Winners Take All: The Elite Charade Of Changing The World Quotes
"A successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement."
"Among Americans born in 1940, those raised at the top of the upper middle class and the bottom of the lower middle class shared a roughly 90 percent chance of realizing the so-called American dream of ending up better off than their parents."
"For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is—above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners."
"The tools and mentalities and values that helped them win—are the secret to redressing the injustices."
"The only truly ultimate good is 'human flourishing.'"
"The country requires transformational reform."
"What is at stake is whether the reform of our common life is led by governments elected by and accountable to the people, or rather by wealthy elites claiming to know our best interests."
"Much of what appears to be reform in our time is in fact the defense of stasis."
"MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo."
"Very rarely, if ever, did the step-by-step, perfectly linear process of ‘here’s how we’re going to conduct this exploration’—very rarely did that actually surface the right answer."
"The answers were derived through intelligence and common sense, and then the team would make them look more like trademark McKinsey answers: ‘We would backfill them into the template.’"
"So successful is the belief in business as the universal access card for making progress, helping people, and changing the world..."
"The biggest risk of putting a corporate consulting firm in charge of designing fixes for societal problems is that it may sideline certain fundamental questions about power."
"The widespread faith in win-wins is part of why Hilary Cohen had ended up at McKinsey."
"It captured MarketWorld values perfectly: You could change things without having to change a thing."
"In an ideal version of these endeavors, the winner could enjoy an enticing combination of making money, doing good, feeling virtuous, working on hard and stimulating problems, feeling her impact, reducing suffering, spreading justice, exoticizing a résumé, traveling the world, and gaining a catchy cocktail-party spiel."
"Suffering can be innovated away. Let the innovators do their start-ups and suffering will be reduced."
"It is more forthcoming when you frame problems in ways that make winners feel good."
"But in Shapiro’s Venn diagram, it is worth noting that the lion’s share of each circle remains outside the overlap of the win-win—what mathematicians call the relative complement."
"Suddenly its capabilities can be harnessed to address your problem."
"But what was even more striking than these blind spots was the notion, implied in Ferenstein’s idea, that the winners should receive a kickback from social change."
"‘Society tells me I have to go to school, get a good job, and then I’ll get a salary, because I’m in America,’ Jacobs said. ‘And that’s what I did, and now I’m in debt. And now I’m suffocating.’"
"Even is a personal solution to a public problem."
"It would be a sad irony if a great new Band-Aid headed off the major surgery that an insecure citizenry so desperately needs."
"The question for me was never if I should devote my career to social impact, it was always HOW can I make the most impact?"
"At the end of the day, it's not about the money. It's about the love and those moments of character."
"The next twenty, thirty years, my best piece of advice is stay alive."
"They are most comfortable in the uncomfortable places."
"What’s amazing about tech is that there are so many opportunities to have your cake and eat it too."
"In the era when political power corrupts, social and crowdsourced power cleanses."
"We are all created equal in the virtual world, and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world."
"Investing has become the genteel occupation of our gentry, like having a country estate used to be in England."
"It is the best of times for thought leaders. It is the worst of times for public intellectuals."
"Socialized obedience and conformity played into the decisions of both the 9/11 hijackers and the American guards at Abu Ghraib who tortured their prisoners."
"Men in general are seen as possessing more of whatever characteristic is most culturally valued."
"The desire to solve underlying problems is an alluring and moral vision, but ultimately wrong."
"The people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging. That's it."
"I feel how frustrated people in this room are, so can we stop for a moment and talk about what's going on?"
"The system is set up in a biased way. It favors white guys. Sorry, but it does."
"For the aspiring thought leader, it is less important to have an undergirding of scholarly research than it is to be your idea—to perform and hawk it relentlessly."
"Their susceptibility to scientific authority, no matter how thin or disputed."
"Their need for ideas to be useful, results-oriented, profitable in order to receive their support."
"The world of ideas 'is just another industry,' he said after a moment. 'There’s good product, and there’s bad product.'"
"People react differently toward identifiable victims than to statistical victims who have not yet been identified."
"It’s not that you, as a thinker, are forgetting that it’s about the group. You’re not."
"The protocols offered a powerful way of stepping into a world you didn’t know and reconstituting its reality."
"The protocols tell you to reduce the scope of what is considered, limit the amount of data you drink in, to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the volume of reality you confront."
"But the discussion would not be built around philosophical insights, or the express desires of the people to be helped, or an analysis of the power structures that inhibited the pursuit of justice and equality."
"Wealth is like an orchard. You have to share the fruit, not the orchard."
"Great inequality of environment, the concentration of business... in the hands of a few."
