One Of The Most Perceptive and Profound Interviews
From the Amanpour PBS episode aired Sept. 19, 2018
All right let's first start with this thesis of yours. But let's kind of explain it in something that happened recently- Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. I think he's worth something around 162 billion dollars depending on what the stocks are doing today. He says he's going to focus his philanthropic efforts on two things homelessness and dealing with low income kids in education.
He's going to put two billion dollars up there what's what's not to like?
ANAND:
Jeff Bezos is joining the ranks of a very widespread tendency in our time which is the winners of our age giving. 184 people have signed the Giving Pledge to give the majority of their assets away. But it's not just billionaires like Bezos It's every young person on these elite college campuses who wants to change the world and start a social enterprise and join the social enterprise club and go to Africa and volunteer.
We actually live in an age in which elites whether they're an elite graduate or all the way up to the richest men on earth are very consumed with trying to make a difference.
But.
Often when rich people step into social problems and try to make a difference they do so in ways that are designed to avoid threatening their own privilege and to actually preserve the systems that keep them on top. And if you're the richest man in the world who's built one of the most dynamic original innovative companies on earth it seems to me you can do more than treat symptoms.
You could actually start to ask questions like I imagine he would ask if this was a business problem.
Why do we have homelessness in America.
Why do we have an education problem for poor kids.
If you start to ask yourself questions like that as a privileged person, as a billionaire you might start to say well you know we have homelessness in part because if you don't pay people enough they get evicted. That's one source of homelessness.
We also have homelessness because a lot of companies in America don't pay the full measure of taxes that they ought to pay. So then that follows through Amazon which he runs.
AMANPOUR:
Right.
What are the steps that Amazon could take or what that he could drive Amazon to take that would get to that root problem that you're talking about instead of the symptom.
ANAND:
I think he would have to look within and yes look at Amazon's practices but frankly go broader to look at why is it as a society that we are able to pay people so little that they can work one two three four jobs and still make it you know have it hard to make ends meet.
And that's happening at Amazon but that's happening across our economy.
Why don't we have a higher minimum wage while unions have been bludgeoned over the last generation. The collective bargaining power of workers has been decimated and thinking about how you rebuild that thinking about how you help reinvent the collective bargaining of the future but also push back against those who've tried to destroy unions.
That's the kind of thing that you don't generally see rich people supporting because it would come at the expense of their own interests.
Well one of the lines of thinking that the givers the winners are saying is listen we are coming in to try to fill a gap that the public sphere has failed that there is a you know we have these children that are having disparate outcomes in education because of the schools that they went to.
AMANPOUR:
Right.
And they're saying I'm not the Department of Education but I still want to help these kids.
ANAND:
Rich people have have through their business lobby through their companies through their personal campaign contributions have fought tooth and nail for 30 or 40 years for a world in which government has less resources because of tax cuts that benefit them.
Government regulates less and therefore social problems fester.
The government no longer does anything about it and then with those social problems festering we have a government starved for resources to deal with them.
Guess who comes along and says Oh what a shame the government can't do anything.
Let me do it.
AMANPOUR:
Now there's an excerpt from your book and read out says many millions of Americans on the left and right feel one thing in common that the game is rigged against people like them.
ANAND:
The system in America and around the world has been organized to siphon the gains from innovation upward.
It's no wonder that the American voting public like other people around the world have turned more resentful and suspicious.
AMANPOUR:
In recent years. Did the president tap into it. Did he understand that this was the frustration.
ANAND:
I think he tapped into an intuition that all these elites claiming that everything was going to be fine for people didn't match what was actually going on in people's lives.
And he saw that and he spoke to it.
But then he didn't he wasn't just the the exposer he became the exploiter instead of actually going after the causes of those things who actually moved all those jobs from Youngstown overseas who actually you know was responsible for the great deindustrialization of the Rust Belt.
Instead of doing that he turned around that anger and said you know Muslims gosh you got to got to get angry about those Muslims or or you know immigrants.
Immigrants are the ones doing this or the way he denigrated women and others he diverted.
And then finally the exposer the exploiter the embodiment he became the embodiment of the very kind of fake billionaire a change agent that he exposed because he came into office talking about fighting for the common man.
And even after everything he'd said in the campaign he could have come into office and built things for America. He could have built bridges put his name on them you would've been a very happy guy.
But instead he has used his time in office to enrich himself promote his own hotels and essentially aggrandize the name Trump while pretending to fight for others.
And that tendency in our culture did not begin with Donald Trump.
AMANPOUR:
You're talking about winner take all really in the philanthropic space in that arena has it also pervaded into politics.
I find it so fascinating all this conversation now about who will be the saviors from Trump for the left.
We've talked about Howard Schultz billionaire.
We've talked about Michael Bloomberg that's the kind of latest one we're talking about.
Whatever you think of those people.
Look at yourself what is it in us.
That gravitates to these billionaire sugar daddies and sugar mommies when we feel scared for our society.
ANAND:
I'm trying to point us to a cultural tendency that is not about party and is not about whether Donald Trumps a good guy or a bad guy or any of the other people I named.
But now we don't look for people we don't look for MLK anymore. We don't look for people who can build movements we don't lead. We don't look for people who can organize like Cesar Chavez.
We look for people who are rich as a measure of character and a measure of their ability to save us.
And we need to stop looking to be saved by rich people we need to stop waiting for trickle down change somebody's going to come back and say I am giving opportunities to people who never had them.
Whether I'm working with girls in villages in developing parts of the world.
