I.G. Book Club: Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas
This month, I.G. held its first ever book club in Borough to discuss Anand Giridharadas’ controversial Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. The event was attended by people from all sides of the philanthropic table, and we even had a surprise FaceTime call from Anand himself to contribute to our debate! For those of you who have not yet read Anand’s book, Winners Take All was first published in 2018 and has taken the philanthropy world by storm, inviting many difficult conversations and asking the challenging question: is giving simply the “wingman” of continued taking? Anand asserts that if the responsibility to solve inequality is put in the hands of those who want to change the world without changing their own world, change will only be surface deep.
So, with our numerous questions in one hand and a (high-tech) pint glass in the other to amplify Anand’s voice on speakerphone, we had a fantastic evening of discussion and conversation driven by some of the best and brightest minds in philanthropy and corporate impact. Some of those questions and key discussion points are shared below for those who couldn’t make it, and please note these opinions may not reflect those of all attendees, or I.G. Advisors:
1. One of the key themes in the book is that generosity is not a substitute for justice. Do you think philanthropists do enough to address the inequality and systems at the root of social problems? Why or why not?
A common trend we increasingly see in the philanthropy sector is that major donors want to ensure they are achieving maximum impact with their donations, and understanding the systems of the issues they are addressing. However, there are problems with this. More often than not, philanthropists leave their own wealth history and actions out of the picture when trying to understand the problem, and therefore often remain ignorant to the real changes needed to tackle the root causes of inequality. Philanthropists who do try to educate themselves beyond this often feel overwhelmed by the complexity and severity of the issue, and feel powerless to change whole systems.
Anand shared with us that in his experience, some ‘philanthrocapitalists’ don’t understand their place in these systems, but are often open to being educated on how to avoid creating more harm. His suggestion was to create a new norm, where foundations call out the harm being caused by the money they are funded with. In essence, he said, foundations could act as both a donation mechanism and an ‘intelligence agency’, reporting back to the headquarters of wealth generators that may be the source of issues the philanthropy is trying to solve.
A key takeaway for those involved in the philanthropy sector is that we are all responsible for ensuring philanthropists are educated on the root causes of issues, and not being complicit in boosting donors’ egos and avoiding challenging their knowledge and expertise on the social problems they care about.
2. The book spends some time on the Sackler family, whose name features on many arts and cultural institutions but who have made a significant amount of money from the sale and spread of Oxycontin, a key component of the opioid crisis across the US. Anand doesn’t believe that organisations should be taking money from the Sacklers -what do you think charities should do in this situation?
Some of the major challenges for charities is the difficulty in tracing where their money comes from, defining what ‘bad’ money is (beyond illegality, of course) and deciding how far they should assess a donor’s family or business history. There is also no current way for donors to quantify the cost of harm their wealth-creation might have caused to society in order for them to consider putting that value back into philanthropy. However, as charities with tight resources already struggle to fulfil the needs of the populations they are serving, our discussions concluded this should realistically be a donor/foundation-led initiative.
For Anand, the Sacklers are just the tip of the iceberg and an easy example to draw on, and he asked what else should be done about money from philanthropists such as Mark Zuckerberg who is accused of putting democracy at serious risk with his business practices. Anand argued that we need to speak the truth about where philanthropic money originally comes from and the problems it has caused.
When asked about how many degrees of separation from harm it is acceptable to accept donations from, Anand stressed that if philanthropists understand where the money they inherited is coming from and do not replicate the problems that it caused, there shouldn’t be a reason for not accepting it. However, he specified there is no point in trying to solve a global issue with the same mentality that created it in the first place. Ultimately, he said, people who have caused lots of harm to society should be facing a criminal process, and their assets taken away from them, and philanthropy should not be a means to buy immunity for their crimes. If philanthropy is to be truly altruistic, Anand added, then philanthropists should not put their name on the money earmarked for philanthropic purposes, their family on the Board, or claim philanthropic giving as a tax reduction.
3. We have many stories about how philanthropy has done a huge amount of good in many ways (global health being a big one), but the book argues that it may be too big of a trade-off. If the elite weren’t benefiting from the systems that perpetuate inequality to begin with, there would be no need to invent new solutions to global problems. Do you think this is true? Or will we always need philanthropy to step in?
Whilst questions of this scope can feel challenging in our sector, it was argued that philanthropy is inherently political, and we do a disservice to society and ourselves by stating we are politically agnostic, or trying to avoid controversy or ‘overstepping’. Many questions arose from this during the discussion: at what point does someone become a philanthropist?; can you be a philanthropist without attaching yourself to an institution?; and can governments solve global problems effectively enough, or do we need another institution such as philanthropy, which acts as a body to hold governments accountable? In order to answer these questions, we explored the need to figure out what the current values of philanthropy are and what we would like them to be if it continues to exist into the future. Would it be a purely impartial vehicle for funding and change, or would it a little bit more nuanced, driven by incentives, guilt and ego?
Follow-Up Questions
Our Book Club could have gone on for many more hours, and several lively discussions did last until almost midnight! The most useful takeaway for the I.G. team was that we can do even more to hold ourselves accountable for the roles we play in the philanthropic sector, and attendees were strongly questioning how we could all be more responsible in our daily professional lives to ensure that philanthropy does more good than harm.
We weren’t able to ask all the questions we had prepared due to the depth of discussion, but for anyone else holding a book club on Winners Take All, or for those wanting to continue the discussion, you may want to consider the following additional ones:
· The fallacy of the “win-win” is something the book takes real issue with — and that by focusing on positives, where everyone wins something, we actually cover up the fact that in most cases in order for someone to win, someone else has to lose. Anand also talks about how this infiltrates the language we use: we talk about “poverty”, a problem with no villain, vs. “inequality” where there are some at fault. Does the language we use to talk about social good limit our possible solutions?
· The book deliberately doesn’t pose a simple solution to this challenge but if there is a way forward to be gleaned, it’s saying that if you believe in Democracy, you have to get smart, ambitious people to go into the public sector, you have to vote, and then you have to pay your taxes. This works in theory, but I think if you only look around at the governments in the US and UK, much less places where corruption is even more overt and visible, you can see how this would be difficult for people. What do you think we can do — individually and collectively — to try to address the issues this book raises?