"The true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of the rich and the poor—a reign of harmony."
"We accept and welcome therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few."
"Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself."
"Somehow in being efficient and being clever and being productive, people thought they had the license to just stop thinking about the human beings and the well-being of everybody else in the system."
"The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits."
"Under the law of competition, the employer of thousands is forced into the strictest economies, among which the rates paid to labor figure prominently."
"That work might be the expression of the inner desire to be productive and to be of service to one’s community—and that the idea of denying someone the opportunity to fulfill that is like not letting a tree produce fruit."
"The giving world needed to openly acknowledge and confront the tension inherent in a system that perpetuates vast differences in privilege and then tasks the privileged with improving the system."
"What underlying forces drive the very inequality whose manifestations we seek to ameliorate?"
"Inequality is built on antecedents—preexisting conditions ranging from ingrained prejudice and historical racial, gender, and ethnic biases to regressive tax policies that cumulatively define the systems and structures that enable inequality to fester."
"Big philanthropy needed to get better at modeling the kind of equality we hope to achieve by listening, and learning, and lifting others up."
"Compartmentalizing is a means of coping. And so, sure, there are things that they know, they see, on a daily basis that must, if they’ve got any morality, appall them."
"The people who get to take advantage of the system, why would they really want to change it? They’ll maybe give more money away, but they don’t want to radically change it."
"Life goes more and more behind the gate. More and more of our civic activities and public activities become private activities."
"The American public had their big conversation out there in the messy democracy, and the elite had its own ongoing intramural chat."
"Inequality gave some the resources to build their own discos and sequester themselves indoors."
"An achievement of modernity has been its gradual persuasion of citizens to expand the circle of their concern beyond family and tribe, to encompass the fellow citizen."
"Government still had the responsibility, but, more and more, the wealthy made the rules."
"I will bring my perspective as someone who is deeply concerned about the welfare of people in poor and vulnerable communities."
"Around the world, a suspicion seemed to be taking hold that jet-setters solving humanity’s problems in private conclaves was as much a problem as it was a solution."
"The only answer is to build an aggressive, creative partnership involving all levels of government, the private sector, and non-government organizations to make it better."
"When private actors move into the solution of public problems, it becomes less and less of the public’s business."
"The world’s elites were being revolted against, and the revolts perhaps had something to do with how disconnected they were from the realities of others."
"The problem with the globalists’ vision of world citizens changing the world through partnerships, Rodrik said, is that 'you’re not accountable to anybody, because it is just a bunch of other global citizens like you as your audience.'"
"Who should make change, and where should they make it?"
"If you are trying to shape the world for the better, you are engaging in a political act—which raises the question of whether you are employing an appropriately political process to guide the shaping."
"Horvath and Powell’s most interesting analysis is about how elites can pull off this crowding out of vast machineries of state."
"The seasoned and astute private world-changer seeks to alter 'the public conversation about which social issues matter, sets an agenda for how they matter, and specifies who is the preferred provider of services to address these issues without any engagement with the deliberative processes of civil society.'"
"'Of course, you should do it because it’s the right thing to do, but there’s a strong business case,' Collymore, of Safaricom, now said."
"What if reimagining the world in such rooms was, in fact, the business-smart thing to do but not the right thing to do?"
"He described CGI’s model of extrademocratic partnership as 'living proof that good people, committed to creative cooperation, have almost unlimited positive impact to help people today and give our kids better tomorrows.'"
"Clinton now voiced the sense of besiegement that the globalists had been feeling."
"Clinton was right that his philosophy was meeting resistance, but he did not take much responsibility for why it was being resisted."
"Clinton, believing in the power of politics to improve lives, having shown the possibilities of politics with his own life, had accepted the shift."
"For the inescapable answer to the overwhelming question—Where do we go from here?—is: somewhere other than where we have been going, led by people other than the people who have been leading us."
"We stand for something, not against anything."
"At what point is it the right moment to say, 'Great, this is how all business must act'?"
"I don’t believe that everybody just trying to be more responsible leads to higher returns."
"If you have campaigned against inheritance tax, if you have directly tried to avoid paying taxes, if you supported and directly, voluntarily benefited from a system where there were low labor regulations and increased precarity, then you have directly contributed to a structure that foreseeably and avoidably harmed people."
"Your life, your talents, what you do could not be possible if they weren’t for common institutions."
"You are chewing on the fruit of an injustice."
"To do a modest bit of good while doing nothing about the larger system is to keep the painting."
"This is absurd in the sense that it’s a concept of agency that doesn’t make sense philosophically and doesn’t make sense practically."
"The winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm."