“For an annual fee of $260, the app calculates a person’s average earnings and reserves any excess earnings for the weeks when they earn less. Even is helpful when it comes to managing unpredictable cash flow, although it doesn’t solve other problems caused by erratic work schedules, such as scrambling to find last-minute childcare.”
Also, it costs $260! Presumably such an app is intended to be most helpful for people who are just scraping by and as such need to budget stringently. And Even’s creators expect that market to just have $260 lying around to toss at an app? It’s frankly hilarious, in a very sad way, to see how out of touch these supposed do-gooders are.
I completely agree that it is not the right solution, but $5/week is probably something that most people can pay—and in some cases, what it might save them in terms of payday loans and bank overdraft charges might make it a real savings.
Confirming text. For many years I have been managing nonprofit organizations and now I offer a nonprofit coaching business. Your article and my immediate purchase of this book confirmed what I have said to my nonprofit and social activist friends that their number one client is not the person that comes to their doors for service but it is the provider of the funds to their organization, initiative or event. I know that to be true because the funding source is to whom you are formally held accountable first. Through this monetized relationship, all too often the standards for the deliverables are tweaked or adjusted to meet the funding sources needs. If you really want and need the money, you comply accordingly. THAT IS THE COMMON DANCE.
I’m not a social entrepreneur even if I would like to engage myself in such adventure in the near future. Today I’m just trying to make my opinion and find my way through the existing social models including non profit organizations.
I do love the book report proposed by Mark Kramer: clear, easily understandable, openness and at the end he dares positioning himself with that complex challenge… Courageous.
I also appreciate comments for all of you guys. Every remark is smart and interesting.
I personally think that understanding the current existing overall situation is not so difficult. Capitalism has unfortunately quite negative effects and I think that only upturning the table would give a chance to eliminate poverty in large scale in a long term view. However, nobody can propose realistic alternatives today and even solution like basic income would be a simple band-aid on a wooden leg.
Concerning the topic of the book I guess that we currently have no choice. NGO and non profit organization depends on people funding them (see comments from Gregory Johnson above) and spend 70% of their time looking for financement. All government are subjects to corruption and, in democratic countries, the same focus more on the next election pool than on changing the system. The only system, powerful enough to have a global impact, is the business system. So yes, philanthropic are inside the system and tend to reinforce it but that a simple start. I guess that if that movement can increase and spread all over the globe in the next years we would maybe find either a common leader who could drive us or more likely create tools to coordinate all local initiative in order to have everyone going forward in the same direction. For me the key is in creating tools and rules in order to coordinate local autonomous sub-systems and initiatives.
I am a retired management consultant and I have been a serial social entrepreneur since my early retirement. I am also promoting B Corps in Hong Kong - a well known capitalist stronghold and co-founder of two Certified B Corps.
Although I have yet to read Giridharadas’ book (which I will), I agree with him that many of the ‘elites’ initiatives are self-serving and do not challenge the bases of glaring inequalities and environmental destruction that are worsening before our eyes. I also see the limits of purely market-driven solutions and that government’s role is absolutely critical. But the reality is that all over the world, governments are unable or incapable of addressing these fundamental issues. It is good that some businesspeople are taking the lead to address these issues, such as the B Corps and Creating Shared Value movements. Yes, they have not gone far enough. But it is understandable as the movements have been around for only a decade or so. It is encouraging to see the momentum is building up. And they are dynamic movements and could evolve to challenge more fundamental issues of the current capitalist system. In due course, they might able to influence government policies to accelerate the need change. So I think Giridharadas’ work is most welcome as it could provide a spur to deepen and transform the nascent movements.
To me, reading Winners Take All was akin to getting a diagnosis and, looking back, recognizing all the symptoms. As somebody who has been in the social innovations field since before it became a household name, I’ve certainly made many of the critiques as Giridharadas, but only in piecemeal form, mostly privately, and certainly without his depth and courage.
This book is a call for us to focus more on the individuals and institutions that enable or benefit from inequality and environmental degradation instead of on innovator hero workshop, often funded by many of those same sources.
When faced with intractable problems, isn’t it necessary to step back to another more fundamental frame of understanding. One possible frame is to take an evolutionary view that “culture” and “collaborative processes” are the “secret sauce” of our species adaptability and that highlighting and rewarding individuality is at the root of many problems. Does anyone else have a suggested frame?
totally agree with Howard. After retiring from the corporate world, I was active in promoting social innovation in Hong Kong and China. I became the first Ashoka Support Network in the Greater China Region. I founded a number of social enterprises which eventually created a major impact in this part of the world. But in 2005, I shifted my focus to join the global B Corp movement as I felt that mainstream businesses must change and change fast. then I noticed that none of the big foundations, corporate funders and the like are interested in challenging the the current models of businesses as such. they are keen preserve the status quo and hand out donations on the side. That’s why I think spreading and deepening such movements as the B Corps are critically urgent.
