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Altruist Capture?

I’ve been reading Winners Takes All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas, and it’s gotten me thinking about something. I’m only about a quarter of the way through, and there will certainly be a “Book Stuff” about it on this capsule at some point. However, I don’t want to wait before discussing this.

As the title of the book suggests, it questions just how much good the wealthy and large corporations actually intend to do with their rather public acts of philanthropy. Early on, it talks about how large banks and other monolithic businesses have been recruiting from America’s top universities, offering their best and brightest the chance to “change the world”. It gives several examples through interviews with people who were in university in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and who sipped the kool aid. They wound up working for big name investment firms under the impression that they would in fact make a huge, positive impact on the world, dispelling poverty, pollution, and all the other things that ail this planet. The interviewees eventually became jaded as they settled into their new jobs and realized the vast majority of what they were doing was typical corporate lackey tasks: finding ways to reduce costs, facilitate mergers, eek out ever higher profits, and so forth. There was little to none of the making the world a better place stuff that they were promised by recruiters. Eventually the people being interviewed left those jobs for greener pastures.

Meanwhile, it sounds like the people that stay on with these firms are hardcore workaholics. They’re the sort that try to squeeze every last drop of productivity from their day to put toward the job, and that’s on top of working crazy hours. Worse, it seems that there are a lot more of these people than the ones that leave. They’re working ridiculously hard, but they’re so distracted by the tasks they are assigned that they don’t have time to notice just how little impact on the world they are having. They would probably be horrified if they realized that many of them are likely causing more harm than good in the long run.

One of the big arguments being put forward is that these corporations and wealthy people are creating these projects that claim to want to make the world better so that they can control them. This way they can point the altruistic people working under them in one direction. As such, they aren’t trying to dismantle or modify other aspects of the system that the wealthy profit on quite nicely even if it’s on the backs of others.

This is where I’m getting the impression that all of this is basically altruist capture. Just as corporations have been involved with regulatory capture for years, effectively removing the teeth from regulators so that large businesses can do as they please, they are gobbling up young, intelligent, motivated people, and saddling them with a ton of corporate busy work so that they don’t even have the opportunity to do anything that would threaten corporate interests. It’s better to pump their heads full of beautiful ideas that they’re fighting the good fight, but keep them too busy to notice they haven’t really done anything. Worse still, many will talk about this or that issue that they’re fighting for while being totally oblivious to the fact their company may be involved in sweat shops in some corner of the world, or connected to horrendous pollution issues somewhere.

If they really wanted to fix the world, stopping that sort of nonsense would be a good start, and many of these people have the skills to potentially put a good size dent in those sort of things. The thing is that it would also put a good sized dent in the profits of the wealthy, and they are not going to have any of that. As such, these corporations seem to think it quite pragmatic to harness these people’s intelligence and work ethic only to focus it on benefiting the wealthy while making sure these young, naive, new hires feel all warm and sunny inside as if they actually are making the world a better place.

All that being said, I am still only a quarter of the way through this book, so there is much more to read. I’ll be back later with a more thorough look at it. For now, what I’ve read so far has really gotten me thinking on a few things.

Pennywhether

pennywhether@posteo.net

August 24, 2021