In Winners Take All, Anand Giridharadas details the inequalities in America and their relationship to the country’s political, economic, and social systems. For example, in the US, productivity rose 72% between 1973-2014, and yet worker pay rose only 9%. The US also spends the most on healthcare per capita among OECD countries, and yet we rank 46th globally in life expectancy and don’t crack the Top 25 in the Bloomberg Global Health Index. The author uses these and numerous other examples to demonstrate America’s
“winner take all” system, in which most of the economic gains accrue to a select few, while the country’s public services – education, transportation, health, for example – are perennially underfunded.
Giridharadas points to American history to demonstrate how this has not always been the case. In the decades following World War II, the US experienced strong antitrust regulations, high unionization, and tax rates as high as 91% to fund public services, and yet the country experienced an economic boom and improvements in wellbeing for many Americans.
The author ties the current disparities to a mindset dating back to Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth. Carnegie held the view that in a capitalist economy, there is a zero-sum tension between capital and labor, and society would be better off with wealth accruing primarily to the capital owners. With this mindset, he justified dramatic wage cuts and arduous working conditions while he built his fortune, espousing the philosophy of “build as much wealth as aggressively as possible and donate it later.” Giridharadas is cynical of this brand of “philanthropy,” calling out those who built their fortunes by cutting costs Jack Welch-style (i.e., keeping wages stagnant, outsourcing, layoffs). In his eyes, these individuals amass enormous fortunes at the expense of labor and become self-appointed “stewards of change,” while their philanthropy tends to maintain the status quo for most of society.
The book’s underlying theme is that we need to focus more on finding and addressing root causes of societal issues in our political and economic systems, rather than just targeting our efforts towards band-aid solutions. While the author intentionally doesn’t dive deeply into solutions, he references Germany’s practice of codetermination, in which labor has meaningful representation on corporate boards. Codetermination has led to a constructive relationship between capital and labor in Germany, in contrast to the antagonism between unions and corporations in the US.
The theme of Winners Take All is a major reason I was excited to join Re:Build Manufacturing. Re:Build’s Principles promote stakeholder capitalism, long term-ism, and mutual benefit, standing in direct contrast to Carnegie’s zero-sum beliefs. We can set an example of doing business differently – collaboratively and for the benefit of not only shareholders but also our suppliers, customers, communities, and all employees – and our country will be better for it.
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