precarity for ever larger sections of the population seem increasingly inevitable, given the free market policies pursued by both sides of politics in the US and across the West. A large part of the end of this book focuses on Bill Clinton’s efforts to open more and more of the US economy to market forces, both as president and through his institute after leaving power – this attitude is certainly not limited to the US. However, the election of Trump and the move towards more authoritarian leaders internationally seems to be a consequence of this ‘the market is the answer’ belief system. <br /><br />This book is an interesting read – it follows a number of people who want to do good, but are convinced (as is the universal prejudice of our age) that if you are to learn how to do good you must learn your skills in a global accounting firm, because being able to apply the logic and practices of such firms is presented as the only path to addressing all issues. This is also the logic of organisations such as the ‘Teach for’ movement. Again, too often market solutions leave no room for community solutions, that is, these market ‘solutions’ are imposed on communities, rather than with them. As such, they are all too rarely successful.<br /><br />I would recommend this book. I feel a storm is coming. To quote another Irishman:<br /><br />“And I say to my people’s masters: Beware <br />Beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people<br />Who shall take what ye would not give. <br />Did ye think to conquer the people, or that law is stronger than life, <br />And than men’s desire to be free? <br />We will try it out with you ye that have harried and held, <br />Ye that have bullied and bribed. <br />Tyrants… hypocrites… liars!”<br /><br />From The Rebel – Patrick Pearse

As someone who has dithered on the edges of "elites changing the world", much of this rings true and I believe (and grapple) with the tension between the sometimes necessary power/influence/fortune needed, as we strive for justice and equity. An article that I always refer back to is Noam Chomsky's dissection of justice vs power. That and thoughts about how social movements and protest no matter how "ineffectual" will always be more powerful levers to create systemic change than social enterprises. That's a whole other issue area though. <br /><br />I wanted this book to be more and found it was too long for what it had to say. I believe governments too should be larger actors than businesses, but the book drawing this conclusion seemed to be based on needing to propose something else rather than a genuine endorsement. I also would have hoped for greater analysis or critique of this "elite charade". <br /><br />I'd recommend all articles that are snippets of this book to everyone. The book itself, I'd primarily recommend to people who are part of these communities and have yet to realise everytime they use the word "movement" or "activist", it's an active form of co-option.

Very mixed feelings about this book. I liked some parts too much to give a low rating, disliked other parts too much to give a high rating, and don't feel those should average out.<br /><br />While I was reading, I was considering a criticism that this book is ultimately not engaged in critical thought, but is just another "thought leader," simply for a different demographic. But it doesn't entirely fall into this trap, and it isn't shallow or vapid. There are definitely pieces that were solid.<br /><br />Yet I still feel like this book's project is fundamentally flawed. I don't think someone who started out disbelieving in the book's premise would be convinced, nor does the book seem to even attempt to convince them - agreement with central tenets is presumed. As someone favorably inclined toward the premise, I was hoping for a rigorous analysis of the issue that would deepen my understanding of the subject. I didn't get that as much as I'd like.<br /><br />For example, the criticism of the family that made their wealth via OxyContin was exactly along the lines I wanted. Direct empirical analysis of their impacts on both sides, which in my mind is a serious criticism of their philanthropic efforts that undermines all their rhetoric. I'd have preferred a whole chapter devoted to it, but I enjoyed that segment.<br /><br />But many other segments don't engage on that level. For example, criticizing business executives who reduce Indian economics to a market chain seems promising, but there's no analysis, just throwing out hypotheticals that <i>might</i> undermine their position. Those are questions with real answers that would be a far stronger response, so why bring them up without getting into the facts of the situation?<br /><br />Now, a book doesn't need to be empirical analysis, there's a place for simply expressing ideas. For example, I was fascinated by the section about early objections to Carnegie's philanthropy. But as much as some parts were interesting, I feel like a book with an aggressive thesis needs to present a high degree of either novelty or rigor, and this book didn't go all the way with either.<br /><br />I'd be more favorable inclined toward its attempt if not for my last problem with the book: the tendency to smugly contradict interviewees in the text itself instead of raising those objections to their face and recording their response.