Anand Giridharas & the scandal of Elite seminal malfeasance

Anand Giridharas has a new book out from which the Guardian published this extract- 

A successful society is a progress machine. It takes in the raw material of innovations and produces broad human advancement. America’s machine is broken. The same could be said of others around the world. And now many of the people who broke the progress machine are trying to sell us their services as repairmen.

So, Anand tells us that America used to be 'progress machine'. Economists speak of the 'Great Compression'- i.e. reduced income and wealth inequality- in racist post-war countries. This ended a couple of years after Jim Crow restrictions and Racist immigration laws were lifted. Some economists believe that White people lost interest in redistribution once they saw that colored people would benefit disproportionately. Furthermore, the 'brain drain' from countries like Anand's ancestral homeland to advanced countries like the US, reduced the need for nurturing indigenous talent. It so happens that Indians in the US count as an affluent community. They, simply by existing, contribute to increased inequality.

Anand tells us that some guys broke America's progress machine. They are now offering to repair it- which is nice of them. After all, they must remember where they bunged the spanner which gummed up the works. Who could be better qualified to do the job? After all, we can easily check to see if they make good on their offer. Why not let them get on with the job?

Anand takes a different view. He thinks smart people who have done well shouldn't fix 'progress machines' because...urm...well, they just shouldn't, okay?

When the fruits of change have fallen on the US in recent decades, the very fortunate have basketed almost all of them.

If the 'very fortunate' were responsible for the change, then their 'basketing' its fruits represents their motivation. A guy who grows tomatoes, baskets those tomatoes. If other people basket it, he stops growing tomatoes.

 For instance, the average pretax income of the top 10th of Americans has doubled since 1980, that of the top 1% has more than tripled, and that of the top 0.001% has risen more than sevenfold – even as the average pretax income of the bottom half of Americans has stayed almost precisely the same. These familiar figures amount to three-and-a-half decades’ worth of wondrous, head-spinning change with zero impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans. Globally, over the same period, according to the World Inequality Report, the top 1% captured 27% of new income, while the bottom half of humanity – presently, more than 3 billion people – saw 12% of it. 

Indeed. That is what happened. One result is that ordinary people all over the world now want their kids to study Sciencey stuff and get into these new hi-tech industries. But, Sciencey stuff is hard.

That vast numbers of Americans and others in the west have scarcely benefited from the age is not because of a lack of innovation, but because of social arrangements that fail to turn new stuff into better lives.

So 'social arrangements' are at fault. But these 'social arrangements' were not created by Sciencey guys. It was big fat politicians and lard-ass bureaucrats and shrill Academicians and a whole host of the 'great and good' who screwed up in that departments.

For example, American scientists make the most important discoveries in medicine and genetics and publish more biomedical research than those of any other country – but the average American’s health remains worse and slower-improving than that of peers in other rich countries, and in some years life expectancy actually declines.

Cuba had a food availability deficit after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Health outcomes improved because people ate less of the things they liked and took more exercise.
American health outcomes would improve if it had a food availability deficit and a gas shortage.

American inventors create astonishing new ways to learn thanks to the power of video and the internet, many of them free of charge – but the average US high-school leaver tests more poorly in reading today than in 1992.

Because teachers are basketing all the fruits of change and living high on the hog on their million dollar bonuses.  What's that? Teachers aren't paid mega-bucks? Well, then it must be the administrators who are getting rich. Clearly the 'social arrangements' in Public Schools need to be reformed. However, it certainly wasn't the 1% broke that particular 'progress machine'.

The country has had a “culinary renaissance”, as one publication puts it, one farmers’ market and Whole Foods store at a time – but it has failed to improve the nutrition of most people, with the incidence of obesity and related conditions rising over time.

My obesity and related conditions have been rising over time because I'm a greedy slob. There is a Whole Foods 5 minutes walk from me, but the McDonalds and KFC are just a minute away. Fuck it, I'll just order a pizza coz I can't be arsed to put on trousers.

The share of young people who own a business has fallen by two-thirds since the 1980s. America has birthed both a wildly successful online book superstore, Amazon, and another company, Google, that has scanned more than 25m books for public use – but illiteracy has remained stubbornly in place, and the fraction of Americans who read at least one work of literature a year has dropped by almost a quarter in recent decades.

I haven't read a book for ages. Netflix is just so much better.

The government has more data at its disposal and more ways of talking and listening to citizens – but only a quarter as many people find it trustworthy as did in the tempestuous 1960s.

Coz every other Netflix series is about evil Government agencies in cahoots with the Lizard People from Planet X.

Meanwhile, the opportunity to get ahead has been transformed from a shared reality to a perquisite of already being ahead. Among Americans born in 1940, those raised at the top of the upper middle class and the bottom of the lower middle class shared a roughly 90% chance of realising the so-called American dream of ending up better off than their parents. Among Americans born in 1984 and maturing into adulthood today, the new reality is split-screen. Those raised near the top of the income ladder now have a 70% chance of realising the dream. Meanwhile, those close to the bottom, more in need of elevation, have a 35% chance of climbing above their parents’ station.

To get to the top of the income ladder involves moving to areas which are booming. Those at the bottom of the ladder couldn't or wouldn't move out of declining regions. It is not surprising that this should affect their children's life-chances.

And it is not only progress and money that the fortunate monopolise: rich American men, who tend to live longer than the average citizens of any other country, now live 15 years longer than poor American men, who endure only as long as men in Sudan and Pakistan.

To monopolise something means to keep it all to oneself. Rich American men do not 'monopolise' longevity. There are very poor men all over the world who live very long lives because of their genetic endowment and healthy life-style. Some rich American men make bad life-style choices and die young. So do many poor American men. In the latter case, one should certainly look at 'social arrangements'. Why is it that a particular segment of the male population in America has higher life expectancy if incarcerated than if left free?

