Hits and misses with my new year’s non-fiction reading resolution

Dutch writer Rutger Bregman.

I made a strange New Year’s resolution: to read a non-fiction book each month that I would probably find objectionable. I would reject the basic premise, doubt the evidence and query the conclusions.

Of course, I have to do a bit of digging around before I decide which books to read. But the first one was easy. Its title — Utopia for Realists and How We Can Get There — was sufficient to make the cut. The fact that the progressive crowd adores it reinforced my decision.

Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman.

It’s written by Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman and I have briefly reviewed some of its contents in a column I wrote on the debate about a universal basic income. His three main ideas are that we should have a universal basic income, that there should be a 15-hour limit on the working week and that borders should be completely open.

It’s an appalling book. He provides no convincing evidence whatsoever for any of his ideas. He never addresses the issue of how a UBI can be financed apart from making some glib references to (small-scale) schemes supposedly paying for themselves.

I thought my next choice was similarly straightforward. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, written by Anand Giridharadas. I noticed that left-wing economist Joe ­Stiglitz reviewed the book very favourably. I was wrong to put it on the list but right to read it. Winners Take All is a terrific book that I highly recommend to readers of this column. Apart from some small missteps — the author is a fan of Thomas Piketty and his faulty research on inequality — it’s full of interesting gems worked around a compelling theme.

According to Giridharadas, a former McKinsey employee, there is a powerful association of advocates that he terms MarketWorld. It has been particularly influential in the US.

What draws these advocates together is money and power as well as unswerving promotion of markets, giving back, contempt for government, unconstrained movement of capital and people across borders, diversity and ­cosmopolitanism. They are committed globalists. They regard themselves as change agents, aiming to make the world a better place by using their financial resources and intellect to improve the lot of those not as fortunate. They seek to do this within the status quo, giving up nothing effectively but giving back on their terms.

The members of the MarketWorld club are tech billionaires, investment bank billionaires, venture capitalists, senior partners of firms like McKinsey and other consulting firms and select former politicians (Bill Clinton is their poster boy).

They hang out at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Summit at Sea, TechPop, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Skoll World Forum (held in Oxford) and, until recently, the Clinton Global Initiative. These forums are all invitation-only and are extremely expensive to attend.

The club has developed its own “thought leaders” to make presentations at these gatherings as well as give TED talks (another string to MarketWorld’s bow). Foreign policy scholar Daniel Drezner is quoted in the book as saying that “it is the best of times for thought leaders. It is the worst of times for public intellectuals’’.

Giridharadas says “public intellectuals are generally wide-ranging critics and foes of power with a duty to point out that the emperor has no clothes”.

By contrast, “thought leaders are more congenial to plutocrats who sponsor intellectual production. They tend to know one big thing and believe their important idea will change the world.

They are not sceptics, but true believers. They are optimists, telling uplifting stories. They go easy on the powerful.”

These extremely well-paid thought leaders (a speaking fee of between $US50,000 and $US75,000 is quoted) are told to keep it simple and respectful and to make sure the presentation is “sunny and actionable”.

Giridharadas says “thought leaders have given rise to watered down theories of change that are personal, individual, depoliticised, respectful of the status quo and the system and not in the least bit disruptive”. You need to check out the TED talks to get the drift.

There are some absolutely hilarious vignettes in the book, including the delusions of some of the tech titans that their vastly profitable activities have improved the lot of humanity at no cost. Take the guy who devised the “like” symbol in Facebook: he is firmly of the view that he has made the world a better place.

And then there is the unqualified praise of Uber and Airbnb as innovations with no losers — tell that to taxi plate holders and the neighbours of short-term rentals. The fact is that both these developments are essentially distribution platforms connecting providers and customers, but the inventors and investors like to see them as means of turning everyone into individual social entrepreneurs.

We hear a story of an eager, talented female graduate who takes a job at McKinsey based on all the uplifting material in its mission statement and the information provided to her at the interview. She is going to change the world.

The reality is different. Her assignments mainly involve advice to firms to cut costs, particularly by optimising the cost base according to the firms’ requirements. If this means putting workers on variable hours contracts, so be it.

We hear of the comical session at the Summit at Sea, held on a luxury liner cruising the Caribbean, in which ex-CIA officer and leaker Edward Snowden talks on satellite from Moscow. He is a favourite of the MarketWorld crowd. When the facilitator, a fantastically wealthy venture capitalist, thinks he can hear the basis of a start-up, Snowden becomes very confused and refuses to play the game.

Having been an insider, Giridharadas eventually breaks with MarketWorld. He bravely points out to club members — he is speaking at Aspen — that their businesses are often the main part of the problem. The idea of win-win solutions is often just self-serving pap designed to fend off actions by governments to reduce their market power.

He also contends that the activities of MarketWorld are essentially anti-democratic, seeking to take action on behalf of people but not asking them for their input. He notes that companies tend to be everywhere, whereas workers are somewhere. This disjunction is simply ignored by MarketWorld.

Clearly, I will need to be more carefully with the next book I pick. But my New Year’s resolution has already paid off.