Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite's Charade of Changing the World, notes that the circle of powerful men and a handful of women who surrounded Jeffrey Epstein are emblematic of a privileged caste that lacks the empathy to see the suffering and abuse of others. Whether that was sexual abuse of children, the financial meltdowns they orchestrated, the military fiascos they backed, the addictions and overdoses they enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, and the technologies that failed to protect people.
People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private meritocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, startups, academia, science, high finance, and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, or, yes.
The Epstein emails, in my view, he writes, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions and for whom. Saying that is an extreme. The way this elite operates is this class includes Republicans, Democrats, business people, diplomats, philanthropists, healers, professors, scientists, royals, super lawyers, from former Treasury Secretary and former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, to Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Bill Gates, Alan Dershowitz, Woody Allen, Deepak Chopra, Peter Thiel, and even Noam Chomsky.
If this neoliberal era power elite remains poorly understood, he writes, it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, an oblige elite, a political elite, or a narrative-making elite. It straddles all of these lucratively and is persuaded of its own good intentions. These people are, he writes, on the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence. In the class that decides things, when principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.
It is this new class of mandarins that he examines in his book Winners Take All, a class that has sold us out, degraded our democracy, and allowed corporate and oligarchic predators to immiserate our lives. While mouthing a cloying morality, positing themselves as champions of the poor, they assiduously defend a status quo that serves their interests, not ours. A system of ruthless and often cruel economic exploitation unlike anything seen since the age of the robber barons. Joining me to discuss his book is Anand. Um, the book is great. Uh, and we don't find out till the end that, uh, it's not just, you know, very fine reporting, uh, into the machinery of our, uh, at this point global ruling elite, but you spent time within it, uh, yourself. Um, which I find kind of fascinating. Uh, one of the things in the book you write about is the heavy recruitment that these large firms like McKinsey and Goldman Sachs use, essentially convincing recruits that they are going to make a better world. And I wonder whether you were susceptible to that. You worked for a year for, uh, McKinsey.
I wasn't. That was not my story. It was a little bit more unique and, frankly, mercenary. I wanted to be a journalist and wanted to be a journalist for the New York Times since I was like 14 or 15 years old and started writing for my school newspaper and told everybody who would listen that that was my single goal in life. Uh, and I got, you know, some internships, um, with the Times actually in high school and then again in college. And I had a mentor there, Jill Abramson, who later became, uh, the editor of the paper, but was a junior editor in Washington at that point. And she gave me some career advice and she said, 'Don't spend your 20s hanging around the building in New York and Washington trying to get these internships, you know, a thousand, a thousand young aspiring journalists vying for each freelance piece, each internship.' She said, 'Go far out into the world and try to learn about something that other people don't know.'
Uh, and so I kind of thought about going international somewhere. And I applied for all these journalism jobs and it's obviously pretty tough to get a foreign correspondent job out of college. Uh, and so then I had the idea of like, let me just go take some job somewhere I actually want to be, somewhere I want to go, right? And my family had come to this country from India. And I had a lot of, uh, I had a complex relationship to India. I didn't, I didn't like it. Uh, I was fascinated by it. I, you know, uh, the first thing I learned about it was that my parents had chosen to get out of it. Uh, so I thought, okay, I'm going to make myself a writer by going to India and I tried to get these journalism jobs in India and that didn't work. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to get, you know, a job. And I figured out that you could get a job at one of these consulting firms which would take someone who studied what I did, which is the history of political thought, and would send you, you know, far afield in the world, uh, to be a business consultant. So, I took this job. It wasn't particularly lucrative. I was making $14,000 a year, living on a working local Indian salary, living in a little room in someone's apartment. Um, but it got me to India and within a few months I realized it was a huge mistake and started applying again for journalism jobs and got one a year later and joined the New York Times, which was my dream, and started doing journalism.