Thus many millions of Americans, on the left and right, feel one thing in common: that the game is rigged against people like them. Perhaps this is why we hear constant condemnation of “the system”, for it is the system that people expect to turn fortuitous developments into societal progress.

The 'system' that confronts poor Americans is bureaucratic and legalistic, not technocratic and entrepreneurial. There are 'for profit' penal and educational institutions but they can 'game the system' in a mischievous manner precisely because they are rent seeking enclaves protected from the Market.

Instead, the system – in America and across much of the world – has been organised to siphon the gains from innovation upward, such that the fortunes of the world’s billionaires now grow at more than double the pace of everyone else’s, and the top 10% of humanity have come to hold 85% of the planet’s wealth.

America has one system, Europe another. Asia and Africa have diverse systems. Who went around 'organizing' all these different systems to benefit a racially and culturally diverse bunch of billionaires? Either the thing happened spontaneously- perhaps as an unintended side-effect- or there is a secret global cabal which can read our thoughts unless we put on our tin-foil hats.

The rise of the billionaire has to do with problems arising out of the 'divorce between ownership and control' back in the Seventies and Eighties. Essentially, the Pension funds and Insurance companies who owned the big Corporations felt they weren't getting a good return on their investment. Management was busy featherbedding the workforce while using the Corporate jet to go party hearty on the Company's dime. It was in this context that the billionaire emerged as the savior of the institutional investor. Naturally, this involves periodic anal rape but, I suppose, it helps pass the time.

New data published this week by Oxfam showed that the world’s 2,200 billionaires grew 12% wealthier in 2018, while the bottom half of humanity got 11% poorer.

 What the report actually says is 'between the middle of 2017 and the middle of 2018 the total dollar wealth of the bottom half of humanity – some 3.8 billion people – fell by around 11 per cent.' Why did this happen? The answer is that 'the soggy' dollar surged over precisely that time-frame while asset bubbles in emerging economies let to steep depreciation. It is easy to come up with sensationalist figures like this by just cherry-picking data. The thing is wholly meaningless. 

We expect the average billionaire to make better decisions than a bureaucrat or a politician about complex technical things. That's why we want the billionaire to control a lot of assets. Poor people are often forced to hold assets with a negative real return for precautionary reasons. One way 'social arrangements' can be improved is by 'risk pooling' and thus creating fungible assets that ordinary people can hold. The problem with this approach is that politicians and bureaucrats can divert the funds thus created to benefit themselves or back their own crazy schemes. 

It is no wonder, given these facts, that the voting public in the US (and elsewhere) seems to have turned more resentful and suspicious in recent years, embracing populist movements on the left and right, bringing socialism and nationalism into the centre of political life in a way that once seemed unthinkable, and succumbing to all manner of conspiracy theory and fake news.

The Oxfam report is fake news. So is this article. It says billionaires broke the 'progress machine'- whereas what actually happened was that 'social arrangements' were distorted by politicians and bureaucrats and academics and the chattering classes.

There is a spreading recognition, on both sides of the ideological divide, that the system is broken, that the system has to change.

Recognition means properly identifying something or someone. My greeting the Pizza guy as Beyonce does not constitute recognition. Rather, it is evidence of extreme mental infirmity or the usage of mind altering drugs.

Some elites faced with this kind of gathering anger have hidden behind walls and gates and on landed estates, emerging only to try to seize even greater political power to protect themselves against the mob. (We see you, Koch brothers!)

Very poor people like me have 'hidden behind walls and gates' coz not having walls means passersby can see us in our undies. Also, we'd get very wet if it started to rain.
The Koch brothers don't fear the mob. They did not believe Obama was actually a Communist 'sleeper agent'. The Tea Party voiced outrage at a bailout for Bankers. That is how it gained traction. It was for small Government- a reasonable demand if 'social arrangements' as embedded in the things the Government provides, had indeed- as Anand suggests- worsened over the last forty years thus causing the 'progress machine' to break.

But in recent years a great many fortunate Americans have also tried something else, something both laudable and self-serving: they have tried to help by taking ownership of the problem.

There is a long tradition, associated with significant Tax advantages, of setting up philanthropic Foundations to tackle various social problems. Often, private philanthropy has shown the way and the Government has moved in to scale up the solution.

All around us, the winners in our highly inequitable status quo declare themselves partisans of change.

But, Anand tells us, the losers too are partisans of change. It makes sense for the very rich to want to get even richer by fixing a 'progress machine' which is holding back the effective demand of their own market. Why does Anand find this sinister?

They know the problem, and they want to be part of the solution. Actually, they want to lead the search for solutions. They believe their solutions deserve to be at the forefront of social change.

Who doesn't believe their own solution oughtn't to be at the forefront of social change? Nobody says 'I propose that nobody should listen to my suggestion because I'm stupid and don't deserve to be at the forefront of anything'.

They may join or support movements initiated by ordinary people looking to fix aspects of their society. More often, though, these elites start initiatives of their own, taking on social change as though it were just another stock in their portfolio or corporation to restructure.

What's wrong with that? Clearly these guys got rich by caring a lot about stocks and portfolios and so forth. We might say of a carpenter that he 'takes on social change' as though it were a chair whose legs are wobbly. This would not prejudice us against the carpenter. Rather it would convey a mental image of a craftsman who cares deeply about his work who will do something useful for Society.

Because they are in charge of these attempts at social change, the attempts naturally reflect their biases.

Yes. There is a transparency here lacking in bureaucratic or political organisations which obfuscate and occlude their own selfish motives and that of other stakeholders.

For the most part, these initiatives are not democratic, nor do they reflect collective problem-solving or universal solutions.

That's a good thing. Democracy has no means to measure preference intensity and is bedeviled by strategic voting. 'Collective problem-solving' faces the a concurrency problem and is vulnerable to 'McKelvey chaos' in a multi-dimensional decision space susceptible to 'Agenda Control'.

