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“There were many things that business traditionally did to support the community, from training people to whole sets of other activities that they sort of took responsibility for, which we call investing in the commons,” Porter said. By commons he meant the shared assets of a place—things such as public schools that both industry and average people benefit from. “As people got disconnected from locations, business stopped really reinvesting in that. They thought their job was globalizing.”
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
“Was it more important to make it easier for Etsy to do good, or rather to make it harder for ExxonMobil to do harm? Was it possible to do both?”
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
“Generosity is not a substitute for justice, but here, as so often in MarketWorld, it was allowed to stand in. The institutions that benefited from the Sacklers’ largesse have shown little interest in demanding that they atone for any role they might have played in fomenting a national crisis”
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
“The “conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionized,” he wrote. Inequality is a better thing than it may seem, Carnegie explained: “The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us to-day measures the change which has come with civilization. This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial.” Stratification was the price of the onward chugging of progress.”
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
“When elites solve public problems privately, they can do so in ways that contribute to democracy, and they can do so in ways that disrupt it. The former occurs when elite help “contributes to and enlarges the public goods provided by the state, and attends to interests not readily provided for by the state.” But the same elite help, backed by the same noble intentions, can instead “disrupt” democracy when it “replaces the public sphere with all manner of private initiatives for special public purposes.” These latter works don’t simply do what government cannot do. They “crowd out the public sector, further reducing both its legitimacy and its efficacy, and replace civic goals with narrower concerns about efficiency and markets.”
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
― Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
Michael’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Michael’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
221 books
|
93 friends
184 books
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76 friends
50 books
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5 friends
178 books
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85 friends
132 books
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22 friends
84 books
|
118 friends
176 books
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190 friends
172 books
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25 friends
More friends…
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