That one year, along with some later experiences I had, you know, and I've been a full-time writer, I should say, ever since, since 2005 when I was 23 years old. But that experience, that one year at McKinsey in India, was an eye-opening glimpse into, I think, certain mentalities in the business world, um, that are important to understand if you want to understand the world we live in. And often, and I say this about myself now, we are often critical of these systems and often those of us who are most critical of them don't actually have much human understanding of what's going on in them, right? And it's very important to understand what you're up against. It's very important. I mean, I hear people say all the time, you know, things about how the media work. There are people who might have theories about how you and I do our jobs. And I often hear them and think sometimes it's just so off base that I think you're not necessarily a very effective critic of how these systems work if you don't understand them.
And what I saw that year was a business, uh, a business world. I mean, I was operating in India, but a kind of, uh, in many ways new kind of business elite that had emerged over the last generation in which, uh, businesses were being kind of rationalized and rationalized and rationalized. Any fat was being cut. Everything was being optimized. But what that actually often meant was an indifference to or disregard for human beings. People becoming collateral damage to the hegemony of the spreadsheet. Um, and you know, it was enough to drive me away within a few months. Uh, left just after a year. Um, but it, you know, it stayed in my mind and when I wrote Winners Take All a long time later, it was probably still in there.
Well, you interview a lot of the people who are inside the system, many of whom have conflicted feelings about being within the system. Uh, but I, I, I didn't. I, I also began as a free... I just went to El Salvador and began as a freelance reporter. Jill Abramson is right. I didn't hang... I didn't even get an internship like you at the New York Times. Um, uh, so, but I found it fascinating the efforts to which these very mercenary corporations, uh, uh, you know, uh, play on the idealism of those they are attempting to recruit. I didn't know that till I read your book. Just explain how that works because once they get inside the system, um, at least from many of the interviews you carried out, they realize, they realize they've been had.
Yeah, it's really interesting. I think there was a time, maybe not that long ago in history, when a company, a Goldman Sachs or Coca-Cola or what have you, didn't have to engage in the charade of my subtitle, right? In which they could just say, 'We're Coca-Cola, big famous brand, make a lot of money. You'll have a great career here. You'll have mobility. You'll get promoted.' Or Goldman Sachs could say, 'Look, we'll send you to Hong Kong. We'll send you to London. You'll have this, you know, you'll make a ton of money. Um, you'll live in Tribeca, you will date models, like whatever the pitch is, right?' Um, but as rising inequality over the last, you know, generation, as you've so brilliantly chronicled, as that has become not just an economic fact but a felt fact, a fact that people know in their bones, uh, that, as you know, is not just a feeling people have on the left but is actually animating quite a bit of rage on the right as well, where you have in different forms an anti-corporate revolt that's bipartisan.
Um, I think these companies have realized that for many purposes, for hiring, for dealing with Washington, for, uh, for having consumers want to buy what they are selling, for all the ways in which they interface with the public, they have to deal with this issue of the public potentially hating them for the world that those corporations have wrought. And so these corporations, as I tell in Winners Take All, have evolved and articulated and disseminated a story that serves them now in this environment. And that story cannot just be, 'We're a good company, they'll give you, you know, uh, a great career.' It is, you are changing the world by joining this company. By joining Coca-Cola, by joining Goldman Sachs, by joining Facebook, Meta, you are changing the world. You are making the world a better place. You are liberating people. You're going to transform education. You're going to transform these societal things.
Almost to the point of saying, not only are you not a bad person, like in case that you're the idealistic college student, you know, at the peak of your idealism, who's like, 'I don't want to go work for Meta,' not only are you not doing anything wrong by coming to us, think about this, what these companies really say is you are in a sense hurting people if you go choose to work in some other line of work where you wouldn't be able to have this impact. What are you going to go work for some nonprofit? You going to help 10 people get a better education? In the telling of this story, you work at Meta, you could change education for a billion people if you had the right stuff. And so, and then you could find versions of this pitch for consumers, right? If you buy this cookie, we'll donate $1 to every one of these. Or, you know, you can find this for, uh, what they come and tell senators and congressmen in Washington, that, you know, 'We're not just a company bringing jobs to your district.' That doesn't cut it anymore, right? We have these civilizational missions.
