Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Carol Hanisch: “Personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.” It was an important and fruitful idea in February 1969. It helped people to see that things that happened in the quiet of personal life, and yet happened over and over again at the scale

It beamed out so many thoughts about why the world was getting better in recent years that its antennae failed to detect all the incoming transmissions about all the people whose lives were not improving,

Women’s equality, it was now said, was a $28 trillion opportunity. This had become a near-constant refrain in MarketWorld—some permutation of the words “women,” “equality,” and “trillion.” If the logic of our time had applied to the facts of an earlier age, someone would have put out a report suggesting that ending slavery was great for reducing th

not-too-distant future might not have steady work available to them. To him, this coming future was both an entertainment problem (how would we occupy the minds of all those people?) and a political one (how would we keep them from revolting?).

what was once called the sharing economy, he began to see through the fantasy-speak.

The panel members saw themselves as above and apart from fearful, conflictual politics. Their politics was technocratic, dedicated to discovering right answers that were knowable and out there, and just needed to be analyzed and spreadsheeted into being. Their politics had borrowed from the business world the pleasantness and mutualism of the win-w

The business has to earn a good sustained return, and we’re in it for the long run, and we’re building a great company,” he said, “rather than this notion that it’s the stock market vote every day that determines whether you’re succeeding or not.”

Giving back, he wrote, is

entire society twisted to serve the interests of its most powerful group.