The Win-Win Edition

Summary

Slate Money: “The Win-Win Edition” (October 13, 2018)

Overview

In this episode of Slate Money, host Felix Salmon is joined by regulars Anna Szymanski and Emily Peck, along with special guest Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. The conversation centers on Giridharadas’s critique of elite-led social change and the contradictions inherent in “win-win” approaches to philanthropy and social responsibility. The hosts also discuss breaking news: the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi regime, and the reaction of the global business elite — followed by a discussion of the new IPCC climate report and the recurring failure of both business and government to confront existential threats. The show closes with the traditional “Numbers Round.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing Anand Giridharadas & His Book

• [00:30–08:50]
• Anand explains the premise of Winners Take All: that today’s elites often portray themselves as benevolent agents of change, but their “generosity” and do-goodism often protects and perpetuates the very systems from which they benefit.
  • “These same rich people being predators...they build, maintain, and uphold an economic system that...siphons almost all of the gains from progress upward to them.” (Anand Giridharadas, [01:30])
• Felix notes the book is genuinely challenging, not simply a “TL;DR” treatise (“This is one of those books which actually caused me to change my mind on a few things.” [03:01])

Notable Exchange

• Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women Program
  • Emily: Points out how companies trumpet initiatives (like Goldman’s program for women) even as their core practices remain exclusionary: “They don't even hire women to work at the bank.” ([03:41])
  • Anand: “If that Goldman 10,000 Women program is part of an ecosystem that allows Goldman to keep being Goldman in its day job...then that making a difference becomes a kind of wingman of making a killing.” ([08:40])

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2. The Dynamic Between Philanthropy & Harm

• [08:51–10:57]
• Felix challenges whether these “doing good” programs actually make harmful systems any worse, or merely serve as PR.
• Anand responds with an example: the Goldman Sachs PR chief, before a negative NYT article, tried to pitch GS’s philanthropic work as a counterpoint—demonstrating that elite do-gooding is often reputational “cover” rather than structural change.
  • “Bullet point number one: GS Gives is not in the story...the most important thing you can do is try to squeeze a philanthropic substory into the main story.” ([10:00])

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3. Capitalism, Inequality, and the Role of the Elite

• [11:01–15:28]
• Anna Szymanski pushes back, arguing that, globally, capitalism and globalization have produced huge gains since the 1980s, though not evenly in the U.S.
• Anand clarifies his book focuses on America, where: “The 1%...has cornered most of the benefits of the future. And the data is very clear that the bottom half of Americans basically haven't gotten a raise since 1979.” ([12:19])
  • He points to lived experience: “Most Americans...experience correctly that this society feels rigged to them.” ([14:07])

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4. Loss of the Public Sphere & Elite Secession

• [16:25–18:59]
• Emily highlights Giridharadas’s insight into how elites (and many others) have retreated from the public sphere, weakening community and civil society.
• Anand: “One of the major shifts in a globalizing world is the possibility of elite secession...some people...have had the ability to...float up and out...and become part of this global mesh of talent and opportunities.” ([17:48])

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5. The Saudi Situation & Global Elite Hypocrisy

• [19:00–29:29]
• The panel discusses the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the flustered response of global elites invited to the Saudi “Davos in the Desert” investment conference.
  • “As of this morning, we're still listed on the website...even everything we know, bonesaw and all, has not been sufficient for most people to disavow this.” (Anand, [22:15])
  • Emily: “It just exposes...these companies want to have it both ways. They want to say, we do the right thing, period. And then they...do the wrong thing unless...called out.” ([23:16])
• Giridharadas connects the episode to his book’s central thesis: elite companies substitute minor virtue for major structural change — and at times, simply for PR.

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6. “Do No Harm,” Not “Change the World”

• [29:00–30:05]
  • Felix points to a tension: Anand’s call for CEOs to return Saudi money and boycott the conference could seem like a call for “virtuous” elite action.
  • Anand clarifies: “What I am calling for is not the global elite coming together to do good. I'M calling for them to just stop doing harm...First, do no harm, and then let us as a public do the public good.” ([29:30])

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7. The IPCC Climate Report: Existential Crisis and Public Inertia

• [30:05–41:58]
• The hosts turn to the alarming new UN climate change report, with Felix itemizing the colossal scale of future economic and human loss absent swift action.
• Anand: “This is the first time in human history that we've managed to put the very status of the planet in peril through our actions....we have gotten ourselves to the precipice in Earth time of undoing this whole thing. And that's insane.” ([31:30])
• The problem: responsibility is diffused; even “conscious capitalists” like BlackRock's Larry Fink talk sustainability while buying more Exxon shares ([33:30]).
• The media and NGOs focus on small actions (buying smart appliances), while political solutions (“We need $100–200/ton carbon taxes at minimum!” – Felix, [35:59]) are ignored or blocked.
• Anand calls for reframing the task as inspiring and collective, akin to a moon landing or WWII: “This could be really exciting! ... This is a challenge on that scale.” ([37:54])
  • “We have to make this personal for people;...help them migrate psychologically... Mismanaged by those who understand it primarily as a data and policy problem.” ([40:13])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Making a difference becomes a kind of wingman of making a killing.”
  – Anand Giridharadas ([08:40])

