Winners Take All

Winners Take All by Anand Ghiridaradas

“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That's how it goes Everybody knows”

Anand Ghiridaradas vividly illustrates precisely how the truisms of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” are at play in the US and global economies today. For a book about economics, governance, and fiscal policy, Winners Take All is strikingly readable, propelled by close narratives of various characters, from idealistic young would-be-world-changers suckered in to working for Goldman Sachs or McKinsey to “thought leaders” who preach gospels of philanthropy (loud enough to drown out calls for actual systemic change) from the decks of posh cruise-ship conferences for the super-rich. While Ghiridaradas’ thesis, that it is unacceptable for those who’ve profited so disproportionately from the current loaded system to fancy themselves the only ones innovative enough to change that system, is unassailable in and of itself, he falls short of offering clear recommendations for how the system could change for the better, somewhat nonspecifically implying that a return to strong government and regulation would be preferable.

Perhaps his reservation from recommendation-making is wise, as Ghiridaradas himself has experience as “an Aspen Institute fellow…a former McKinsey analyst…and has spoken on the main stage of TED,” experiences which he doesn’t disclose anywhere within the book other than his author bio on the back fold of the dust jacket.** While it would plainly have been better had Ghiridaradas disclosed his personal involvement with the very entities he’s critiquing at the beginning of the book, this is nonetheless a well-written and infuriatingly illuminating book, making a clearer case than ever for just how pissed we should all be with the 1%—for hoarding the wealth and power of the world, for appropriating the hard-wrought language of movement and activism, for weakening the exchange of complex and challenging ideas, and for remodeling paternalistic colonialism and repackaging it for the rest of us to buy in such a way that it both enriches them and makes them look good. Don’t buy it.

**I hadn't read the book's acknowledgments when I wrote this review, but I've since done so. In this section of the book Ghiridaradas discusses his time as an Aspen Institute fellow and how that experience directly led to his writing Winners Take All. He writes, "This book is the work of a critic, but it is also the work of an insider-outsider to that which it takes on. There is almost no problem probed in this book, no myth, no cloud of self-serving justification that I haven't found a way of being a part of, whether because of naiveté, cynicism, rationalization, ignorance, or the necessity to make a living. I chose not to write about these things in a personal way because I didn't want the book to be about me. But let me say here, while I am doing some acknowledging, that I once worked as an analyst at McKinsey, that I have given not one but two TED talks, that I earn a chunk of my income giving speeches, that I was attending conferences claiming to "change the world" long before i came to see them as a charade....This is a critique of a system of which I am absolutely, undeniably a part."

So, now that you've read what should've been posted right at the beginning of the book, go forth and read Ghiridaradas' very illuminating and well-written critique!