And what I tried to do in Winners Take All was deconstruct this as, I think, a new ruling class ideology for this age, that was a wrinkle on it, was an innovation on the earlier story. It was no longer enough, uh, to just offer people money. You had to offer them this idea that change, which in theory would be a thing visited against powerful elites of this kind, that change was now in this story something that could only be achieved using the skills, resources, systems of this very elite.
Well, you also, uh, point out in the book that they sell this idea that you are going to learn skill sets at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or anywhere else that will make you more effective as a citizen, uh, even if you don't stay with the company. The idea that we're training you with, uh, esoteric skills that you can use anywhere.
Yeah. Uh, and this is a very important part of the story because, you know, I think with the rise, that's the story I tell in the book, is with the rise both of management consulting and high finance, right? So think about a McKinsey and a Goldman Sachs, different, but what they both have in common is, you know, think about, let's just to simplify this for people, think about, you know, that show The Office, right? That everybody knows like in a certain way. That's how a lot of companies were running, you know, coming out of World War II in the post-war years. Meaning, you know, in a pre-internet, pre-McKinsey, pre-high finance saturating everything age, you had your company, you had your boss, right? How did companies like that find customers to sell to? Well, like the guy who runs a place like that knows some people, went to high school with some people, make some calls, you sell to some customers. I'm oversimplifying, but you know, how do you hire people? Well, like there's some people in your town. You like put out an ad. Those people come to your thing. You hire them, right? It's not particularly rationalized or optimized. It's sort of like you go with what you got, right? And by the way, a lot of us, that's how we were eating before we could look up every, you know, restaurant review in the internet age.
What the consulting firms and the high finance firms and, you know, in a way shareholder activism, various things over the last generation did was arrive in businesses. Keep that picture of The Office kind of company, paper company, in your head. Arrive in businesses like that and start, you know, lifting up the hood and being like, why are you only selling to like eight customers that you happen to go to high school with? You should have a customer base that is like rationalized to be the most optimal possible customer base for you. Not just people you happen to know or people whose numbers you happen to have. Why are you hiring people from this town only because these people are actually quite expensive? What if you hired these people? What if you ran ads elsewhere? Right? Uh, I'm simplifying the story.
But what a lot of these outsiders, right, the consultants who come in or the bankers who came in and bought a company, turned it around, what a lot of them were doing is saying this is kind of this cozy, clubby, like informal thing, but actually every element of everything needs to be rationalized. And so they brought these frameworks and skills and tools. And not all of it is terrible. I mean, some of it is like, you know, if you're purchasing tires for a car, like there's a kind of helter-skelter way to do it, which is like calling guys, you know, and then there's like a process you could imagine where you'd find like the safest, best, cheapest tire in a more concerted way. So, a lot of this kind of concertedness came into business.
But what I describe in the book is that the frameworks that they were bringing into these companies, right? How do you purchase more effectively? How do you do this more effectively? How do you reduce your wage bill and not pay for the use of people's time that you don't need? What it actually amounted to in human practice was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing every bit of fat. Is one way to think about it. But often what the fat was was people, community stability, right? Uh, yeah, you can hire like people from 25 countries to do the work of a paper mill and they could all be virtual and whatever, but if you have 25 people from the same town, there's a certain connection in that town that you might foster. You might then have a loyalty to the local high school. You might then sponsor the local high school football team because of that connection, right? When everything got rationalized and everything got squeezed and everything got optimized and every supply chain, it was all like algorithmically remade.
Um, you ended up with an economy that feels like what we live in now, which is a lot of efficiency but not a lot of humanity, and companies that are very big and employ lots of people but are kind of loyal to nowhere. Um, so when you think about where we ended up, which is the biggest companies in the world based in this country, you know, companies that have changed how everything functions, how work functions, how the economy functions, but companies whose success doesn't seem to have implications for everyday people's success, uh, I think the rise of those frameworks are a big part of the story. And then what I tell in the book is that those frameworks have now been imported into the world of do-gooding, into the world of philanthropy, even into the world of government and public health and these other worlds. Saying these same frameworks that helped business kind of squeeze human beings and remove them from the equation of how a society should be run should now be used to fight AIDS and reform education and figure out, you know, how to battle poverty. Uh, and that is again like, as if it wasn't enough for some of these frameworks to dehumanize people through corporations, they're now dehumanizing people in many cases, um, through this kind of separate phase of do-gooding.