• “Most Americans...experience correctly that this society feels rigged to them.”
  – Anand ([14:07])

• “One of the major shifts in a globalizing world is the possibility of elite secession.”
  – Anand ([17:48])

• “It just exposes...these companies want to have it both ways. They want to say, we do the right thing, period. And then they...do the wrong thing unless they're publicly called out.”
  – Emily Peck ([23:16])

• “First, do no harm, and then let us as a public do the public good.”
  – Anand ([29:30])

• “This is the first time in human history that we’ve managed to put the very status of the planet in peril through our actions.”
  – Anand ([31:30])

• “We are all involved in a validation of phony change agents that is a part of the story of why issues like this get as bad as they do.”
  – Anand ([34:48])

• “This could be really exciting...this is a challenge on [the World War II] scale.”
  – Anand ([37:54])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:30] – Anand introduces Winners Take All
• [08:40] – The “wingman of making a killing” argument
• [10:00] – Goldman Sachs’ PR playbook
• [12:19] – U.S. wage stagnation and elite cornering of prosperity
• [17:48] – “Elite secession” and the loss of shared public spaces
• [22:15] – Business elites slow to renounce Khashoggi murder
• [29:30] – Anand's “do no harm” challenge to business
• [31:30] – The existential threat of climate change
• [37:54] – Framing climate change as an opportunity
• [40:10] – The need for personal, localized climate messaging

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Numbers Round

• [42:11] Anand: 82% – Of all new wealth in 2017 went to the top 1%.
• [42:51] Felix: $85 – How much the World Food Program gets if you buy an $850 Balenciaga fanny pack; the rest goes to Balenciaga.
• [43:44] Emily: $1.4 billion – Valuation of Silicon Valley shoe company Allbirds.
• [44:55] Anna S.: 13 – Pakistan’s 13th IMF bailout, reflecting issues with Chinese debt and the Belt and Road Initiative.

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Final Thoughts

This episode offers a cogent critique of the idea that the world’s elites can “change the world” through selective, self-serving social interventions while perpetuating the systems that generate harm and inequality. The hosts connect these ideas to ongoing news: elite hypocrisy in reaction to the Khashoggi killing, governmental abdication in Saudi relations, and the deep collective action failures behind climate change. Anand Giridharadas argues for a shift away from private virtue-signaling and toward genuine public power — demanding not just “good works” from powerful actors, but a halt to the harm they cause.

Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to the Win Win edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I am joined as ever, by Anna Shymanski. Hello. By Emily Peck of the Huffington Post.

[B]

Hello.

[A]

And very excitingly, in a confluence of fabulousness that no one could have really organized, it just worked out this way. This week, which is the best possible week for Anand Giridadas to come on this show, is the week that Anand Giridadas has come on the show.

[C]

It is a true win, win.

[A]

It is a true win, win. We are blessed. Anand, you have a book out which we're gonna talk about. And we are also going to talk about the big things that we need to talk about this week, which one of which is obviously the big IPCC report on global climate change, which should be dominating all of the headlines all of the time, but given the news cycle seems to have been dominating like half of the headlines for about five minutes, we are going to talk about this crazy Saudi situation and how big business is reacting to it. And all of this is directly relevant to your book, which you now get to plug.

[C]

Is that the question?

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Tell us about the book.

[A]

Plug the book.

[C]

So the book is called Winners Take the Elite Charade of Changing the World. And it's a book about how trying to explain a paradox, which is that we live in this age of extraordinary elite generosity and rich people giving billions of dollars away and having social enterprises and philanthropy and Silicon Valley companies that are gonna emancipate mankind. And also those same rich people being predators. Predators because they build, maintain and uphold an economic system that predictably, reliably, in an ongoing way, siphons almost all of the gains from progress upward to them.

[A]

So I wanted to have a big fight with you about this book because in all of these sort of boil down tldr versions of the book, I feel like it's horribly sort of, you know, every time I read it, I was like, no, no, no, that's wrong. No, I need to fight with Nanand about this. But then I have to say this is one of the few books where it really helps to read the whole thing. And there's a big sort of a books at four. There are so many. You have no idea how many people we have on this show where you can more or less just read the subtitle and you get it.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Am I wrong?

[B]

I mean, it's insulting for all of the people who've been on the podcast to plug in.

[A]

Hey, former Guests naming no names but.

[C]

Subtweeting the hell out of everybody.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Go on, Felix.

[A]

But no, this is, this is, this is one of those books which I, you know, a very rare book which actually caused me to change my mind on a few things. So you, you know, well done on that.

[C]

What did it cause you to change your mind on this?

[B]

How did you not agree from the start? I was like, finally someone has exposed the ridiculous hypocrisy of these companies. Like, I've been a business journalist for a while at Huffington Post and we get these press releases from Goldman Sachs about their.

[C]

What is it called?

[B]

The 1000 Women Initiative.

[C]

10,000 Women.

[B]

10,000.