I applaud Mark Kramer for so thoughtfully sharing his views about Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World without defensiveness and with genuine openness about the complicated and serious issues raised by its author, Anand Giridharadas. I find this particularly admirable because Mark acknowledges some of Giridharadas’ critique applies to his own ideas and practices of community change which Mark’s consulting firm calls Collective Impact – a brand of multisector collaboration. For a critical examination of Collective Impact, see Collaborating for Equity and Justice: Beyond Collective Impact http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org, 9 January 2017.
Giridharadas’ concerns about philanthropy, and its preferred community change frameworks such as Collective Impact, draw attention to an intentional refusal to challenge existing power relations. In what Giridharadas calls “MarketWorld,” you can talk about “win-win” opportunities but not about social justice because it implies taking money away from those who have far more than they need and redistributing it to those who do not have enough. Many suggest the failure to challenge MarketWorld supremacy is unintentional. However, the mainstream community change paradigm is purposely limited to “methods and techniques” with almost no examination of the larger historical, cultural, political, or economic contexts in which community change takes place. The paradigm is depoliticized and sanitized so it can be monetized and this is very rarely questioned. Giridharadas’ quote from Upton Sinclair applies, “It is hard to get a man to understand something he is being paid not to understand.”
One of the most serious problems of the mainstream paradigm is its silence about attacks against our democratic institutions of government which must be viable for large scale, transformative change to occur. The unwillingness to confront efforts to weaken the public sector is related to a long-standing, fundamental flaw of the mainstream paradigm: an inability to take even the best outcomes community change to scale through public sector policy and sustainable funding. For example, after decades and thousands of community-based partnerships to improve the economic conditions and well-being of American children, many of which were successful on a small scale, in 2017 the United States ranked 35th of 41 developed nations in the eradication of child poverty (Charlotte Edmond, World Economic Forum, 28 June 2017). In part, this continues because foundations and public agencies providing funding to reduce child poverty within the mainstream paradigm for community change rarely allow their support to be used to address the cause of child poverty: the abdication of public/governmental responsibly for eradicating it. As many European countries have shown, eradicating child poverty requires some form of a social democratic public sector to limit the inherent inequities caused by capitalism.
The rhetoric of philanthropy about community and systems change often diverts attention from the obvious fact that philanthropic assets result from enormous wealth disparities. Foundations will not challenge the power relations which provide power for their boards of directors and well-paid gatekeeper privileges for their professionals (see Giridharadas’ conversations with Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation). In the mainstream paradigm, the encouragement of inclusion and engagement rather than meaningful community empowerment eliminates significant challenges to MarketWorld. As Malcolm X said, “Just because you invite me to the table, it does not mean I get something to eat.”
To promote and support transformation change, it is essential to understand the basic and important differences between inclusion/engagement and the power to meaningfully share decision-making about the purpose and practices of community change. I define power as the capacity to produce intended results. If you do not have this capacity to produce the results you intend, don’t rely too much on philanthropy to help you get the power necessary. After serving for almost 12 years as a senior program officer at large community and private foundations, I can confirm that philanthropy helps you stand on your own two knees.
Sinclair attended New York’s City College, and there were a bunch of similar New York colleges where the bulk of the students were poor and working class. These were free colleges producing very many Nobel Laureates, engineers, professors etc.
Another free college until a few Years ago, The Copper Union, in lower Manhattan offered a curriculum or Art and Engineering, beginning before the Civil War, and where lincoln gave his stunning second inaugural.
None of these colleges are free today and therefore many of their students are financially burdened. Moreover, public colleges and universities today struggle to exist and have lost much of their ability to offer fine educations.
COMMENTS
BY Ilana
ON August 17, 2018 09:13 AM
“For an annual fee of $260, the app calculates a person’s average earnings and reserves any excess earnings for the weeks when they earn less. Even is helpful when it comes to managing unpredictable cash flow, although it doesn’t solve other problems caused by erratic work schedules, such as scrambling to find last-minute childcare.”
Also, it costs $260! Presumably such an app is intended to be most helpful for people who are just scraping by and as such need to budget stringently. And Even’s creators expect that market to just have $260 lying around to toss at an app? It’s frankly hilarious, in a very sad way, to see how out of touch these supposed do-gooders are.
BY MARCIE PARKHURST
ON August 18, 2018 03:37 PM
I completely agree that it is not the right solution, but $5/week is probably something that most people can pay—and in some cases, what it might save them in terms of payday loans and bank overdraft charges might make it a real savings.
