This is a book review, but it was too delicious for me, almost like drugs. Anand Giridharadas takes on — at long last — the “win-win” culture of philanthropy, philanthro-capitalism and all the Aspen/Davos/TEDtalk/Clinton Global summits and events the choke the calendar every year. The chapters are mostly arranged around individual figures in that galaxy, including Bill Clinton and Darren Walker, the head of the Ford Foundation. It’s expansive, but not comprehensive.
I confess that I enjoyed it a little too much because I’ve been on this circuit. Never an A-lister, but as a hanger-on, panelist, stand-in participant in many World Economic Forum, Aspen, impact investing and other events over these years. And while it’s hard to resist the sheer positivity and enthusiasm that these events bring, I’ve always had a dark tickle in the back on my mind, whispering “this is bullshit”.
Giridharadas’ critique isn’t really of capitalism or the system as such. Rather it’s of the “charade” of elites and their organizations and initiatives which pretend to improve the world, but might instead excuse or sustain it. He coins a term, “MarketWorld” to describe the mindset of win-win, market-oriented, problem-solving, with a strong admixture entrepreneurial gusto, philanthropy, venture-capital investing. It’s often combined with explicit or implicit disdain for government and public policy interventions and a useful blindness towards structural and class analysis. That’s a pretty rich vein to mine. But it also only goes so deep. And the critique only really gets substantive in his final chapter with Chiara Cordelli, who lays out a more coherent argument why these initiatives might, on balance, be more harmful than good: “alongside the act of helping was a parallel act of acceptance.”
Despite his posture as a provocateur, truth-sayer, and rebel, Giridharadas actually treats many of his subjects with kid gloves. It would have been easy to drive the knife in deeply to Bill Clinton, Darren Walker (Ford Foundation), and a few others. But he holds back. He admits in his book notes that he knew many of these figures socially before the book, and it shows. His righteous anger surges just high enough to reach but not submerge some of the leading lights of “MarketWorld”. He can’t quite say “hypocrite” when he obviously should — and probably feels it. I wanted blood — and felt that a man who means to make his name attacking this world owed it to me, the reader. But you can see how the gentility and politesse of these social networks insulate the powerful. not to mention the incentives of speaking fees, flights on private jets, and fancy parties. In the end, maybe Giridharadas doesn’t have the courage — or maybe he doesn’t have the bloodlust.
Still, it doesn’t take a reader much effort to get to a sharper critique on the individuals he profiles.
A few critiques of the book, and of his message.
As mentioned above, Giridharadas makes on the most cursory critique of capitalism and the system, even while he’s criticizing other for not attacking it. But, I think it’s important to his argument that he (and we) understand it. Much of MarketWorld is oriented towards reducing poverty and other forms of deprivation using a conceptual frame of market failure. They assess that there’s some “hack” that will unlock the power of the market to do it’s work in ending poverty and disease, etc. There’s at least two problems with that. First is that there is often no viable market solution, indeed, no viable market in the places and among the people targeted. There’s no “hack” to end the conflicts Syria, Afghanistan, or DRC. And there’s no way that poor people will ever have the means to purchase modern health care (including medicines). The MarketWorld types might imagine better ways to deliver aid or target charity, but there’s no getting around the fundamental problem that poverty and scarcity mean that market mechanisms can’t and won’t provide in many contexts. So what about that?
The second problem is that politics is often (usually?) the source of the problem — either directly or through a market failure. In which case, there must be a political solution. No amount of interesting data analysis, or technology, or social entrepreneurship can circumvent the inconvenient reality of politics, which underlies most things. And whiz kid tech bros and investors from Silicon Valley are uniquely unqualified to do anything about politics in the poorest places. They can barely engage in politics in their home countries.
Anyway — Ghiridaradas doesn’t get into this stuff. And I wish he did. Because that’s a deeper and more meaningful critique.
[may be edited or expanded]
ENDS///