[A]

10,000 Women Initiative. You're off by an order of magnitude there.

[C]

It's still smaller than the number of women they call caused to be foreclosed on by their role in the financial crisis.

[B]

They don't even hire women to work at the bank.

[D]

Hardly.

[A]

Like they've appointed Dina Powell to their Global Governance Council. And it's such a good job she's not becoming the next U.S. ambassador.

[B]

The percentage of women executives at Goldman Sachs, like at all dismal.

[A]

It is.

[B]

So I was, for one, I was sold from the outset. But I'm curious why Felix wasn't.

[C]

So what were you, where were you going into it? And then what are the couple things.

[A]

That you so like going into it? Um, I was, I had a couple of issues, one of which, I mean, and the big one, which I think I probably still have, I can't agree with everything in the book is that I feel like there's a bunch of people in this kind of win win globalist jet setting, Davos and Bellagio and Aspenworld that you quite elegantly fillet in this book who have genuinely made the world a better place. And not all of them by any means, but some of them I would include, bizarrely, someone like Bono who realizes that the way you do.

[C]

Sorry, I'm not familiar, what's his last name?

[A]

The way you do this, I believe it's Houston, isn't it? Houston?

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

I think his name is Paul Hewson. But the way you do this is that you pal around with like second and third tier ministers at big governments and you persuade them to do things like Gavi and the Global Fund and then they wind up spending tens of billions of dollars eradicating AIDS in Africa. And you can't do that on your own, but you have the ability to influence, you know, governments because you're an international pop and you wind up making the world a genuinely better place. And that is, I think, you know, one of the few areas where somewhere like Davos can actually claim, credibly claim a certain amount of credit.

[C]

And how did it change your mind?

[A]

Well, I mean, first of all, let's say, like, I mean, I'm not sure that it changed my mind on that, but I do. I think it more changed my mind than just, like, how I look at the. The myopia of these conferences and how the stuff that they don't talk about is very important, and the fact they don't talk about it is very important. And they're very happy to talk about the Global Fund and Gavi, and they're very not happy to talk about certain other things which are equally important.

[C]

Yeah, so a couple things there. One, the Global Fund and Gavi are not the kinds of things that I'm really going after in this book. Those are the kinds of things that actually do, as you say, work with government to some degree and work with actual systems to some degree. And you're also right that there are many people among the global plutocratic superclass who do do good work and do save lives, as I say in the book, and do make people's, you know, do put roofs over homeless people's heads, et cetera, et cetera. The argument of the book is not a claim of absence. It's not a claim that no good work is being done, there are no decent rich people, and nothing is being changed. The argument of the is, when elites get into the game of changing the world, they are never happy to sit in the back row. They end up, in important ways leading change. They end up sitting on the board of the organizations that drive change. They end up changing our collective conversation about change. They use their intellectual and pecuniary power to change words, to spread ideas and defang change so that change is something that's less hostile to them, and that what you end up with is change that, yes, does in many cases help people, sometimes it doesn't, but sometimes does save lives, et cetera, but change that ends up abetting harm on a much greater scale. So Goldman Sachs's 10,000 women program, which is not even a particularly worthy program among all the things out there, but it's real. I have met some of the women who receive mentorship and receive loans. They're real. They really did receive that. And I'm sure their lives got better. It would be hard to not make their lives better by intervening in them in that way. But the idea is that if that Goldman 10,000 Women program is part of an ecosystem that allows Goldman to keep being Goldman in its day job, if the little bit of moonlight charity allows it by daylight to continue to build the kind of company that helped cause the financial crisis. Got it. To pay a $5 billion fine for causing millions of people to lose their homes and their livelihoods, then that making a difference becomes a kind of wingman of making a killing.

[A]

But that's a big if, right?

[C]

I think the book exists to. To prove the if.

[A]

But I mean, the if is. Is. Is that if the 10,000 women didn't exist, then Goldman would somehow be more constrained than it is right now in its rapacious capitalism. And I don't think you prove that. I think there are any number of rapacious financial institutions in the world who don't have 10,000 women programs and who are no less evil for it.

[C]

They almost all have something. Wells Fargo has financial literacy to help people be protected from fraud, the kind of fraud that Wells Fargo perpetrated on its own customers. JPMorgan Chase has, I think, some new urban revitalization thing to help America's cities recover from the financial crisis for which JPMorgan Chase paid maybe the largest fine of everybody for helping to cause. I don't think you'd actually find any bank of the kind you describe that is not aggressively trying to create a reputation of helping. And in fact, there's an email, an amazing email from November 18, 2007, in which the Goldman Sachs PR chief sent this email out to the leadership of the bank saying, big story coming in the New York Times tomorrow about how we managed to avoid the mortgage debacle for ourselves while our client suffered the exact act that would result in that $5 billion fine years later. The core of their fraud. And he updated Lloyd Blankfein in this email with like five bullet points based on his conversations with this reporter and what he'd been trying to pitch the reporter. Bullet point number one, GS gives is not in the story. Right? They had tried. They knew. So you may doubt that there's a relationship between the giving and the taking. But in that email, the Goldman Sachs's PR chief was very clear that when a story about rapacious taking is coming, the most important thing you can do, bullet point number one, is try to squeeze a philanthropic substory into the main story. Fortunately, the reporter did not take the bait.