I want to seize on that word efficiency because, uh, efficiency in the eyes of people who are attempting to accumulate more wealth, um, it's actually not efficiency. It's about creating a system whereby workers are immiserated and, uh, disempowered. You see that within academia with the decline of 10-year jobs. Uh, everybody is an adjunct who's earning what, $5,000 a course and can't get health insurance and probably driving an Uber on top of it. What they define as efficiency is, uh, is really a mechanism to increase profits for the elite that you write about at the expense of everyone else.
It is, that's right. And I would say, and I think about this a lot. I want someone to write about this in a way, I feel it's a really powerful thing that someone could do. I, you know, we talk about these big bureaucrats and Elon Musk and all those people. I think something more universal and fundamental has happened that we haven't really been able to name, which is that I just feel this walking down the street, living my life, that in almost every kind of crevice of human experience now, it feels to me like a corporate mentality of that kind of what they would call efficiency, what I would say is a kind of squeezing or, you know, draining of a certain level of humanity between people. It has happened everywhere. So, I'll give you just little examples, right? Where people don't, I don't think people think about this as part of what we're talking about.
You get like, you want to get your haircut now, right? Um, like you used to, like you live in a place, like you go to that same barber every, you know, every so often. Um, you'd have a relationship, you go in, pop in, you ask for an appointment, maybe you come back later, you call. In a lot of places in America, you can't do that anymore. Even this is not a big business we're talking about. It's a small business, but there's this company called Vagaro, and there's others, that is like an appointment broker for that company. And that, you know, and it's very helpful to these barbers. I'm sure it, you know, it allows them to organize their day and not spend all the time on the phone fielding calls. But what it has done, and I've seen this in neighborhoods, I've talked about this with my friends, it has created a world in which none of us can like have that personal thing with the barber anymore. There's just like this company in between that decides you have appointments.
And sometimes like you have a crisis and you need to get your haircut, you go to an event. You can't do that anymore unless you're some very high-end person that spends, you know, thousands of dollars on like a glam squad, because you can't call your barber. The barber can't call you. The same thing's happening in restaurants. There's Resy, which is owned by American Express, right? Your neighborhood restaurant. You can't just go to your neighborhood restaurant. You can't. New York City people talk about it all the time. It's impossible to get into restaurants now because there's a finance company that is the broker of reservations. I've talked to people who own restaurants who say, 'My mother calls me and asks for a table at this restaurant. I can't give my mother a table because I don't own the tables in my restaurant anymore.' Resy has control of all the tables.
And I'm giving you little examples that are not necessarily big plutocracy. I think at every single level of our public life, our shared life, there has been the insertion of these tools that claim to be about efficiency and sometimes deliver some efficiency for some people. Again, I'm sure the barber prefers to not be on the phone all day answering reservation, you know, appointment queries. But what it amounts to in my experience is a society in which people are increasingly separated from each other in every way. And the human connection with the people in our neighborhood, with the people doing work that we are benefiting from or we're doing work for them, there's this force cutting into our lives, and that force is corporations.
Well, it's the commodification of human life just as we have commodified the natural world. Uh, I want to talk about these elite networking forums. You spent time, was it the Aspen Institute, but the Clinton Global Initiative Forum. These, you write, self-appointed leaders of social change. Uh, and, uh, you make, I think there's a little moment in the book where you talk about Carnegie on the one hand, uh, crushing unions, and wasn't Carnegie, wasn't it Carnegie who shot all the workers in Lello on the one hand and building libraries on the other. It was kind of the perfect analogy. Uh, they don't touch the system. Uh, and, uh, it was a question I had when I read the book. Uh, I thought you were a little kind to them. Um, in the sense that, uh, at least from my reading of the book, you seem to believe that, uh, some of them at least saw themselves as do-gooders. Um, and perhaps some of them do. But on the other hand, they're also once again, as they have with the accumulation of wealth or power, using philanthropy to build monuments to themselves, which is what Carnegie did, of course. Uh, but let's talk about that world. It's a world that, uh, certainly Trump supporters have quite rightly, uh, been repulsed by and responded to. So you have this kind of virtue signaling and moral posturing by the very people who are, um, you know, making sure you go bankrupt because you can't pay your medical bills.