- Mark Kramer
BY Gregory Johnson
ON August 24, 2018 06:39 AM
Confirming text. For many years I have been managing nonprofit organizations and now I offer a nonprofit coaching business. Your article and my immediate purchase of this book confirmed what I have said to my nonprofit and social activist friends that their number one client is not the person that comes to their doors for service but it is the provider of the funds to their organization, initiative or event. I know that to be true because the funding source is to whom you are formally held accountable first. Through this monetized relationship, all too often the standards for the deliverables are tweaked or adjusted to meet the funding sources needs. If you really want and need the money, you comply accordingly. THAT IS THE COMMON DANCE.
BY REMI BOUSQUET
ON August 26, 2018 02:56 AM
I’m not a social entrepreneur even if I would like to engage myself in such adventure in the near future. Today I’m just trying to make my opinion and find my way through the existing social models including non profit organizations.
I do love the book report proposed by Mark Kramer: clear, easily understandable, openness and at the end he dares positioning himself with that complex challenge… Courageous.
I also appreciate comments for all of you guys. Every remark is smart and interesting.
I personally think that understanding the current existing overall situation is not so difficult. Capitalism has unfortunately quite negative effects and I think that only upturning the table would give a chance to eliminate poverty in large scale in a long term view. However, nobody can propose realistic alternatives today and even solution like basic income would be a simple band-aid on a wooden leg.
Concerning the topic of the book I guess that we currently have no choice. NGO and non profit organization depends on people funding them (see comments from Gregory Johnson above) and spend 70% of their time looking for financement. All government are subjects to corruption and, in democratic countries, the same focus more on the next election pool than on changing the system. The only system, powerful enough to have a global impact, is the business system. So yes, philanthropic are inside the system and tend to reinforce it but that a simple start. I guess that if that movement can increase and spread all over the globe in the next years we would maybe find either a common leader who could drive us or more likely create tools to coordinate all local initiative in order to have everyone going forward in the same direction. For me the key is in creating tools and rules in order to coordinate local autonomous sub-systems and initiatives.
BY gawain
ON August 29, 2018 12:01 PM
okaaaaaay…...
So what are you going to do beyond: ” think long and hard about my life’s work”?
BY Ka Kui Tse
ON September 2, 2018 05:56 PM
I am a retired management consultant and I have been a serial social entrepreneur since my early retirement. I am also promoting B Corps in Hong Kong - a well known capitalist stronghold and co-founder of two Certified B Corps.
Although I have yet to read Giridharadas’ book (which I will), I agree with him that many of the ‘elites’ initiatives are self-serving and do not challenge the bases of glaring inequalities and environmental destruction that are worsening before our eyes. I also see the limits of purely market-driven solutions and that government’s role is absolutely critical. But the reality is that all over the world, governments are unable or incapable of addressing these fundamental issues. It is good that some businesspeople are taking the lead to address these issues, such as the B Corps and Creating Shared Value movements. Yes, they have not gone far enough. But it is understandable as the movements have been around for only a decade or so. It is encouraging to see the momentum is building up. And they are dynamic movements and could evolve to challenge more fundamental issues of the current capitalist system. In due course, they might able to influence government policies to accelerate the need change. So I think Giridharadas’ work is most welcome as it could provide a spur to deepen and transform the nascent movements.
BY Winthrop Carty
ON September 15, 2018 07:22 AM
To me, reading Winners Take All was akin to getting a diagnosis and, looking back, recognizing all the symptoms. As somebody who has been in the social innovations field since before it became a household name, I’ve certainly made many of the critiques as Giridharadas, but only in piecemeal form, mostly privately, and certainly without his depth and courage.
This book is a call for us to focus more on the individuals and institutions that enable or benefit from inequality and environmental degradation instead of on innovator hero workshop, often funded by many of those same sources.
BY Howard
ON September 15, 2018 08:27 AM
When faced with intractable problems, isn’t it necessary to step back to another more fundamental frame of understanding. One possible frame is to take an evolutionary view that “culture” and “collaborative processes” are the “secret sauce” of our species adaptability and that highlighting and rewarding individuality is at the root of many problems. Does anyone else have a suggested frame?
BY Ka Kui Tse
ON September 15, 2018 05:04 PM
totally agree with Howard. After retiring from the corporate world, I was active in promoting social innovation in Hong Kong and China. I became the first Ashoka Support Network in the Greater China Region. I founded a number of social enterprises which eventually created a major impact in this part of the world. But in 2005, I shifted my focus to join the global B Corp movement as I felt that mainstream businesses must change and change fast. then I noticed that none of the big foundations, corporate funders and the like are interested in challenging the the current models of businesses as such. they are keen preserve the status quo and hand out donations on the side. That’s why I think spreading and deepening such movements as the B Corps are critically urgent.