[D]

So I. I'm gonna be honest that I disagree a little bit with the idea that the system as Such, like post 1980s, to the present has been a net bad for the world. I don't really think data totally supports that.

[C]

The book's not about the world.

[A]

No, no.

[D]

But I'm just saying that I think if you're looking at this, if you're saying that the argument that the good that some of these companies or people do is not justified because it's supporting a system that is creating so much harm in America. In America, to a certain extent. Although I would. We don't need to have the whole argument, but I would maybe push back a little bit, that if you look at what has happened since the 80s in the entire world, overall, there's been such a net gain that although we should have done quite a bit more in the United States, I don't necessarily think that means that what globalization has done is a bad thing.

[C]

But you're, You're. You're. I mean, I'm saying repeatedly for an important reason, this book is about America and about America's elite's relationship to the society. The world has seen a huge reduction in poverty. I mean, in part because of two countries and in really one country, which doesn't really vindicate. I mean, it's. China has an overwhelming amount of it. And China and India are both huge historical quirks because they had very bad systems for a while, and neither of them is a clear case of letting capitalism in. They did a lot of things in the last 30, 40 years, which are a mix of capitalism and authoritarianism and India doing the biggest affirmative action program in the history of the world. Those are not simple stories either. But my book's not about that. My book is about the fact the 1% in this country, in the United States, which is what I'm concerned with, that since the 1980s, has cornered most of the benefits of the future. And the data is very clear that the bottom half of Americans basically haven't gotten a raise since 1979.

[D]

That's also like. It's not entirely. It's not that that stat has been kind of countered in many ways. I just want to say that.

[C]

What's your stat?

[D]

The stat that the CBO put out that has showed that actually. I mean, it's. It's. I would actually argue that the CBO stat could be too high, but they've shown that there has actually been. It was a much more significant increase because they were using a different measure of inflation. And they were also taking into account transfer payments and how far people's money can actually go. And the measure of inflation that's used in the stat you're talking about like the Fed doesn't even use, I mean the cpi, they don't use that because it over corrects for inflation. So I'm not arguing that everything's right in the United States. I'm not arguing. I actually think a lot of what your book, I agreed with a lot of your book. I think that we have moved too far in the direction of saying that government can't do anything and that business should do everything. I'm only pushing back a little bit on the idea that what has happened since the 1980s has mostly been bad. I'm not entirely sure if that's accurate and the only reason I bring that up is cuz I think it's important to remember that when trying to think, well, how can we move forward in having both business and government working effectively.

[C]

Yeah, I think that's, that's fair. But I'll, I'll tell you as someone who was in eastern Ohio recently, was in Iowa recently, was in Idaho recently when I traveled to most parts of this country, you talk to most people about their lived experience of what's happening with your medical bills, like what's happening with your ability to get your kid the education you want. It's not just one statistic about the bottom half of Americans not getting a raise. There's a lot of data of all kinds human, the kind of reporting that we have from books like the Unwinding and kind of that deep Portraiture and various other kinds of work. My previous book was about, you know, the exurbs of Texas and worlds where basically social mobility is gone, enormous parts of the population are on meth and life has basically kind of vanished and the possibility of the future has vanished many people. So whatever your inflation number is, the reality is most Americans, I think on the left and right experience correctly that this society feels rigged to them. It doesn't feel like it works in the way it used to and that a few of us at the top have managed to corner most of the benefits of the extraordinary changes of the last 30 or 40 years.

[A]

Can I just, you know, then instead of Talking about post 1980, talk a little bit about pre 1980 because I'm not convinced there was ever any kind of prelapsarian paradise. And, and I go all the way back to Alexander Hamilton and his kind of feelings of noblesse oblige and like how he had all of the answers for everyone and they should just kind of their duty was to quietly elect him and then he would make sure everything was right for everyone. Obviously pre1980 was not good for, you know, people of color. It was not good for women. It was not good for like huge swathes of the American population. And I'm not convinced that there ever was a period that pre sort of win win business speak, do gooding that was better than what we have now.

[B]

I think one point that you make in your book that I thought was really fascinating was the way elites, and a lot of Americans too, have just abdicated from the public sphere entirely and retreated into their communities and how much this has hurt the United States. And while it's true that obviously people of color and women were excluded from the country from, from its very founding, this retreat from the public I think has, is a huge problem. It's this retreat from a civil society where we're all sharing in something. And I think that's sort of like epitomized right now with the Trump administration and something that you really dug into that be great if you could talk about more that is really, really hurting us. And I think is it change this like disbelief in not only government, but in civil society and in public action?

[C]

You know, I mean, I think to take both points, I mean, I think you're absolutely right that I think the short answer to your point is we were a lot worse on civil rights, both women and African Americans and others 50 years ago, but in terms of class, we were in some ways better. Right. And you don't get to. You don't.

[A]

Yeah, no, I think that's true.