Yeah. You know, the book originated in a moment in one of those forums at the Aspen Institute, you know, in 2011, um, while I was still at the New York Times and I was a columnist at that point and I was just about to publish or had just published my first book, which was about India, um, where I'd been a foreign correspondent. And I get this kind of out of the blue thing saying, you know, 'You've been nominated to be a fellow of the Aspen Institute.' Um, and interestingly, I was actually nominated by a guy who was a fellow, but he was a Chinese, uh, business executive who had liked a column I'd written in the New York Times about, actually about how the American elite didn't quite understand, you know, how the way they were running the country was actually making other systems like the Chinese appealing to other countries around the world because of how America was being run into the ground.
So, you know, my beginning with it was actually this guy saying, you know, 'Maybe you all need to listen to somebody who's a little bit different from your consensus.' And this fellowship was like, you go to Aspen in Colorado, in the beautiful mountain town, you know, where parkas are like $8,000 in the local store. Um, and you'd go there for a few days and you'd, you know, you'd actually read these ancient texts and Plato and Aristotle. You discuss the good society. And I think they probably wanted some variety when they were choosing me. So I give them credit for that. And I very much was that variety, right? I sat in a room, you know, with 20 people, we read these books and talk about what is a good society. It was, and it was interesting to me because I hadn't, when am I otherwise going to sit with like 20 mostly business people and actually in private, off the record, like understand what they actually think, how they actually understand the world. It was very illuminating. Um,
And several years later, four years later into it, there was a, you know, annual reunion of these fellows from all the different classes and they asked me to give a talk at this reunion. And a lot of people from the thing gave a talk at one thing or another. It was pretty common. And they asked me to give a talk actually about a book I'd written about a hate crime after 9/11. So I said, 'Yeah.' And then I decided to not inform them that I would be giving a different talk. And I wrote a different talk. And I wrote a talk about what I called the Aspen Consensus, which is that you should do good, that powerful and privileged and fortunate people should be told to do more good, but never to do less harm. Uh, that they should be told to change the world, but never to change the system. Right? That they should be told, uh, to give back but not to stop taking so much. And I basically said, look, this fellowship is about trying to make the world a better place. What would actually make the world a better place is reining in the power of the kinds of people in this room.
Um, I got a weird combination of a standing ovation and very icy stares. Uh, let's say the ovation was not from everybody. Um, some people, even people in that world, were moved by it, maybe even altered by it a little bit. Uh, a lot of people...
thought it was a very thing to do. Some people thought both at the same time and told me that. But what I was trying to get at is I think at the heart of what you're raising, which is this group of this modern corporate elite in this country is really built today in a way that I think is different from a generation ago on this fantasy of doing well by doing good. Right? In the book, I call it win-winism. This idea is win-winism. And it's really different from prior flavors of capitalism which in a way were more self-confident in saying the purpose of business is just business. Just do business. The rest takes care of itself. This is not quite that, right? This is saying business and the tools of business and in some cases the spoils of business are the most powerful possible tool to deal with the biggest societal problems we have. So, it's not just that let things trickle down. It's like the way to solve gender inequality is through Silicon Valley tech companies. The way to solve the environment is through Tesla. The way to solve poverty in Africa is, you know, Mastercard and Goldman Sachs figuring out like credit cards for rural people in Kenya. It was a really in a way new ideology about the capacity of business not just to deliver goods and services efficiently which was always the old pitch and create abundance but to actually do the work traditionally that even business people thought of as government's work or the civil society's work. This was a kind of almost I would say cancerous idea that business and capitalism had to endlessly multiply so that it was almost the only organ left in society that social change would now be delivered by these same people, mentalities, frameworks and resources. That education would now be another of their provinces. That gender equality would be kind of fought through their organs and mechanisms. And it's a very seductive idea because at the very moment that big business had been kind of elbowing its way into social change, it had been starving and defanging government as you know so well.
