Michael

“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.”
― Anand Giridharadas, 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?”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“As I read Thomas Piketty’s masterpiece, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, I came upon a line that brought the purpose of my own book into focus. “Whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable,” Piketty writes, “depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“There is tremendous pressure to turn thoughts into commodities—into tiny, usable takeaways, into Monday morning insights for the CEO, into ideas that are profitable rather than compelling for their own sake.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World