[C]

You know, like just the collective bargaining power that a high school educated worker had was just in a very different place 50 years ago.

[A]

And the CEO would live in the suburb with, in the same suburb as the workers.

[C]

Which gets to Emily's point about connectedness. Right. So I mean, I think one of the major shifts in a globalizing world is the possibility of elite secession. Right. Obama talked about if you have software coding skills, you can sit anywhere in the world and work on a project in any other part of the world and for a company in some third part of the world and you have a lot of leverage to take the best deal. But if you're a home health aide, you just don't have that secession possibility. And you're kind of stuck your bargaining powers because you're kind of stuck where you are. And that has become, I think, a truism for the economy in general. There's some people, they're not all plutocrats, they're just some people, people with certain Kinds of skills, often college educated people who have had the ability to take advantage of the era we live in and who've been able to kind of float up and out of the place they are, if need be, and become part of this kind of global mesh of talent and opportunities and. And project. And there's.

[B]

They're the ones buying the bunkers in New Zealand we talked about a few weeks ago.

[A]

Exactly. These are the people who all get invited to Davos in the desert by Mohammed bin Sultan and someone. Sorry. By Mohammed bin Salman.

[C]

I like how you made him a Disney character.

[A]

Yeah. And I'm not even going to try and pronounce the name of Jamal Khashoggi. Is it something like that?

[C]

Jamal Khashoggi? Yeah.

[A]

Khashoggi who? You know, the Saudis can one day engage in extraterritorial, extrajudicial killing of journalists in Turkey and then the next day expect all of global civil society, from the presidents of the World bank and Christine lagarde, from the IMF and all the way down to the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and Blackrock and all the rest of it to come and sort of pay their respects to this great fount of cash.

[B]

Should you sort of rewind and explain a little bit more about what you're talking about, Emily?

[A]

What am I talking about here?

[B]

So last week, a Washington Post journalist named Help Me out walked into the Saudi embassy in Turkey and never came out again. And as reporting surfaced in the past week or two, it's looking increasingly like he was essentially murdered by the Saudi government. And the backdrop now becomes the Saudi government is putting on this, essentially, as Felix said, Davos in the desert. This big innovation conference like Davos, but even worse.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

In the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh, the same Ritz Carlton that the leader of Saudi Arabia used to imprison his political enemies is going to house the CEO of. Is going to house Jamie Dimon and until recently, the CEO of Uber. And all these like, fancy the Davos set that Anand writes so well about in his book. And as the news surface of this man's killing, and apparently a bone saw was used to dismember his body and then it was removed from the embassy, according to reporting from the Washington Post. Mainly this has been embarrassing for the global elite. I mean, they don't want to be associated with this and they've been pulling out yet on Thursday and Friday this week, a lot of them have been saying, oh, we won't go. We're so shocked by this. But of Course, it shouldn't be shocking because this isn't the first time the leader of Saudi Arabia has been caught doing some nasty stuff.

[A]

Saudi Arabia has never exactly been a paragon of human rights abuses. And. And, yeah, so what? Like what. So the question I have for you, Anand, is like, did it really require the assassination of a member of the global elite of like, a high profile Washington Post columnist to, like, bring home to the world just how sort of, you know, bad and brutal the Saudi regime is?

[C]

I mean. Well, first of all, it's not clear to me that it has brought home to most of them. I mean, the people who still are a minority.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Of the people who. As of this morning, the guy's been gone more than a week. As of this morning, we're still listed on the website. These are all powerful people who have the ability to get their name off a website, I would imagine, and many of whom had not even made their own Twitter announcements or whatever. So to be clear, even everything we know, bonesaw and all, has not been sufficient for most people to disavow this. I have been in conversation, for example, with Dara's spokesman at Uber since I ran into him on Wednesday in Los Angeles, and it took until late last night to get, you know, just to pull out from the conference. I also then followed up and saying, are you willing to also return the massive Saudi stake in Uber? I have not gotten a response to that.

[B]

And tell what Uber's slogan is. Its new slogan under Don, the new.

[C]

One is do the right thing.

[B]

We do the right thing, period.

[D]

Yes.

[B]

I mean, it just exposes, I think, what Anand wrote about, which is that these companies want to have it both ways. They want to say, we do the right thing, period. And then they go out and they kind of do the wrong thing unless they're publicly called out and essentially harassed by a lot of journalists, which is what happened to Uber, which is why they pulled out.

[D]

And I think Mohammed bin Salman is an interesting example of almost him. He seems to be kind of modeling himself on this, you know, being a global elite and on the one hand trying to say, oh, well, you know, I'm allowing women to drive, when on the other hand, arresting all of the female activists who are pushing to get driving. And.

[A]

And then when the Canadian foreign minister points that out, as we mentioned in a previous episode of this show, he goes and, like, pulls all Saudi students out of Canada and, like, ends diplomatic relations just for her, sort of saying, hey, you shouldn't jail these people.

[C]

I just want to point out also that they let women drive around the exact same time that through Softbank they were making an investment in cruise, a driverless car technology. It's like they decided women could drive once they concluded that driving itself was going to be eliminated.