Look I'm not their government I can't change those things but I can help the situations or maybe if I'm providing malaria nets you know there's hard data that shows that quality of life is improving health outcomes are improving.
AMANPOUR:
What's so wrong with that.
It is better to give those malaria nets than not.
It is better to help those girls than not the marginal Act is good.
ANAND:
What I'm concerned with is the system in which you are raping and pillaging economically.
Paying people as little as you can.
Paying as few taxes as you can.
Routing your money through a double dutch with an Irish sandwich tax maneuver to avoid paying your fair share of taxes.
You do all those things you then donate to this charity and you get a tax deduction for it.
By the way.
But you're also part of the reason why our foreign aid budget isn't what it could be because you did all those things to avoid the government having money.
You are part of why those kids that you're trying to help in inner city Detroit you're part of why their lives go the way they do because you refuse to employ their parents in a steady way and pay them proper benefits.
So what I'm advocating for is people owning the fullness of their contribution to the world not allowing a single gesture over here to define them but asking were you involved with the problems.
AMANPOUR:
And how could you get your whole life your regular life on the side of justice not just your side hustle. What is your own role in this.
You are whether you like it or not a thought leader not in the derogatory sense that you're saying and right so what are you willing to sacrifice what are you willing to do.
What have you identified as your role in this system.
ANAND:
I spent a long time thinking about whether to write this book.
It's not convenient to criticize the richest and most powerful people in the world.
It's not convenient to go after people whose names are on you know half the buildings that I enter and exit every day who you know have made philanthropic gifts to the news organizations that I write for.
I mean this is not convenient.
I actually deeply believe that societies can make enormous can make very bad choices for long periods of time because of something as flimsy as myths.
Because of a belief that is actually so so ethereal that Mark Zuckerberg is what change looks like because of a belief that you know a billionaire second generation tycoon from Queens is a champion for the common man.
I really look at this country and think we've all been hoodwinked by a story about what change looks like that's simply not true.
And that versus other stories of what changes look like that we do know about the civil rights movement the fight for women's rights the fight for our voting rights most if you ask yourself.
Anybody listening to this ask yourself what did you do today and how many of those things would you not have been able to do 50 or 100 years ago right.
Many of your viewers may not have been able to work in the job they do depending on their identity a certain number of years ago they may not be in this country.
Depending on policy they may not have been able to vote.
They may not have been able to sit at a restaurant counter and how do we change all this.
Why were you able to do all those things today that you wouldn't have been able to do in the past.
Because rich people throw you some scraps?
I don't think so.
You were able to do those things because people organized,
They marched, they fought.
They spoke truth to power.
They sacrificed and they forced powerful people to concede what was dear to them.
They forced frankly sacrifice or overrunning power to do what was right and advance the common welfare.
And I think we've lost that whole vocabulary in a blizzard of vocabulary about leverage and scale and synergies and efficiency that is very good at solving some kinds of problems but doesn't actually comport with what it takes to advance social progress.
AMANPOUR:
What are the solutions that those individuals and others should take.
What are steps that they can take now either in policy prescriptions or lobbying and sacrifices that they can make that would be part of this much larger systemic solution that you're asking for.
ANAND:
There's a fascinating movement that I write about in the book called B Corp benefit corporations.
These are companies that voluntarily certify themselves as not being evil not being predatory not dumping externalities into society.
They pay people while they respect the environment.
They don't cause social problems.
That's great.
I think an interesting idea that's emerging is Elizabeth Warren has a proposal to require every company in America to be a benefit corporation and that may be too far but I think an interesting half measure would be to give a corporate tax break to companies that don't dump social problems into our laps relative to companies that do.
That's an idea and I think there's we need to really think about civic participation again and that's all the people running for office particularly the record number of women running.
But there's another thing you know I think for young people when young people see a problem in the world that they want to do something about they have been trained by this kind of business culture of the last generation to think of private business fixes.
Right.
You see a problem I think on the side of cupcake comfort company that donates to that problem or or you see a problem is eminent started charter school.
I think we need to shift our orientation when you see a social problem.
Think of what a public democratic universal and institutional solution to that problem would be what would solve that problem at the root.
And for everybody I think we should think about things like people who do public service.
We absorb their tuition debt as a society let people who teach or serve on city councils or serve on county councils or work as an activist perhaps. Let's absorb their tuition and people who want to go work in finance.
Great.
Good for you.
But you pay a little more for your for your education.
I think there are a lot of things we can do.
To reorient this country to being more public spirited again you know in every every age has its own kind of temper.
And I think part of what I'm arguing is that we're living in a world in which we have over indexed on private endeavor.
We've created amazing things private.
We have.
I don't think anybody would say we don't have enough great companies in America.
I don't think anybody would say we haven't innovated enough.
We haven't come up with enough great stuff.
The problem is we haven't made all that work for regular people so that we have not just innovation but progress if progress is defined as most people getting ahead.
And I think that the temper of this time that is coming, I would say almost the post Trump era, looking ahead is that it needs to be an age of reform and I think we're simply overdue for another age of reform in American life.
AMANPOUR:
Thanks for joining us.
ANAND:
Thank you so much.
- Anand Giridharadas is author of "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World"
My take: It is about time someone questioned today's philanthropy in light of our failing systemic efforts for the common good. He is saying things here I've wanted to say about today's philanthropy really being a band-aid instead of a real systemic solution that lasts and solves the problem as if we really want to solve the problem more long term and more for the good of everyone. The billonaires look good giving but they have realized it takes only so much money to bring happiness. What is really at work here today and isn't this the less intelligent, less effective short-ranged top-heavy-handed way of solving our problems.
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