## Highlights - 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. Because they are in charge of these attempts at social change, the attempts naturally reflect their biases. - The initiatives mostly aren’t democratic, nor do they reflect collective problem-solving or universal solutions. Rather, they favor the use of the private sector and its charitable spoils, the market way of looking at things, and the bypassing of government. - The elites behind efforts like these often speak in a language of “changing the world” and “making the world a better place” more typically associated with barricades than ski resorts. - “<mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">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.</mark>” - 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. - The study showed that a college graduate like Cohen, on the safe assumption that she ended up in the top 10 percent of earners, would be making more than twice as much before taxes as a similarly situated person in 1980. If Cohen entered the top 1 percent of earners, her income would be more than triple what a 1 percenter earned in her parents’ day—an average of $1.3 million a year for that elite group versus $428,000 in 1980, adjusted for inflation. On the narrow chance that she entered the top 0.001 percent, her income would be more than seven times higher than in 1980, with a cohort average of $122 million. The study included the striking fact that the bottom half of Americans had over this same span seen their average pretax income rise from $16,000 to $16,200. One hundred seventeen million people had, in other words, been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s,” Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman wrote. - It is an era, moreover, that has relentlessly told young people that they can “do well by doing good.” Thus when Cohen and her friends sought to make a difference, their approaches were less about what they wanted to take down or challenge and more about the ventures they wanted to start up, she said. Many of them believed there was more power in building up what was good than in challenging what was bad. - neoliberalism, and it is, in the framing of the anthropologist David Harvey, “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” - The age-old youthful impulse to reimagine the world was now often molded and guided by one of the reigning ideas of the age: that if you really want to change the world, you must rely on the techniques, resources, and personnel of capitalism. - “Very rarely, if ever, did the step-by-step, perfectly linear process of ‘here’s how we’re going to conduct this exploration’—very rarely did that actually surface the right answer,” she said. Often, that process—the thing for which McKinsey was famed—was “used primarily for communicating the answer, rather than generating it,” she said. The answers were derived through intelligence and common sense, and then the team would make them look more like trademark McKinsey answers: “We would backfill them into the template,” Cohen said. - If you think of the world as an engineering problem, a dashboard of dials you can turn and switches you can toggle and thereby make everything optimal, then you don’t always register the voices of people who see a different world—one of people and systems that guard what is theirs and lock others out. - she was more interested in starting something new than in examining how she and those around her—and the institutions they belonged to—might change their existing ways. She asked herself what she could do, but not what people in her universe might already have done. - It captured MarketWorld values perfectly: You could change things without having to change a thing. - Often, when people set out to do the thing they are already doing and love to do and know how to do, and they promise grand civilizational benefits as a spillover effect, the solution is oriented around the solver’s needs more than the world’s—the win-wins, purporting to be about others, are really about you. - Suffering can be innovated away. Let the innovators do their start-ups and suffering will be reduced. Each entrepreneurial venture could take on a different social problem. “In the case of Airbnb, the way you alleviate housing suffering is by allowing people to share their homes,” - There are still winners and losers, the powerful and the powerless, and the claim that everyone is in it together is an eraser of the inconvenient realities of others. - the founders of Even wanted very much to help, but thought it best to help in a way that would create some opportunity for them, too. - The study found that going up to poor people in a mall and asking them a hypothetical question about money, such as whether to make an expensive repair to an imaginary car, could drop their IQ on a subsequent test by 13 points relative to people of similar means not reminded of money, a plunge comparable to the effect of being an alcoholic or losing a night’s sleep. - In the Valley, prediction has become a popular way of fighting for a particular future while claiming merely to be describing what has yet to occur. Prediction has a useful air of selflessness to it. - It is not in the rebel’s job description to worry about others who might have needs that are different from his. By Pishevar’s lights, when a company like Uber challenged regulators and unions, there were not rival interests at play so much as a singular truth vying with opposition, and insurgent rebels going up against a corrupt establishment. - Pishevar was not only casting venture capitalists and billionaire company founders as rebels against the establishment, fighting the powers that be on behalf of ordinary people. He was also maligning the very institutions that are meant to care for ordinary people and promote equality. He referred to unions as “cartels.” He cast protests, which were a fairly standard feature of labor movements, as a “war zone.” He spoke of taxi drivers and their representatives in the language of the corrupt, mafioso Other: “those types of characters from that world.” Here was a leading investor in a company, Uber, that had sought to shatter democratically enacted regulations and evade the unions that have a record of actually, and not just rhetorically, fighting for the little guy, and he was proudly portraying himself as the one who was truly fighting for the people against the corrupt power structure. - She came of age among hackers and renegades and then grew frustrated with their failure to accept victory. They now owned the tools of modern power. But the group’s self-image as “outsiders,” a hangover from the sector’s countercultural origins, left it “ill-equipped to understand its own actions and practices as part of the elite, the powerful,” Boyd argues. And powerful people who “see themselves as underdogs in a world where instability and inequality are rampant fail to realize that they have a moral responsibility.” - It can be disturbing that the most influential emerging power center of our age is in the habit of denying its power, and therefore of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself. - “Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by start-ups,” the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham once tweeted. - A famous statement of that finding came from the feminist writer Jo Freeman, who in her 1972 essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” observed that when groups operate on vague or anarchic terms, structurelessness “becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.” - The fight over platforms, whether they are cooperative or owned by just a few—you can look and you can distill history down to essentially being that fight. Class warfare can really be about who gets to own it, a couple of us or all of us. It is things that have public benefit that are owned by a couple of people, and they get to extract what they will from those who have to use it—or they are shared for the collective benefit. What is new about technology here, it’s just a new space to have that battle in. - This was what had bothered Yorra. The technology, which had made the service easier to procure, had also changed the nature of the interaction. The one-click app obscured the messy human reality of the working people behind it, who now had less bargaining power. - Without necessarily intending to, she was giving MarketWorld what it craved in a thinker: a way of framing a problem that made it about giving bits of power to those who lack it without taking power away from those who hold it. - Public intellectuals argue with each other in the pages of books and magazines; thought leaders give TED talks that leave little space for criticism or rebuttal, and emphasize hopeful solutions over systemic change. Public intellectuals pose a genuine threat to winners; thought leaders promote the winners’ values, talking up “disruption, self-empowerment, and entrepreneurial ability.” - <mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">If you want to be a thought leader and not dismissed as a critic, your job is to help the public see problems as personal and individual dramas rather than collective and systemic ones.</mark> - Many thinkers tend to be zoomers-out by nature and training, seeing things in terms of systems and structures. But if they wish to be thought leaders who are heard and invited back, it is vital to learn how to zoom in. - “<mark style="background: #FFF3A3A6;">Personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.</mark>” - “The question is, do you want to be wealthy as a writer or do you want to be an intellectually honest, responsible writer?” - The ability of a powerful group to reward those who agree with it and punish those who don’t also distorts the marketplace of ideas. This isn’t about corruption—beliefs naturally shift in accord with interests. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” The result can be an entire society twisted to serve the interests of its most powerful group. - tremendous pressure to turn thoughts into commodities—into tiny, usable takeaways, into Monday morning insights for the CEO, into ideas that are profitable rather than compelling for their own sake. To give in to this pressure, to make your thoughts more actionable, to enter the business world’s domain of language and assumptions is in effect to surrender.