Universal solutions are bad solutions because human life is idiographic not nomothetic.

Rather, they favour the use of the private sector and its charitable spoils, the market way of looking at things, and the bypassing of government.

'Charitable spoils'! Oh dearie, dearie, me! A rich man's money is tainted. It can only become clean and pure if confiscated by the Government. Look at what happens to the money ordinary people pay in taxes. It pays for the 'social arrangements' which, Anand tells us, broke the 'progress machine'.

Suppose we place a 100 % tax on charities. If the rich are seflish, this should have no disincentive effect. But, would 'social arrangements' really improve?

They reflect a highly influential view that the winners of an unjust status quo – and the tools and mentalities and values that helped them win – are the secret to redressing the injustices.

No. The secret to redressing injustice is having an effective Judicial system. Redressing a social evil arising out of bad mechanism design depends on opening up the field for innovation and rewarding and scaling up successful models. A billionaire may fund a Social Entrepreneur for 'proof of concept' but this does not mean that the Government can't then pick up the thing and run with it.

Those at greatest risk of being resented in an age of inequality are thereby recast as our saviours from an age of inequality.

By whom? Name names, Anand. Where are these people who parade through the streets chanting the blessed names of the Divine Gates and the Holy Buffett?

Socially minded financiers at Goldman Sachs seek to change the world through “win-win” initiatives such as “green bonds” and “impact investing”.

'Socially minded'? Goldman Sachs? 1MDB? Is this guy serious? As for 'impact investing', Gates pulled the plug on Davos Man Arif Naqvi's Abraaj fund last year.

Tech companies such as Uber and Airbnb cast themselves as empowering the poor by allowing them to chauffeur people around or rent out spare rooms.

No. They cast themselves as being cheaper or more convenient than the alternative. If they said they were 'empowering the poor' we wouldn't use them coz we don't want smelly homeless guys driving us or sleeping in our spare bedroom.

Management consultants and Wall Street brains seek to convince the social sector that they should guide its pursuit of greater equality by assuming board seats and leadership positions.

The 'social sector' is not pursuing anything at all except more money for itself. It doesn't need persuading to put out to any moneyed dick. However, it does need to drive up the price by pretending to be a tight little virgin.

Conferences and ideas festivals sponsored by plutocrats and big business – such as the World Economic Forum, which is under way in Davos, Switzerland, this week – host panels on injustice and promote “thought leaders” who are willing to confine their thinking to improving lives within the faulty system rather than tackling the faults.

Thankfully, Trump has taken a great big dump on Davos. They started pretending that Chairman Xi was the new Messiah but are now piping small. The thing has turned into a repugnancy market.

Profitable companies built in questionable ways and employing reckless means engage in corporate social responsibility, and some rich people make a splash by “giving back” – regardless of the fact that they may have caused serious societal problems as they built their fortunes. Elite networking forums such as the Aspen Institute and the Clinton Global Initiative groom the rich to be self-appointed leaders of social change, taking on the problems people like them have been instrumental in creating or sustaining.

The Clinton Global Initiative! That's what sunk Hilary. Only losers now sign up for shite like that.

A new breed of community-minded so-called B Corporations has been born, reflecting a faith that more enlightened corporate self-interest – rather than, say, public regulation – is the surest guarantor of the public welfare. A pair of Silicon Valley billionaires fund an initiative to rethink the Democratic party, and one of them can claim, without a hint of irony, that their goals are to amplify the voices of the powerless and reduce the political influence of rich people like them. 

The two billionaires mentioned- one is behind Linkedin, the other is behind Zynga- crashed and burned spectacularly. I suppose there would have been a spin-off benefit for their core business if they'd come up with something innovative or engaging. Still, the thing is stale news. The fact is, one can watch stories produced by them niggah-lovin-Jew-Yorkers while beating one's wife like a red-headed stepchild- even though you are actually her Uncle-brother.

This genre of elites believes and promotes 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.

Okay. These guys may be too stupid to understand the theory of comparative advantage. Still, they have lawyers and lobbyists who work principally through non-market institutions so as to secure their economic rent. If they didn't do so, they soon stop being rich.

The 'systems people have in common' are non-market ones if there is sufficient preference or endowment diversity. But, it was those non-market 'social arrangements' which broke the 'progress machine' and ended the 'Great Compression' by, for example, letting dark skinned people like Anand's parents rise up economically and socially.

This is what I call MarketWorld – an ascendant power elite 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 thinktanks. 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 and translated into action. MarketWorld is a network and community, but it is also a culture and state of mind.

Which has already failed. Anand's book would have been timely if Obama were still in the White House and Tony Blair and the Clinton foundation and Davos Man and so forth were not all irremediably tarnished.

The elites of MarketWorld often speak in a language of “changing the world” and “making the world a better place” – language more typically associated with protest barricades than ski resorts. Yet we are left with the inescapable fact that even as these elites have done much to help, they have continued to hoard the overwhelming share of progress, the average American’s life has scarcely improved, and virtually all of the US’s institutions, with the exception of the military, have lost the public’s trust.

The elites may spend a little time speaking this language as a P.R exercise or because they have nothing better to do. But, they didn't get rich because of their command over this jargon. Rather, it was their ability to leverage a familiarity with some recondite, deeply boring, subject into mega-bucks by fair means or foul which earned them their fortunes. It is true that some such billionaires are still respected because their Corporations continue to innovate and improve the service they offer but the landscape is littered with very rich men who failed to deliver in like terms.

But something of this sort has always happened. There was a time when Henry Ford tried to stop the First World War. He was laughed at. That sort of hubris on the part of the very rich started to decline. However, they have learned one lesson from the Ford Foundation- viz. that it is dangerous to lose control over one's tax avoidance vehicle. The thing could be used against the interests of one's own caste.