[B]

It's like big banks hiring more female tellers while at the same time like opening tons of ATMs and closing down.

[A]

So the question I have though is like, you know, this is, this is the second year of the conference, the first year of the conference. You know, we get to see all of these bigwigs floating around and basically trying to catch some of the money that MBS is throwing out of helicopters these days with this massive Saudi financed war in Yemen going on in the background with millions of people in poverty and dying of hunger and just dying, period. And it was, you know, unedifying to say the least. But we didn't see this kind of level of peer pressure among the Davos set to get each other to sort of pull out. And now it's like one guy dies and suddenly everything changes. I'm interested in that dynamic.

[C]

I mean, I think it's partly that he's a global elite. I think to be honest, it's the well known psychological research on just like one story is easier to absorb than 16,000 deaths in Yemen, which is just kind of more one of the sad facts of the world. That boy in, you know, Alan Kurdy and the Syrian boy on that beach was not a global elite, but he got the world's hearts in a way that I don't know, 50 million people on the loose as refugees around the world just hadn't. So there's just, that's, I think something just about how we process story. And I think that's actually fine because what is happening here, you know, as a writer I've always been very, I try to be non judgmental about like how people learn. People learn the way they learn and you gotta like understand that. And the reality is Jamal's death may become a spur for a lot of people to use a business term to right size their relationship with Saudi Arabia, to actually ask deeper questions about what their relationship to Saudi Arabia should have been all along, given what they knew and had reason to know, but didn't, but ignored. Okay, fine. But now you have a story that is unignorable, that frankly is a journalist being potentially assassinated, which has a particular emotive power to it. In an age where we're told journalists are enemies of the people here in our own country by one of the Saudi's great hoteliers, Donald Trump. And I think hopefully this will be a moment to frankly end the toxic, abusive relationship that the United States has had with Saudi Arabia for a very, very long time.

[B]

I also feel like what's going on with Saudi Arabia again relates back to your book because while these companies are, I guess, being prodded at least some of them to scale back their relationships or take another look, like you were saying, our president and his son in law aren't condemning this. You know, they're being very careful. Donald Trump even said something yesterday like, well, we wouldn't want to damage our relationship with Saudi Arabia because of the $10 billion.

[A]

$110 billion.

[B]

$110 billion. They're SPE on weapons. And it's like this. There's an abdication from the White House here. And what's left to fill the void are these companies which at the end of the day, they'll respond to public pressure, but they're not going to make any real substantive changes that you need the public, you need the government to step in and set an example. And we're really seeing a vacuum. And rushing into this vacuum are like the Uber CEO, you know, and this.

[A]

Is actually, you have an op ed in the New York Times basically saying, you know, that the CEOs of all of these global companies, and especially American companies should do this sort of performative virtue signaling and not go to Saudi Arabia and I and return all of.

[C]

The billions of dollars.

[A]

I'm not sure that's legal. But, but the, I mean, but the.

[C]

Fact is that there is always a way, Felix, if the money, if you, if you say that the money was fraudulent, it's, I mean, there's always a way. But the, you find replacement investors, you can buy them out. Like there's always a way that money should not be in this country.

[A]

But I do see a certain tension there. I mean, you're basically calling on the global business elite to come together and collectively make the world a better place, which is like exactly what your book is.

[C]

No, no, what I am arguing is that the more useful thing to do, what these people do, exactly as you said, Emily, is play a double game. They create harm on a massive scale and then they often do good works that fail to match up to the harm they caused. And my argument is for them to spend less time trying to do good and more time trying to just not do harm first.

[B]

Keep your house in order.

[C]

And so what I am calling for is not the global elite coming together to do good. I'M calling for them to just stop doing harm. They have done harm by accepting money that is clearly designed as part of a reputation laundering campaign for their companies. They have done harm by trying to gin up business and lending their legitimacy as speakers and quote unquote thought leaders by going to this conference. I want the global business elite not to be in charge of change at all. But I just want them to stuff like the Hippocratic oath. First do no harm and then let us as a public do the public good.

[A]

Okay, let's talk about the public good here. Because in 2040 the climate is going to be 1.5 degrees warmer than it was in pre industrial times. And the International Panel on Climate Change recently came out with a massive report which I have actually read a large chunk of, talking about the literally hundreds of millions of lives that are going to be devastated as a result and urging the international community insofar as this such a thing exists to come together and as Anand says, do no harm to stop belching carbon in into the atmosphere and to try and prevent this thing from happening. It's difficult, but it is possible. It will wind up saving hundreds of trillions of dollars if we do nothing. According to one report that I was just reading, by 2100, the present value of the damages that are going to happen is over $500 trillion. That's basically the entire wealth of the planet today. So here's a collective action problem for you. Anand, tell me what your reaction was to this.

