Winners Take All: the Davos Edition (how elites launder looting with phoney philanthropy)

With the World Economic Forum kicking off in Davos, Switzerland -- where the super-rich are already decrying Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's massively popular 70% tax-rate on earning over $10,000,000 -- it's a great time to revisit Anand Giridharadas's must-read 2018 book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, in which the former McKinsey consultant and Aspen Institute fellow catalogs the way that the super-rich have starved their host-nations of the funds needed to operate a functional civilization, and then laundered their reputations by dribbling back some of that looted booty in the form of "philanthropic donations" that always seem to redound to their personal benefit.

In a long essay adapted from Winners Take All, published in The Guardian, Giridharadas uses Davos as a jumping off point to explain his thesis and update it for 2019's facts-on-the-ground. While this essay is no substitute for reading Giridharadas's book, it's an excellent introduction to his ideas.

There is no denying that todays American elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory. By refusing to risk its way of life, by rejecting the idea that the powerful might have to sacrifice for the common good, it clings to a set of social arrangements that allow it to monopolise progress and then give symbolic scraps to the forsaken many of whom wouldnt need the scraps if society were working right. It is vital that we try 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.