One of the towering figures in this new approach to changing the world is the former US president Bill Clinton. After leaving office in 2001, he came to champion, through his foundation and his annual Clinton Global Initiative gatherings in New York, a mode of public-private world improvement that brought together actors like Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation and McDonald’s, sometimes with a governmental partner, to solve big problems in ways plutocrats could get on board with.

Clinton had big legal bills to pay and so he prostituted himself with vim and vigor. But this hurt his wife's shot at the White House. Trump, by contrast, is not known to have ever stooped to Charity.

After the populist eruption that resulted in Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 US election, I asked the former president what he thought lay behind the surge of public anger. “The pain and road rage we see reflected in the election has been building a long time,” he said. He thought the anger “is being fed in part by the feeling that the most powerful people in the government, economy and society no longer care about them or look down on them. They want to become part of our progress toward shared opportunities, shared stability and shared prosperity.” But when it came to his proposed solution, it sounded a lot like the model to which he was already committed: “The only answer is to build an aggressive, creative partnership involving all levels of government, the private sector and nongovernment organisations to make it better.”

In other words, the only answer is to pursue social change outside of traditional public forums, with the political representatives of mankind as one input among several, and corporations having the big say in whether they would sponsor a given initiative or not.

What else could Clinton say? He is no longer a 'political representative of mankind'. The only thing he can do is what he has already been doing.

The public’s anger, of course, has been directed in part at the very elites he had sought to convene, on whom he had gambled his theory of post-political problem-solving, who had lost the trust of so many millions of people, making them feel betrayed, uncared for and scorned.

Clinton, like Obama, wanted to be a two term President. Neither could be an LBJ in a country where white voters believed that 'Great Society' reforms would disproportionately benefit colored people.  No 'Great Compression' was possible because demographic changes had cut off the median voter from the underclass. Trump's victory arose because the median voter also felt cut off from the prosperous Hi-tech or Hi-Finance Coastal elites. Trump had a bricks and mortar business which ordinary people could understand. He was a hero because he'd screwed over the Banks when they tried to hold his feet to the fire. Putting a nigger in the White House hadn't scared Wall Street straight, coz no drama Obama was a very superior kind of Negro gentleman. But putting Trump in the White House might work better because the guy was clearly as crazy as a bedbug and, being just one cheeseburger away from a coronary, had nothing to lose.

What people have been rejecting in the US – as well as in Britain, Hungary and elsewhere – was, in their view, rule by global elites who put the pursuit of profit above the needs of their neighbours and fellow citizens.

Nonsense! Immigration- more particularly that of asylum seekers- is what is being rejected. People like me and Anand might not like to admit this, but it is the truth. 'Global elites' only feature to the extent that they are constituted by people like Soros who care about Human Rights and the Environment and not beating your Sister-Wife like a red headed stepchild while watching the Deathwish reboot.

These were elites who seemed more loyal to one another than to their own communities; elites who often showed greater interest in distant humanitarian causes than in the pain of people 10 miles to the east or west. Frustrated citizens felt they possessed no power over the spreadsheet- and PowerPoint-wielding elites commensurate with the power these elites had gained over them – whether in switching around their hours or automating their plant or quietly slipping into law a new billionaire-made curriculum for their children’s school.

Migration meant that citizens didn't work in factories owned by the elites. That's why the labor movement didn't offer a route to gaining countervailing power. As for 'billionaire-made curriculums'- who gives a toss? What ordinary people want is for teachers to be publicly whipped three times a day till sonny boy larns to rite gud.

What they did not appreciate was the world being changed without them.

Very true! I recall the anti 4G riots which swept the Midwest. People of all walks of life made bonfires of their mobile devices to protest the lack of democratic consultation regarding Multi Frequency Equalisation protocols in the context of OFDMA multi-carrier transmission.      

Which raises a question for all of us: are we ready to hand over our future to the plutocratic elites, one supposedly world-changing initiative at a time?

The answer is no. Don't be silly. In order to do so we'd have to change the Constitution and abolish the Houses of Parliament and reconstitute the Judiciary and have a Referendum which means having to put on our sweatpants and slog down to the voting station- and fuck it who can be arsed?

Are we ready to call participatory democracy a failure, and to declare these other, private forms of change-making the new way forward?

Yes. That's something we can do without getting out of bed. What's more, it won't change anything so, sure, why not?

Is the decrepit state of American self-government an excuse to work around it and let it further atrophy?

If it really were so decrepit, America could open its borders. A wall would only be needed to keep people in.

Or is meaningful democracy, in which we all potentially have a voice, worth fighting for?

No. The result of fighting for meaningful democracy is exactly the same as the result of fighting the Spanish Inquisition. People who initially thought you might be quite amusing start avoiding you and unfriending you on Social Media.

There is no denying that today’s American elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history.

Nonsense! Nineteenth and early twentieth century elites were more socially concerned because they themselves were at risk from epidemics sweeping the Cities from which they derived their wealth or even the resorts where they displayed their riches. Furthermore, the risk of a genuinely Communist political party taking power was much greater.

By contrast today's elites need to keep abreast of technological developments in their own narrow field of an arcane type. From time to time they can play at philanthropy or pretend to have radical ideas. But they soon fall flat on their faces or fuck up in some other way. Their fate is to become the increasingly  irrelevant custodians of fortunes invested by younger, smarter, men.

But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory.

Economists can quantify 'predatory' behavior. Some jurisdictions have laws against 'predatory pricing' and a suitably qualified Statistician might give expert testimony using 'the cold logic of numbers'. It may be that certain near monopolies in Tech areas have had a cozy relationship with Regulators but that has always been the case. The novel feature of today's Billionaires is that Money markets trust them to buy promising 'start ups' more cheaply and profitably than anyone else. However, this does not mean that the start up guy is getting less than he otherwise would. A more contested market would feature more rent dissipation and uncertainty- so he might actually make less or even end up with nothing.
This does not mean the billionaires are on a primrose path. They could easily hit a bad patch and end up marooned on a pile of cash but without any pull in the market. The same thing can happen to a sports star or TV personality who is caught beating her wife while tweeting in a racially offensive manner.
No doubt, a lot of these guys could get caught for tax evasion, or price fixing, or false advertising, if bureaucrats had different incentives. But that's a story about non-market 'social arrangements'.

