Re: [Marxism] Meet the ‘Change Agents’ Who Are Enabling Inequality

[A.R. G via Marxism]

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I have a feeling that might have cost him his non-gadfly career.

Amith R. Gupta
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Re: [Marxism] Meet the ‘Change Agents’ Who Are Enabling Inequality

[Michael Meeropol via Marxism]

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I think the most intriguing part of this article that Louis posted is the
role of Joe Stiglitz.   He has become quite a progressive voice in a
usually smugly self-satisfied (and downright reactionary) profession
---very interesting!!!



>
>
>
>  The subtitle of the book says it all: “The Elite
> Charade of Changing the World.”
>
> Joseph E. Stiglitz was chief economist of the World Bank from 1992 to
> 2000 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001. He is a
> professor at Columbia and has been writing about inequality since the
> late 1960s.
> 
> 
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[Marxism] Meet the ‘Change Agents’ Who Are Enabling Inequality

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times Sunday Book Review, August 26, 2018
Meet the ‘Change Agents’ Who Are Enabling Inequality
By Joseph E. Stiglitz

WINNERS TAKE ALL
The Elite Charade of Changing the World
By Anand Giridharadas
288 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

First came the books describing just how much worse economic inequality 
had become over the past 20 years, with all the dramatic political 
implications now impossible to ignore. Then there were the tomes about 
globalization (including my own, I admit), detailing the West’s 
unfettered pursuit of neoliberal policies that abetted all this unfairness.


Well, prepare for a new genre: books gently and politely skewering the 
corporate titans who claim to be solving such problems. It’s an elite 
that, rather than pushing for systemic change, only reinforces our 
lopsided economic reality — all while hobnobbing on the conference 
circuit and trafficking in platitudes.


Anand Giridharadas, a former columnist for The New York Times, spoke 
about this phenomenon at an Aspen Institute conference in 2015, and he 
takes his ideas further in his entertaining and gripping new book, 
“Winners Take All.” As the Democratic Party struggles to figure out its 
future and global demagogy thrives, it’s worth considering where we went 
wrong and how best to save the world from the dangerous turn it has 
taken. It’s now very clear that globalization, technology and market 
liberalization did not bring their promised benefits — at least not for 
the vast majority of Americans and those in advanced countries around 
the world.


For those at the helm, the philanthropic plutocrats and aspiring “change 
agents” who believe they are helping but are actually making things 
worse, it’s time for a reckoning with their role in this spiraling 
dilemma. I suggest they might want to read a copy of this book while in 
the Hamptons this summer.


In a series of chapters centered on different individuals who are part 
of this rarefied class, Giridharadas exposes the rationalizations of the 
0.001 percent who actually believe they are making the world a better 
place. The Sacklers helped create the opioid crisis but give money to 
important causes. The chief executive of Cinnabon thinks that being 
transparent about the fat and sugar she peddles offsets the harm her 
company creates. It’s a land of PowerPoint presentations and cuddly good 
intentions.


Giridharadas calls this prevailing ethos “MarketWorld,” made up of 
people who want “to do well and do good.” He beautifully catches the 
language of Aspen, Davos and the recently extant Clinton Global 
Initiative, which will doubtless reappear in the newly born Bloomberg 
initiative. It’s a world of feel-good clichés like “win-win” and “make a 
difference.” The rote conversations of this crowd were on recent display 
at the Public Theater, in the beginning of the second act of the Bruce 
Norris play “The Low Road.” As Giridharadas describes the ethos of 
MarketWorld, it’s made up of people like former President Bill Clinton 
who saw the anger bubbling up but proved unable to “call out elites for 
their sins: or call for power’s redistribution and fundamental systemic 
change; or suggest that plutocrats might have to surrender precious 
things for others to have a mere shot of transcending indecency.”


Like the dieter who would rather do anything to lose weight than 
actually eat less, this business elite would save the world through 
social impact investing, entrepreneurship, sustainable capitalism, 
philanthro-capitalism, artificial intelligence, market-driven solutions. 
They would fund a million of these buzzwordy programs rather than 
fundamentally question the rules of the game — or even alter their own 
behavior to reduce the harm of the existing distorted, inefficient and 
unfair rules. Doing the right thing — and moving away from their win-win 
mentality — would involve real sacrifice; instead, it’s easier to focus 
on their pet projects and initiatives. As Giridharadas puts it, people 
wanted to do “virtuous side projects instead of doing their day jobs 
more honorably.”


In order to really have an economy with the greatest opportunity for 
all, the kind of economy they seem to champion, the MarketWorlders would 
have to pay high levels of corporate and personal income tax, offer 
decent wages to their workers, allow unions, fund public schools 
(instead of pet charter projects) and support some form of single payer 
health care and campaign finance reform. One simply can’t arrive at a 
more economically equal reality when the rungs of the ladder are so far 
apart.


At Davos and the other international conclaves where the