BY Ka Kui Tse
ON September 15, 2018 05:33 PM
Correction: 2005 on line 5 should be 2015
BY Steve
ON September 16, 2018 01:22 PM
If Jeff Bezos wants to help the world, how about paying his workers more?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/14/jeff-bezos-low-income-people-pay-amazon-workers-better
Thomas Piketty puts his finger on it. We need a wealth tax. Even a 2% wealth tax would mean that income tax could be reduced and government would have enough to invest in the future.
BY Winthrop Carty
ON September 16, 2018 02:39 PM
Exactly.
BY Arthur T. Himmelman
ON October 24, 2018 12:14 PM
I applaud Mark Kramer for so thoughtfully sharing his views about Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World without defensiveness and with genuine openness about the complicated and serious issues raised by its author, Anand Giridharadas. I find this particularly admirable because Mark acknowledges some of Giridharadas’ critique applies to his own ideas and practices of community change which Mark’s consulting firm calls Collective Impact – a brand of multisector collaboration. For a critical examination of Collective Impact, see Collaborating for Equity and Justice: Beyond Collective Impact http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org, 9 January 2017.
Giridharadas’ concerns about philanthropy, and its preferred community change frameworks such as Collective Impact, draw attention to an intentional refusal to challenge existing power relations. In what Giridharadas calls “MarketWorld,” you can talk about “win-win” opportunities but not about social justice because it implies taking money away from those who have far more than they need and redistributing it to those who do not have enough. Many suggest the failure to challenge MarketWorld supremacy is unintentional. However, the mainstream community change paradigm is purposely limited to “methods and techniques” with almost no examination of the larger historical, cultural, political, or economic contexts in which community change takes place. The paradigm is depoliticized and sanitized so it can be monetized and this is very rarely questioned. Giridharadas’ quote from Upton Sinclair applies, “It is hard to get a man to understand something he is being paid not to understand.”
One of the most serious problems of the mainstream paradigm is its silence about attacks against our democratic institutions of government which must be viable for large scale, transformative change to occur. The unwillingness to confront efforts to weaken the public sector is related to a long-standing, fundamental flaw of the mainstream paradigm: an inability to take even the best outcomes community change to scale through public sector policy and sustainable funding. For example, after decades and thousands of community-based partnerships to improve the economic conditions and well-being of American children, many of which were successful on a small scale, in 2017 the United States ranked 35th of 41 developed nations in the eradication of child poverty (Charlotte Edmond, World Economic Forum, 28 June 2017). In part, this continues because foundations and public agencies providing funding to reduce child poverty within the mainstream paradigm for community change rarely allow their support to be used to address the cause of child poverty: the abdication of public/governmental responsibly for eradicating it. As many European countries have shown, eradicating child poverty requires some form of a social democratic public sector to limit the inherent inequities caused by capitalism.
The rhetoric of philanthropy about community and systems change often diverts attention from the obvious fact that philanthropic assets result from enormous wealth disparities. Foundations will not challenge the power relations which provide power for their boards of directors and well-paid gatekeeper privileges for their professionals (see Giridharadas’ conversations with Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation). In the mainstream paradigm, the encouragement of inclusion and engagement rather than meaningful community empowerment eliminates significant challenges to MarketWorld. As Malcolm X said, “Just because you invite me to the table, it does not mean I get something to eat.”
To promote and support transformation change, it is essential to understand the basic and important differences between inclusion/engagement and the power to meaningfully share decision-making about the purpose and practices of community change. I define power as the capacity to produce intended results. If you do not have this capacity to produce the results you intend, don’t rely too much on philanthropy to help you get the power necessary. After serving for almost 12 years as a senior program officer at large community and private foundations, I can confirm that philanthropy helps you stand on your own two knees.
BY Ka Kui Tse
ON October 24, 2018 01:32 PM
I totally agree with Arthur’s analysis. I am witnessing all this happening in Hong Kong and China.
BY Ron Krate, PhD
ON January 25, 2019 08:25 PM
For example, real income for the middle class has remained about the same as it was in the early seventies.
See for reference Joseph Stiglitz’s articles, papers and books.
BY Ron Krate, PhD
ON January 25, 2019 08:56 PM
Arthur quotes Upton Sinclair’s famous words.
Sinclair attended New York’s City College, and there were a bunch of similar New York colleges where the bulk of the students were poor and working class. These were free colleges producing very many Nobel Laureates, engineers, professors etc.
Another free college until a few Years ago, The Copper Union, in lower Manhattan offered a curriculum or Art and Engineering, beginning before the Civil War, and where lincoln gave his stunning second inaugural.
None of these colleges are free today and therefore many of their students are financially burdened. Moreover, public colleges and universities today struggle to exist and have lost much of their ability to offer fine educations.