Consider the following paragraph- it could refer to any elite at any period of history. It is certainly true of the North Korean ruling class-

By refusing to risk its way of life, by rejecting the idea that the powerful might have to sacrifice for the common good, it clings to a set of social arrangements that allow it to monopolise progress and then give symbolic scraps to the forsaken – many of whom wouldn’t need the scraps if society were working right. 

Is there really no difference between the French ancien regime & contemporary tech billionaires? The India from which Anand's parents emigrated corresponds to this description. I recall you couldn't get a phone connection unless you had contacts. There was a ten year waiting list even for a Bajaj scooter. This didn't mean that well connected people couldn't have nice imported goodies. The fruits of progress were available to them. They had electricity and running water and air conditioners running 24/7 while people, lower down in the hierarchy, living a mere block away, sweltered in the heat.

There is a reason India has rejected 'license-permit' Socialism-  which wouldn't give them electricity- and takes pride in Mukesh Ambani's billion dollar residence. The reason is simple. Ambani is showing he means to stay in India. But to stay in India he's going to have sell stuff Indians can afford to buy.

That's all that matters. Is this guy selling something of merchantable quality which I can afford and which is useful to me? If so, well and good. If not, let him take his money and flee the wrath of the taxman.

In India, it was usual to blame the bania (the business man) for all Society's ills. The fact that Mahatma Gandhi was a bania, and the people who funded him belonged to mercantile communities, provides the sub-text to a polemic like the following-

It is vital that we try to understand the connection between these banias' social concern and predation, between the extraordinary helping and the extraordinary hoarding, between the milking – and perhaps abetting – of an unjust status quo and the attempts by the milkers to repair a small part of it. It is also important to understand how the banias see the world, so that we might better assess the merits and limitations of their world-changing campaigns.

I'm sorry. Anand didn't actually write that- well, he did but he said 'elites' not 'banias'. Still, doesn't it seems odd that something which could have been said of pious Hindu or Jain merchants in a still largely feudal, agricultural, country could now be affirmed, 60 years later, about tech billionaires in America?

Furthermore, no Indian gained anything by understanding something false- viz. merchants cause all society's problems. They hoard food. That's why people starve. As for electricity- I yam telling you they are having this big battery under the ground and they steal all the electricity and keep it for themselves. Also, they wake up in the middle of the night and come and steal all the oil in our hair. Furthermore, they suck off our semen thus depleting our virility. Everybody knows that only through retention of semen can one gain super-powers as a Mahatma. Damn those banias! We must teach them a lesson they will never forget by sucking them off so incessantly they beg for mercy! Incidentally, Indiraji, my Daddy was a bania, so you can start with me.

There are many ways to make sense of all this elite concern and predation.

But only one solution. We must suck them all off to death.

One is that the elites are doing the best they can.

Yes! But the way they did it was by sucking us off when we napping. Naturally, this led to some loss of alertness in our waking hours which they took advantage off to steal all the fruits of progress.

The world is what it is, the system is what it is, the forces of the age are bigger than anyone can resist, and the most fortunate are helping.

They are helping only because they have not been reduced to lassitude by being incessantly sucked off anytime they grab forty winks.

This view may allow that elite helpfulness is just a drop in the bucket,

compared to the oceans of our jizz they have greedily swallowed

but reassures itself that at least it is something. The slightly more critical view is that this sort of change is well-meaning but inadequate. It treats symptoms, not root causes – it does not change the fundamentals of what ails us. According to this view, elites are shirking the duty of more meaningful reform.

The problem with this view is that 'meaningful reform' can only be operationalized by prohibitions- like  'stop sucking off poor people while they sleep'- not by obligations. This is because the 'root cause' of a malady must itself be either malum in se-  wrong in itself- or capable of becoming malum prohibitum. Positive duties can be enjoined by statute or by the judgment of a court. However, the obligation-holder can be placed at arms length from the beneficial owner. Thus, it is still the case that 'reform' must identify actions which are wrong in themselves or prohibited by law.

Unfortunately for me, Courts will not entertain my own view of the 'root cause' of like all the bad shit going down. There is no factual evidence that plutocrats routinely suck off poor people while they are asleep. But then, there is no factual evidence that Anand's elites are wholly predatory.

It may be that there are smart lawyers and economists and tech nerds who believe otherwise and who have the chops to assemble that evidence. It may be that Laws have to be tightened up, or that Regulatory Agencies have to be 'de-captured', or that recent advances in the theory of incomplete contracts need to find judicial expression. But that's how actual 'reform' works. It is based on facts, not bombast.

But there is still another, darker way of judging what goes on when elites put themselves in the vanguard of social change: that doing so not only fails to make things better, but also serves to keep things as they are.

What does this cash out as? Elites are stupid. They waste their time doing something which they fail at.
So what? We might worry if starving people keep doing pointless things. But, it its rich dudes engaged in a circle jerk- let them have at it.

After all, it takes the edge off of some of the public’s anger at being excluded from progress.

So- Anand thinks the public is stupid. It gets angry because it is not consulted about the proof of Fermat's last theorem. It feels excluded because it wasn't asked to design the new computer chip. But calms down when some rich people start talking bollocks and fail at helping anybody.

It improves the image of the winners.

Who gives a toss about the image of some rich guy? Only people paid to do so. But other people are paid to manicure his fingernails and manage his combover and wax his butt hole. These guys have shitty jobs but at least, when they come home, they can Netflix & chill.

By using private and voluntary half-measures, it crowds out public solutions that would solve problems for everyone, and do so with or without the elite’s blessing.

