In our own time, the thought leaders have often been deployed to help us see problems in precisely the opposite way. They are taking on issues that can easily be regarded as political and systematic—injustice, layoffs, unaccountable leadership, inequality, the abdication of community, the engineered precariousness of ever more human lives—but using

When I got on the mobility escalator, all the things along that journey that helped propel me forward in many ways either aren’t there anymore, or are weaker, or in fact they would push me backwards.” The delicate art of a night like this, he said, was to make the plutocrats “feel good about America” and make them “feel good about themselves,” and,

Purdue Pharma and its affiliated companies, and for American society, in the case of a painkiller called OxyContin, which it began to sell in 1996.

McKinsey and the protocols more generally was being urged to spit out a preternaturally confident answer to something he knew nothing about.

above all, that generosity is a substitute for and a means of avoiding the necessity of a more just and equitable system and a fairer distribution of power.

The people with the most to lose from genuine social change have placed themselves in charge of social change, often with the passive assent of those most in need

one-fifth of one’s customers providing most of one’s revenue, to cite the most common example. The protocols told the problem-solving swashbuckler that it was possible to swoop in, find that 20 percent, turn some dials in that zone, and unleash great results. These tricks were not about looking at a problem holistically, comprehensively, from vario

of intellectual counteroffer—the idea, say, of using Big Data to better compensate star teachers and weed out bad ones. On the question of extreme wealth inequality, a critic might call for economic redistribution or even racial reparations. A thought leader, by contrast, could opine on how foundation bosses should be paid higher salaries so that t

In our era that harm is the concentration of money and power among a small few, who reap from that concentration a near monopoly on the benefits of change. And do-gooding pursued by elites tends not only to leave this concentration untouched, but actually to shore it up.