[C]

I mean, it's devastating and I think some of what you were getting at earlier with this idea of the world has improved, even if things are not better for most people in America. And that's true. And the poverty reduction numbers, et cetera, are impressive. But this is also the first time in human history that we've managed to put the very status of the planet in peril through our actions. All those other people who had more unequal and cruel in the Middle Ages, whatever, managed to not jeopardize the planet. And we have that huge achievement. And just the idea, I mean when you say we may wipe out an amount of wealth that's equivalent to all the wealth now. You're basically talking about resetting civilization like we're taught we have. We have gotten ourselves to the precipice in Earth time of like undoing this whole thing. And that's insane. And I think a lot of it again grows out of what I think about as an economy that is so. And societies that are so centered on the profit motive that you know, we, we know what causes this, we know who causes this. We know various tax measures and others that could at least make some difference. And we just haven't done it because those companies, the Exxons of the world, have so much power. I just want to share one anecdote which I think gets at the fact that it's not just the carbon belchers who are to blame, the Saudis and the Exxons and whatever, but all of us enable this culture that protects these people, the bad actors, in the following way. Larry Fink, CEO, BlackRock, has famously become this kind of avatar of conscious capitalism, ethical.

[B]

He's going to Riyadh.

[C]

Yeah, of course he is. Of course he is.

[A]

Well, we'll see.

[B]

Go on.

[C]

And he's kind of become, he made this very threatening, almost like benign Mafioso claim that companies don't have a purpose, social purpose, in the future, BlackRock may not, you know, which may not invest in you. Which is like a pretty earth shattering thing for BlackRock to say because they're the biggest asset managers in the world. And what was revealed when I did some digging. And then he was asked on the strength of that reputation, to give a lecture on the climate to the UN in September during UNGA Week. Wow, great. A lecture on the climate CEO lecturing the UN on how to fight climate change. Awesome. Sustainable development, et cetera. Well, it turns out while he was prepping for that speech this year and Cementing this reputation, BlackRock was buying 4 million additional Exxon shares in that very time. Not something that he bought 30 years ago in this time. And this is the problem. The UN still invites him, right? People still listen to him. We still think of him as someone who's trying to make the world a better place and fight for sustainable development. So we are all involved in a validation of phony change agents that is a part of the story of why issues like this get as bad as they do.

[B]

Yeah, we've abdicated leadership to people whose highest purpose is making a profit and the whole world is burning down in the meantime. It is, it is so upsetting and depressing to watch this unfold and feel powerless to change it. And then see right after the IPCC report came out, I think it was cnn, but it might have been another media outlet tweeted something like feeling depressed about the climate news. Here are some things you can do. And it was like, buy smart appliances, take the bus. And it's just, just, it's such a.

[D]

Well, and I think this is important because I think when numbers like this come out and stats like this come out, it's very easy for people to just be like, I guess we're screwed. Because it's, it's very hard to look at that and see any possible steps towards making things better. But I do think it's important to look at what organizations like the EPA have actually done historically to reduce other types of admissions significantly and to suggest that if we have strong government agencies in many different countries that can do things like real carbon taxing.

[A]

Well, I mean, carbon taxing is the number one thing which needs to happen in order for any change to happen here. And like, I've been looking at the numbers, I'll plug my Axios Edge newsletter because I go into this a bunch in this week's episode. But the ranges of carbon tax that you need to avoid getting to 1.5 are minimum sort of 100 to $200 a ton. Some of the estimates go up to as much as like $25,000 a ton. Yeah. Insofar as there is carbon pricing going on anywhere in the world, it's floating around what, 10, 12, 15, sometimes 20 or $30 a tonne. That's not going to do it. And if you're going to keep carbon taxes at those kind of levels, which even that is politically impossible in the United States and by the way, would seriously hurt the poorest Americans in the south because they're the ones who have the most carbon intensive energy. Even if you do that, you then need to do a whole bunch of other stuff like making a global pact to build zero more coal fired power stations and all of these things which are, to a first glance, basically politically impossible. And this is where the globalists surely have a point. Right. This stuff cannot be done on a nation by nation basis. You can only do it at a sort of global level.

[C]

I'm not against doing things at a global level. I'm against private sector people taking over the pursuit of solving the problems they caused. But, but I, but I, I, I want, when I'm listening to you and I, I think part of it is, yeah, the solutions are hard, but I want to make a cultural point which is this could be really exciting, right? This could be, you know, like in.

[B]

The way, like the moonshot, right?

[C]

Correct. In the way that like in many ways wars are experienced as in real time, as like this challenge that the country has to go save the world. Right. The way World War II is. Remember country, this is a challenge on that scale. I mean, this will kill way more people than World War II killed, if some of the worst estimates are true. And there's also been a failure of us to. And maybe even of the people who are raising these alarms. I think to make this issue not just serious and grave, but exciting, thrilling to. Like, this is an all hands on deck thing. Every school should be teaching according to this. Like, we need more pop culture dealing with this. Like, when I read about this issue, it's never. I don't know, it's just not the best books. It's not. I think there's a cultural problem here of, like, the direness of this is not matched by the frankly storytelling it's gonna take to make the kinds of changes you talked about remotely possible. This needs to be as live in our minds as the Great Depression was, if you were living in the Great Depression, or as World War II was, if you were living in World War II, or as the Civil War, like, unignorable. The thing everybody's thinking about every day, but that doesn't have to be awful. That can be like, we're all working on this. We're all inventing things. We're all, like, thinking about how to help companies have new business. All of it. We're doing new regulation, we're figuring out carbon taxes, we're building movements. But it needs to be on that scale. And right now it feels like 1 out of 18 issues in our lives.