Government spending has a crowding out effect because of its power to raise taxes to pay interest on loans. Since the Govt. can't go bankrupt the way a private firm can, private investment can be, domestically, crowded out. Internationally, of course, Governments can go bankrupt and thus their crowding out power- which is that of exporting inflation- is limited.

By contrast, even if all rich people agreed about 'root causes' and backed the same schemes, there would be no crowding out effect. Instead, there would be a crowding in phenomenon, because the market would expect productivity to rise more than proportionately because of external economies of scope and scale.

However, precisely the same thing would happen if the Government had a track-record of innovation in tackling a particular 'root cause'. As Coase's theorem explains, it doesn't matter who owns what- what matters is how resources are allocated.

There is no question that the outpouring of elite-led social change in our era does great good and soothes pain and saves lives.

There is no such evidence. On the other hand, certain technological and scientific breakthroughs may have elite sponsorship. It is unlikely that they will lead to 'social change' because they don't impact on 'social arrangements' except if they have a counter-Malthusian effect in which case there will still be a 20 year lag.

The fact is, when it comes to Project Evaluation, Rossi's Metallic laws still apply. The one prediction we can safely make is that over a long enough time period and a wide enough sample the net effect of any Project whatsoever- be it based on stopping rich people sucking off poor people or something fancier involving mosquito internets powered by green Lantern energy- will be zero.

But we should also recall Oscar Wilde’s words about such elite helpfulness being “not a solution” but “an aggravation of the difficulty”. More than a century ago, in an age of churn like our own, he wrote: “Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.”

Wilde was not an economist and thus did not have the analytical nous to comprehend the true horror of the situation. If he had, he have written 'Just as the worst slave-owners were those who very kindly sucked off their slaves while they were asleep, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it coz Massa enfranchised them and anyway gave great head; so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do the most harm are the people who are constantly sucking us off as a means of trying to be good.'

Wilde’s formulation may sound extreme to modern ears. How can there be anything wrong with trying to do good?

It's coz of all that nocturnal sucking off. Honestly, sometimes I wake up more tired than I was when I went to bed.

The answer may be: when the good is an accomplice to even greater, if more invisible, harm.

Right! These tech billionaires are using their money to turn invisible and then teleporting into my bedroom and sucking me dry night after night. I tell you, I just can't take it anymore! Down with the 1%! Give me back my jizz you scoundrels!

In our era that harm is the concentration of money and power among a small few, who reap from that concentration a near monopoly on the benefits of change.

So the concentration already exists. If it is a harm then its root cause must be found in 'social arrangements' whose dysfuntion predated these billionaire's ascent into plutocracy.

And do-gooding pursued by elites tends not only to leave this concentration untouched, but actually to shore it up.

In which case, they'd save time and potential embarrassment by doing nothing or just hiring P.R guys to handle that side of the business.

For when elites assume leadership of social change, they are able to reshape what social change is – above all, to present it as something that should never threaten winners.

Either leadership of social change is a full time job which demands special skills or it doesn't matter who fills in for the photo op.

Anand is assuming the whole elite can collectively assume leadership. This is certainly possible if they have a hive mind. If they don't they will have to compete for the top job. Such competition could be wasteful or 'rent dissipating'. But it might actually improve efficiency if new techniques or technologies are applied. Now, it may be that the core business of a philanthropist gains by some altruistic 'proof of concept' application. This is simply a case of an externality being internalized. It may be morally wrong to pass it off as something very moral and noble but then the whole Advertising & P.R business- not to mention large chunks of the mainstream media- does nothing else. Everybody already discounts this sort of puffery. Binge watching Netflix dun 'woke' us but good. Not that the rich don't continue to suck us off in our sleep but that's a class action suit just waiting to happen. I want that hot older attorney from the Good Wife. Anyway, that's my pension plan.

In an age defined by a chasm between those who have power and those who don’t, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations.

Why are fundamental power equations really so touchy? I recall, as a young undergraduate at the LSE, walking into a classroom while somewhat inebriated. There was this Professor dude who had written an equation on the blackboard upon which I gazed intently. Suddenly the equation got very upset and started to squirm and squiggle. This caused me to become nauseous. Anyway, I was ejected from the class after I had staggered around vomiting on all present.

Thinking back, I realize the thing I saw on the blackboard must have been one of those 'fundamental power equations' which Anand has interviewed. It must have been a Muslim power equation- Muslims disapprove of drunken people- and judging by the way it started to squirm and squiggle, it was probably trying to turn into Arabic- which is a Muslim language. Now if only I could remember that power-equation, I could use it to become the Caliph. Coz that's how equations work. They tell you how to change things. Thus E=mc squared, enables smart people to convert mass into energy- like in a fission reactor. Obviously, you shouldn't be very very drunk when you approach a fundamental equation coz it might be Muslim and thus could take umbrage and become unreadable. However, members of the elite tend to have a healthy life-style and drink de-caff not Tequila, so they won't upset fundamental power equations if they approach them properly and use the knowledge encoded in them to steal a march over their rivals and gain unheard of power.

Of course, it is possible Anand means something quite different from a mathematical equation. Perhaps he means 'fundamental relations of power'. In that case what he means is 'those enriched by the market must help those impoverished by it only in ways that do not destroy the market and thus their ability to do so'. However, this cashes out X must help Y provided doing so does not make both X and Y and everybody else much worse off.' Put that way, the thing is common sense. There is no need for elites 'to spread the idea' coz nobody is so stupid as to not know it already. This does not mean there can't be a 'tragedy of the commons' such that a rich guy starts distributing money in a street full off poor people and, in vying for his largesse, the poor people end up trampling him and tearing off his clothes and even pieces of his flesh in a competitive frenzy. The outcome is extremely sub-optimal coz the rich guy is now dead and can't return to give away more of his cash but these things can happen when 'fundamental relations of power' are undercut by sheer stupidity.

Society should be changed in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve.

