Michael

“In a bygone era government was solely responsible for addressing the Nation’s biggest problems, from building the interstate highway system to the New Deal social programs. However, today’s challenges are more complicated and interconnected than ever before and cannot be solved by a single actor or solution. That is why government has an opportunity to engage with the actors in the Impact Economy from non-profits to businesses.”
― Anand Giridharadas, 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”
― Anand Giridharadas, 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.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

“A company not run purely in shareholders’ interests risked lawsuits from its investors. The dominant interpretation of corporate law, as we’ve seen, has since the 1970s come to regard companies’ first duty as being to earn a profit for shareholders. A company that put social goals ahead of business ones had no clear place in this regime.”
― Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World