Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Stacy Asher was an entrepreneur who started an initiative called Portfolios with a Purpose after seeing the struggles of poor people in Tanzanian orphanages. Their poverty was exacerbated by large corporations profiting from buying bad debt in the African market. Portfolios with a Purpose was based on the fantasy football model, but participants chose stocks instead of players; proceeds from the portfolios were donated to the players’ charities of choice. Giridharadas points out that 90% of the players worked in finance. Ironically, this meant that the same people who were contributing to the problem of buying dirty debt in Africa could drive up the prices of the stock by purchasing them for the game, thus earning more money.

Giridharadas critiques the perspective of the wealthy organizations, who think in “win-win” terms, a concept borrowed from Stephen Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Win-win thinking signifies only looking for solutions in which both sides can be said to profit and ignoring or rejecting other possibilities. Justin Rosenstein began his career helping develop projects like Google Drive, Gmail Chat, and the “like” button at Facebook. He lives modestly and decided to move on by devoting himself to the company Asana, which sells collaboration software to companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Dropbox.