Winners Take All

Winners Take All helps you see the ultra-rich in a more accurate light by identifying their shady strategies, including using the idea of “making the world a better place” as a front that only serves as a way to solidify their wealth and power.

Hilary Cohen was a recently graduated philosophy major who was curious about what to do with her future after the recent recession. Knowing she wanted to make a positive difference in the world, the only question was how. Entrepreneurship, and using it’s principles to help stop inequality, seemed like the best answer.

Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last few decades, you know how bad inequality has become. It’s gotten especially bad in the US where searches for the word doubled in just the four years between 2010 and 2014.

In that same year, an article came out identifying just how bad it had become. The research discovered that people getting into the top 10% of earners would make double the amount they would have if they had done the same thing in 1980.

But the bottom half of people would only make a total of $200 more.

So it made sense for Cohen to join a management consultancy firm. After all, what’s the harm in using business principles to help alleviate the social issues in the world?

Well, hidden behind this idea is the thought patterns of neoliberalism. It’s centered around the free market, which values little economic regulation and letting prices be governed by what people want and need.

According to the author, we may think this makes people happy, but it’s actually a huge risk because of the way it helps people in power stay in their positions.

You’ve got to love Stephen Covey’s classic self-improvement book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s been one of my favorites since I first read it as a teenager. But one of the habits, “Think Win-Win” is dangerous when business elites apply it. If everyone can be a winner then in these people’s minds whatever benefits them also helps everybody else. With this mindset, it seems like the process of social progress is simple, painless, and without any sacrifice. It seems like a no-brainer that if businesses profit, everyone does. In the real world, however, things aren’t working out in favor of this mentality. Take a problem like productivity. Seems simple enough, right? A Silicon Valley go-getter might think it’s a great idea to build software that helps people and companies improve their efficiency. Couldn’t everyone can benefit from something like that? It turns out this approach is solving the wrong problem. Productivity has already been increasing dramatically in the last few…