[A]

And the least personally germane. One of the great themes of your book is that, like, the normal voter who doesn't have three passports and visit 12 countries a year cares about their local community. And sure, they'll have the occasional hurricane or something, but it's not directly affecting them. And they do see the people complaining about this thing as the Al Gores of the world, these gazillionaires who.

[C]

But again, I think this is also a problem with, you know, with all respect to those who are pushing this issue, like, we always lead as 1.5 degree. That is really. That's a really bad talking point.

[A]

No, it does.

[D]

You hear 1.5 correct.

[C]

You know, like, we need to make this personal for people. When you're in West Virginia, you gotta talk about black lung. And you have to talk about, like, what's happening in their lives, how that's affected their communities. When you're talking in Bangladesh, you gotta talk about flooding. You know, you have to talk about hurricanes in the coastal south of this country and talk about what would it look like to live in an America in which this was happening to you, like, once a week and you had to, like, reboard your house and, like, what are other futures that are possible? Like, we have to talk about if people are not going to do some of these, you know, oil and coal jobs that are causing this problem, like, what is their identity in the new economy that's coming that I think probably feels, like, less masculine to them and, like, you know, future of, like, recycling and wind energy, like, doesn't maybe, like, make a lot of those people feel the power they felt around, like being on an oil rig or in the mine. We got, like, help them migrate psychologically. This is a massive challenge that I think, frankly, has been mismanaged by those who understand it primarily as a data and policy problem. This is like, I think this is truly, when you think about, like, the abolition movement, right? Like, there was a policy component that ended up being a war component, but a big part of it was a persuasion component, trying to persuade people who didn't like slavery to really not like it, trying to persuade slaves to take power, trying to persuade slave owners to maybe some of them realize that they were actually enfeebling themselves by living atop this order, like, all of the above. And we're not really living amid a climate campaign that is anything like that. And I think we have to be.

[A]

It's always storytelling. As a journalist, I 100% believe in this. Anand, you brought a number.

[C]

I did.

[A]

For the numbers round.

[C]

I did.

[A]

What's your number?

[C]

82% of all new wealth generated just last year went to the global 1%, top 1%. And what this means is we are not dealing with the legacy of historical injustices. We're not dealing with things that were bad a while ago, but at least are broadly getting better in the world. 82% of what was built last year still is being cornered by the very people who tell us they're changing the world, making it a better place, and giving back. They are taking on a scale that they're giving can never equal, and we need to, frankly, take power back from them.

[A]

My number is $85, which is the amount of money that will go to the World Food Program. If you buy a nylon fanny pack for $850 from Balenciaga, the other $765. My mathematics is not very good. All goes to Balenciaga, of course. But, hey, we're giving back. I will also mention that the total World Food program contributions in 2017 were somewhere north of $6.8 billion, overwhelmingly from governments. This is a good international government program where private sector contributions are Not a big deal. But hey, you know, we can sort of piggyback on that with our $850 fanny pack.

[B]

And yeah, okay, my number is 1.4 billion. That is allegedly the valuation. Well, that's the valuation reported by the Wall Street Journal of a shoe company called Allbirds, which is like, it's the footwear of Silicon Valley.

[A]

Allbirds has become Allbirds Unicorn now.

[B]

Yes. And they just got 50 million in funding based on this one and a half billion dollar valuation. And Quartz described the sneakers as essentially fleece vests for your feet, which I thought was funny. And in the story in the Journal, what sort of funny about this, to me is that they want to be seen. Allbirds as a tech company. So one of the co founders literally said, we've never even thought of ourselves as a shoe company. We, we are focused on delivering comfort in an elevated way.

[A]

Oh, good. By the way, 50 million, that's all they do.

[C]

They're making the speed a better Place.

[A]

Yeah, $50 million is the median VC investment these days. That's like. That is now absolutely normal.

[D]

So my number is 13, as in Pakistan is asking for their 13th IMF bailout.

[A]

So.

[D]

Which suggests what happened with all the other ones. And what to me is actually especially interesting about this as a lot of it, I mean, a lot of it is just your normal balance of payments crisis, but it also has to do with Chinese debt and with importing a lot of very expensive equipment from China to make a lot of the infrastructure payments that are being paid for with Chinese debt. And so I think this is interesting as maybe a first indication of what we could see with the Belt and Road initiative of where this might not end so well.

[A]

So basically what's happened is that Pakistan borrowed a whole bunch of money from China in order to buy Chinese equipment to build its own infrastructure. Now it has. Now it owes so much money to China that it needs to borrow money from the IMF in order to repay China.

[C]

That's part of it.

[D]

Yep.

[A]

What could possibly go wrong? Okay, on which note, I think we will wrap this amazing episode of Slate Money Up. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Max Jacobs for producing Keep the emails coming on slatemoneylate.com and we will talk to you next week on Slate Money.