Very true! The underlying economic system involves invisible plutocrats sucking off the sleeping poor. Rich people refuse to admit that the only reason they are 'winners' is coz they drained the rest of us of our virile fluids. Not until Gates & Buffet & the rest of that crew come and apologize to me and hand over all their ill gotten cash will Society be ready to change the underlying economic system coz once I is rich I don't want to be spending my nights sucking off poor people.

The broad fidelity to this law helps make sense of what we observe all around: powerful people fighting to “change the world” in ways that essentially keep it the same, and “giving back” in ways that sustain an indefensible distribution of influence, resources and tools. Is there a better way?

Yes! They must admit to sucking me off!

The secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a research and policy organisation that works on behalf of the world’s richest countries, has compared the prevailing elite posture to that of the fictional 19th-century Italian aristocrat Tancredi Falconeri, from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, who declares: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” If this view is correct, then much of today’s charity and social innovation and buy-one-give-one marketing may not be measures of reform so much as forms of conservative self-defence – measures that protect elites from more menacing change.

WTF? The Neapolitan aristocracy went into terminal decline. It had completely lost its coercive power.
Today's charity is about virtue signalling and competitive status-seeking. It isn't about preventing the hungry proles from storming the Bastille.

Among the kinds of issues being sidelined, the OECD leader wrote, are “rising inequalities of income, wealth and opportunities; the growing disconnect between finance and the real economy; mounting divergence in productivity levels between workers, firms and regions; winner-take-most dynamics in many markets; limited progressivity of our tax systems; corruption and capture of politics and institutions by vested interests; lack of transparency and participation by ordinary citizens in decision-making; the soundness of the education and of the values we transmit to future generations.”

Yup, this Mexican dude is on the money because he helped make all this happen in his home country. He's been at the OECD for 12 years. Much good he has done there.

Elites, he wrote, have found myriad ways to “change things on the surface so that in practice nothing changes at all”.

Actually, this guy changed things. He negotiated NAFTA. He cut the Mexican budget 6 times. Why is this bureaucrat blaming the elites? Still, if 'changing things on the surface' means having a phone which works as opposed to no phone at all, then okay mercantile elites are doing what they are paid to.

The people with the most to lose from genuine social change have placed themselves in charge of social change – often with the passive assent of those most in need of it.

Demographic changes brought on by large scale migration are 'genuine social changes'. It seems there is no 'passive assent' to such migration on the part of voters most affected by it. It is only in this context that there has been a backlash against bien pensant elites.

One genuine social change in America which everybody would find beneficial involves better outcomes for African American males and certain poor White and Hispanic communities. How would such a change hurt the elites? If fewer black men get shot by the police, or end up incarcerated for trivial crimes, okay some tycoon who owns for-profit prisons might go belly up. But everybody else would be better off.

Now, it is true that a Chavez type regime can bring about 'genuine social change' but, even there, the biggest proportionate loss was shouldered by poor working people because their assets are less fungible. The rich got out with some portion of their wealth and were able to use their skills to rebuild their fortunes. Suppose you have ten million but manage to get out with only 80,000. Still, if you have high level skills, you might be back to ten million in ten or twenty years. On the other hand, if you have 80,000 and get out with just a 1000 and low level skills, you will never get back to the level you were at.

It is fitting that an era marked by these tendencies should culminate in the election of Donald Trump.

The era marked by these tendencies culminated in the defeat of Mitt Romney- the source of whose wealth seemed mysterious to most voters. The next era was marked by the emergence of ISIS. People no longer trusted leaders who claimed that what was needed was a deeper understanding of something or the other. Rather, Mr. Harrison's cry 'fuck 'em all to death' gained traction.
Trump was a reality TV star whose business everybody thought they understood. He borrowed money from Banks and put up shiny buildings. Thus he was against the Banks. He used his money to marry beautiful women. That showed he understood the 'genuine social change' people were crying out for- which involves fat and ugly men like me getting to sleep with desirable women. This is the 'fundamental power equation' we want changed. A guy with an ugly wife who keeps giving away money to Charity is just a loser. Trump was a winner. He said 'I will' whereas Obama said 'we can'. Can doesn't cut it. And what is this 'we' shit anyway? You fucking do it. I've got Netflix to watch.

He is at once an exposer, an exploiter and an embodiment of the cult of elite-led social change.

'Elite-led social change'? Are you kidding me? Surely the elite is all granola bars and being super skinny and wearing nerdy glasses and basketball shoes? Trump is a throwback to the Eighties. A slum-landlord made good. But he looks like he might genuinely hate colored people not to mention them Europeans with their fancy-schmancy food and don't get me started on the Chinese.

He tapped, as few before him successfully had, into a widespread intuition that elites were phonily claiming to be doing what was best for most Americans.

Yup. That was the Clinton Initiative in a nutshell.

He exploited that intuition by whipping it into frenzied anger and then directing most of that anger not at elites, but at the most marginalised and vulnerable Americans. And he came to incarnate the very fraud that had fuelled his rise, and that he had exploited.

Quite true. Trump is Mexican. His DNA changed because of this incarnation business which Anand knows about coz he's smart.

He became, like the elites he assailed, the establishment figure who falsely casts himself as a renegade.

Well, till he is impeached, at any rate.

He became the rich, educated man who styles himself as the ablest protector of the poor and uneducated – and who insists, against all evidence, that his interests have nothing to do with the change he seeks.

He also refuses to admit that he sucks off poor people while they are sleeping.

He became the chief salesman for the theory, rife among plutocratic change agents, that what is best for powerful him is best for the powerless too.

He said he was good at making deals. That was his big shtick. Rich guys got rich by being good at making deals. So let rich guys make the deals and the taxpayer will benefit.
Put this way, the thing is plausible. Trump and his rich pals have an incentive to make good deals so as to get re-elected or extend their circle of influence. Poor bureaucrats or lawyer-politicians may not be good at making deals and they may be tempted to feather their retirement nests. Alternatively, they may concentrate on virtue signalling, competing with each other to let in the most refugees and starting new wars for Democracy so yet more refugees are created.

Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of a culture that tasks elites with reforming the very systems that have made them and left others in the dust.

Actually, Trump's background wasn't classy enough for him to have embarked on the traditional cursus honorum. His family had money but nothing like  Rockefeller or Kennedy money. Nor was it political in the manner of Al Gore's family. Trump himself did not have the skills or the savvy to enter local politics. He is the only President to never have received a Government paycheck. He can't be the reductio of anything but he is sui generis. His election says more about the internecine problems of the Republican Party- whose candidates appeared greatly inferior to Hilary- than it does about anything else. No one thought Hilary was a weak candidate till suddenly one wondered how anyone could ever have thought her electable.

One thing that unites those who voted for Trump and those who despaired at his being elected – and the same might be said of those for and against Brexit – is a sense that the country requires transformational reform.

Yes! Plutocrats must be stopped from sucking off poor people while we sleep.

The question we confront is whether moneyed elites, who already rule the roost in the economy and exert enormous influence in the corridors of political power, should be allowed to continue their conquest of social change and of the pursuit of greater equality

by sucking off poor people while they sleep.

 The only thing better than controlling money and power is to control the efforts to question the distribution of money and power

while sucking off poor people while they sleep

. The only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens

by a farmer busy sucking off poor people while they sleep

What is at stake is whether the reform of our common life is led by governments elected by and accountable to the people, or rather by wealthy elites claiming to know our best interests.

Either the reform of our common life is beneficial to us or it isn't. If it is, why should we care who leads it or pretends to lead it? If the guy later comes knocking on our door saying 'guys, I led the reform of our common life. Could you give me some money to show your gratitude?' we can just pretend to be foreigners.

On the other hand, if the reform of our common life is a fucking nuisance invented by some virtue-signalling shithead, we do expect our elected representatives to throw a spanner in the works. Leadership is mostly about getting lunatics to fuck off and go bother somebody else.

We must decide whether, in the name of ascendant values such as efficiency and scale, we are willing to allow democratic purpose to be usurped by private actors who often genuinely aspire to improve things but, first things first, seek to protect themselves.

Private actors are free to stand for election. Anand may not like it, but he must lump it. If he has any evidence that legislative power has been usurped or subverted by private actors seeking to protect themselves let him approach the proper judicial authority.

Yes, the American government is dysfunctional at present. But that is all the more reason to treat its repair as our foremost national priority.

Anand strikes me as a nutter. He is completely undemocratic because he refuses to respond to my repeated emails demanding that he condemn the theft of my sperm by plutocrats. Yet there is nothing I can do to stop Anand from seeking a leadership role in 'repairing the progress machine'.

Pursuing workarounds of our troubled democracy makes democracy even more troubled.

 Anand, I have repeatedly told you our troubled democracy can only be healed if plutocrats are stopped from performing fellation of poor, sleeping, people.

We must ask ourselves why we have so easily lost faith in the engines of progress that got us where we are today – in the democratic efforts to outlaw slavery,

which involved a very costly Civil Law

end child labour

WTF? It wasn't till 1938 that non-agricultural child labour was abolished.  According to an article in the Atlantic, 500,000 children pick about one quarter of all the food produced in the USA.

The fact is America is an outlier in that everything other comparable countries achieved in the Nineteenth or early Twentieth Century, they struggled with for decades. In the end, most achievements turned to ash with a decade or two as the Bench changed its composition and ideological currents shifted.

Each of the achievements Anand mentions also had a side-effect or caused a reaction which undermined or even nullified the overall impact.

, limit the workday, keep drugs safe, protect collective bargaining, create public schools, battle the Great Depression, electrify rural America, weave a nation together by road, pursue a Great Society free of poverty, extend civil and political rights to women and African Americans and other minorities, and give our fellow citizens health, security and dignity in old age.

Does Anand really believe all this has been achieved? If so, why would Americans want any further social reform? They have low unemployment. Their workday is limited. They have Trade Unions and so can't be harassed or exploited. Public Schools are teaching their kids all sorts of wonderful things for free. Poverty was abolished fifty years ago. Blacks are perfectly safe from any type of discrimination and everybody enjoys 'health security and dignity in old age'.

Clearly, if Americans are still unhappy it must be because, as I have repeatedly stated, the plutocrats keep coming and sucking off all the poor people while they are sleeping.

Much of what appears to be reform in our time is in fact the defense of stasis.

Right! Obamacare was just a palliative seeking to disguise the fact that the plutocrats are sucking us dry of our precious bodily fluids!

When we see through the myths that foster this misperception, the path to genuine change will come into view. It will once again be possible to improve the world without permission slips from the powerful.

I keep permission slip next to my penis. Thus when powerful and coming to perform fellatio on me they leave their 'angoota chaap' (thumb print) on my permission slip. Thus, Anandji, I am fully authorized to tell you that
1) don't see through myths. Spectacles are needful. I used to have lot of trouble seeing blackboard due to I was using myths instead of spectacles. This is reason I am failing exam.
2) Path to genuine change very crowded and disreputable. All sorts of dirty peoples are congregating there hoping to ply a nefarious trade. Nice boys like you should stay away.
3) I am having many angoota chaap of permission slips from powerful elites. Willing to sell same for modest monetary consideration. You may avail of wholesale rate for benefit of your esteemed readers.

In my young days, I was admirer of 'poorna kranti' (total revolution) of J.P Narayan who financed his US education by 'selling hair straightener to Negroes'.

I quote beautiful Hindi couplet for your enlightened connoisseurship-

'ban kranti ke pujari, siddhanta pe hatti
bar dil mein umang, aur dimagh mein tatti'

Make the Revolution your Religion & take its Principles as Holy Writ
Fill your famished hear with ardor & your starvling mind with shit.