Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
(ALLEN LANE, 304 PP, £12.99)
Tablet bookshop price £11.69 • Tel 020 7799 4064
If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. But what if you’re part of the solution and part of the problem? Such is the question that inflames Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All. A dogged investigation of corporate masquerade, plutocratic reverie and the hegemonic snake oil of market speak, the book is a furious indictment of big business’ self-serving insistence that only when it wins does everybody win. Time and again, in a deftly woven series of interviews with assorted hucksters and hustlers and honchos, Giridharadas skewers Davos Man’s histrionic conviction that he’s a charitable soul doing right by the world – and would do even better by it if only we’d cut his taxes some more.
Not that the book is an anti-capitalist rant. A former McKinsey analyst and fellow of the Aspen Institute, Giridharadas might be a poacher turned gamekeeper but he’s no hanging judge. He knows that capitalism is the goose that lays the golden egg. He just thinks the omelette could be divided more fairly. His basic text might have been borrowed from Martin Luther King: “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”