MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government and think tanks. It has its own thinkers, whom it calls thought leaders, its own language, and even its own territory -- including a constantly shifting archipelago of conferences at which its values are reinforced and disseminated in translated into action. MarketWorld is a network and community but it is also a culture and state of mind.
These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo's reform. [p. 30]
As I read this, I pondered the average age of the people in the advocacy groups in which I participate. I wondered if one of the reasons youth didn't participate in groups challenging the status quo was because they have been indoctrinated in the "Don't be a hater, create!" mentality MarketWorld promotes.
My criticism of the book is that it pulls punches. I had this thought when I glanced at its back cover and saw that Bill Gates, whom I would consider the Grand Poobah, 33rd Level Wizard of MarketWorld, blurbed "In Anand's thought-provoking book his fresh perspectives on solving complex societal problems is admirable. I appreciate his commitment and dedication to spreading social justice."
Microsoft made its money by buying out companies which produced better software and undermining others through monopolistic practices. Note that the latter made the former much easier. Now, Gates wants to do education and public health his way. You can hear all about Gates's philanthropic efforts in Citations Needed Podcast episodes 45 and 46.
Late in the book, Anand summarizes a conversation with Italian political philosopher Chiara Cordelli:
You are worth nothing without society because there can be no hedge fund managers, nor violinists, nor technology entrepreneurs, in the absence of a civilizational infrastructure that we take for granted. "Your life, your talents, what you do could not be possible if they weren't for common institutions," Cordelli says. If the streets weren't safe or the stock markets weren't regulated, it would be harder to make use of one's talents. If banks weren't forced to offer a guarantee of guarding your money, making money would be pointless. Even if your children attended private school, public schools very likely trained some of their teachers, and publicly financed roads connected that island of a school to the grid of the society. Then there is the fact that absent a political system of shared institutions, anyone could dominate anyone. Every person with anything precious to protect would be at constant risk of plunder by everybody else. To live in a society without laws and shared institutions that applied equally to all would be, Cordelli says, to live "dependent on the arbitrary will of another. It would be like a form of servitude.” [p. 259]
But Anand never mentions that violent institutions such as police, prisons, the military, the intelligence services and covert operations agencies are also essential to creating the wealth of the oligarchs, both historically and in our own era. Consult Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa or watch Philippe Diaz's documentary The End of Poverty? or read The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein.
The book has a Twitter account.
The local book club is discussing this via teleconference April 29, 2021, at 10 AM EDT (GMT-4). Contact me if you'd like to participate.
Some of the many quote-worthy passages:
For every thought leader who offered advice and how to build a career in a merciless a new economy, there were many less-heard critics aspiring to make the economy less merciless. [p. 90]
[Jacob Hacker, the Yale University political scientist,] argues that this hesitancy and “loss of faith in government has hugely asymmetric effects on the two parties.” He said, “For Republicans and the right it is -- for the most part, though not always -- conducive to their aims because if government doesn't do things, it can often be consistent with what they would like to see happen. But for the left and for Democrats, it's a huge loss, because their vision of a good society is one in which a lot of valuable public goods and benefits have their foundations in government action.” [p. 239]
[President Bill Clinton] described the [Clinton Global Initiative]'s model of extrademocratic partnership as “living proof that good people, committed to creative cooperation, have almost unlimited positive impact to help people today and give our kids better tomorrows.” Then he added an astonishing aside: “This is all that does work in the modern world.” [p 234]
For people to question this view is not to deny the good it is capable of doing, any more than to question monarchy is to say that kings always botch up the economy. It is to say that it does not matter what kind of job the king is doing. It is to say that even the best he can do is not good enough, because of how it is done:; the insulation, the chancing of everything on the king’s continued beneficence, the capacity of royal mistakes to alter lives they should not be touching. Similarly, to question the doing-well-by-doing-good-globalists is not to doubt their intentions or results. Rather, it is to say that even when all those things are factored in, something is not quite right in believing they are the ones best positioned to affect meaningful change. To question their supremacy is very simply to doubt the proposition that what is best for the world just so happens to be what the rich and powerful think it is. It is to say that you don't want to confine your imagination of how the world might be to what can be done with their support. It is to say that a world marked more and more by private greed and the private provision of public goods is a world that doesn't trust the people, in their collective capacity, to imagine another kind of society into being. [p. 244]
Updated May 19, 2021. Episode "(S32 E18) Burger Kings" of The Simpsons reminded me of Anand Giridharadas's book. - Entry in IMDB
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