Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

And so the crux of it is, in order to reduce inequality, we actually have to talk about redistribution. We have to talk about equity. And that will impact them.” What

People, especially the winners who shape tastes and patronize thought leaders, want things to be constructive, uplifting, and given to hope.

Renzi dropped a casual aside in talking about his labor-market reforms that reflected another aspect of the globalist consensus. He said Italy’s rewriting, the previous year, of its hiring-and-firing laws had finally caught the country up to the standards of Germany and Britain. He added, “Obviously, U.S.A. arrived to this point twenty years ago.”

Lawrence Summers, the economist who formerly ran the U.S. Treasury and Harvard University, wrote his own apologia in the Financial Times, calling for an end to “reflex internationalism” and for a new, “responsible nationalism”: A new approach has to start from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximise the welfare of citize

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,

When a society solves a problem politically and systemically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen. It is saying what it believes through what it does. Cordelli argues that this right to speak for others is simply illegitimate when exercised by a powerful private citizen.

an idea that gives hope while challenging nothing.

Finally, Porter spoke of how the spread of the financial vernacular of the protocols had caused companies to be run more and more for the sake of shareholders rather than for workers

entrenched populists to become president; Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, who styled his own career on the pro-market progressivism that Clinton called the “Third Way”; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian minister and World Bank official, often seen in Aspen and at TED and elsewhere along the MarketWorld circuit, who had recently joine

Now she found herself up against the ultimate win-losey opponent, though this time of the race-baiting, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist sort. Donald Trump had harnessed an intuition that those people who believed you could crusade for justice and get super-rich and save lives and be very powerful and give a lot back, that you could have it all and