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November 10, 2018 10:34 am PST

Winners Take All: Modern philanthropy means that giving some away is more important than how you got it

Anand Giridharadas was a former McKinsey consultant turned "thought leader," invited to the stages of the best "ideas festivals" and to TED (twice), the author of some very good and successful books, and as a kind of capstone to this career, he was named a fellow to the Aspen Institute, an elite corps of entrepreneurs who are given institutional support and advice as they formulate "win-win" solutions to the world's greatest problems, harnessing the power of markets to lift people out of poverty and oppression.

But the deeper Giridharadas got into this new role, the more uncomfortable he became with it. On the night he was to give a valedictory address to an audience of business leaders, finance leaders, and other members of the ruling class, he abandoned the "Aspen consensus" and instead give a scorching and excoriating talk about the structural failure of "win-win" as a way of thinking about the world's problems.

Giridharadas's point was that the business elites who were gathered to "give back" and "solve the big problems" were some of the most egregious contributors to those problems. They had looted the world's treasuries, shut down businesses and shipped jobs to low-wage, low-regulation free trade zones, gutted public services and replaced them with low-bidder private sector contractors, and had done so while formulating and promulgating the philosophy that business leaders' individual judgment about the provision of public services were always to be preferred to those policies set by democratically elected politicians.

The speech was -- obviously -- divisive. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/TYhjURUq8TE/say-its-name.html

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