“There is no denying,” writes Anand Giridharadas in his new book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, “that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory in history.” Giridharadas, a former New York Times correspondent, is speaking of what he calls “MarketWorld,” an ecosystem of wealthy Americans and those who associate with them: venture capitalists, consultants, TED talkers, tech giants, leaders in big philanthropy, and so on. In Winners Take All, he argues that this class has adopted a mission to make the world a better place, but in ways that protect its own financial interests and preserve intact policies, economic practices, and power imbalances that have “fostered many of the problems they seek to solve.”

Giridharadas has in mind problems like inequality, financial insecurity, economic immobility, poor nutrition and health among ordinary Americans, and global ills like poverty. He believes that the capitalist class he profiles has contributed to these problems, through participation in businesses and economic practices that harm those outside the ranks of economic “winners.” Take, for example, the story of the Sackler family fortune, as told by Giridharadas. According to Winners Take All, the Sackler family and its company, Purdue Pharma, made a fortune from producing and marketing OxyContin—and marketing it in an especially forceful way. As deaths from opioids spiked in 2001 in West Virginia, state officials tried to write a prior authorization requirement into the law for the prescription of OxyContin. Purdue opposed it, and even arranged financial incentives for pharmacy benefits managers to proceed without prior authorization in prescribing the drug. In the end, Purdue admitted to an “intent to defraud or mislead” in its promotion of OxyContin. For Giridharadas, other harmful elite practices include tax evasion, questionable vulture fund behavior, and a passion for “optimization” that can keep wages low and worker schedules irregular.

Complicit in economic harm, these same wealthy “winners” launch numerous philanthropic initiatives. The Sacklers, for example, are notably philanthropic, funding art museums, universities, initiatives to reduce dangerous conduct among youth (substance abuse is given as an example), and other programs and institutions. But these initiatives, for Giridharadas, are often incomplete at best. He profiles, for example, Even, an app designed to help Americans whose source of income isn’t always predictable—who aren’t employed in full-time salaried work. In its initial visions, for a fee, Even would establish a standard monthly income, taking money away in months when the worker’s income exceeds the baseline and returning that income in lean months to make up the difference. For Giridharadas, the founders of Even are “awash in noble intentions” but their app raises the question of whether it “could be read as a lucrative bet that the new economy would inevitably trap a permanent underclass, whose incomes could only be smoothed, not lifted.”¹

Jeff Bezos provides another example for Giridharadas, with his recent announcement that he would he give two billion dollars, in part to organizations aiding the homeless and in part to fund the creation of a new, Amazon-ified preschool “network” (where, says Bezos, “the child will be the customer.”) This announcement came after the release of Winners Take All, but Giridharadas wrote a piece for Time Magazine in which he applied his analysis to this highly visible charitable endeavor. Among other things, he believes that Amazon’s political behavior can hurt the ability of the public sector to fund social programs. The examples given of the latter are opposing a tax in Seattle whose proceeds would go to housing initiatives and “inviting America’s cities to bid on hosting its second headquarters, including by offering the company enormous tax breaks.”

In Giridharadas’s view, that is, we must use government action to address economic imbalances, through policies like inheritance taxes, greater social spending, and increased regulation. Though at least some of the subjects of Winners Take All tend toward the Democratic Party, however, they have not embraced such public solutions. Instead, they have favored “win-win” endeavors that seek to help people without burdening the wealthy with higher taxes or tighter regulations. These win-win projects can be private initiatives, like creating socially responsible businesses that allow the wealthy to make a return from helping people (“doing well by doing good”). Or they may involve charitable gifts to private organizations or nonprofits that do not affect the ability of wealthy individuals to continue to profit from dubious business practices or legal advantages. Though these efforts may in fact do good (“there is no question that the outpouring of elite-led social change in our era does great good,” Giridharadas writes), they also leave fundamental realities untouched.

Winners Take All proceeds by way of “portraits” of members of this ecosystem, their work, and their efforts to “change the world,” as Giridharadas points out how these individuals actually make choices that maintain the status quo. He notes the preference for private solutions over financial or political reforms. He profiles elites who feel conflicted about their wealth or the systems in which they operate but who shrink from making the final intellectual leap to Giridharadas’s positions. He depicts “thought leaders” who hold their fire when speaking to the wealthy, leaving fundamental systems or beliefs insufficiently challenged.

Giridharadas, of course, has his own beliefs, one of which comes out in his attitude towards local attachments. At times, he channels his inner Elder Zosima, the monk in The Brothers Karamazov, who relates a conversation he once had with a doctor:

The more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams, [the doctor] said, I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience.²

In this vein, Giridharadas makes reference to “elites who often showed greater interest in distant humanitarian causes than in the pain of people ten miles to the east or west.” He relates, seemingly approvingly, the judgment of Niall Ferguson that elites had “surrendered any loyalty to place.” He reports on Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter, who holds that one of the root causes of contemporary economic ills is the disconnection between businesses and local communities.

On the other hand, earlier in the book, Giridharadas praises “the development of universal rules that applied evenly to all, freeing people from the particularisms of villages, churches, and domains” as a “major project of the enlightenment,” one now threatened by private concentrations of wealth and power. These two theses—that the placeless globalization of elites may be partially to blame for economic ills, but that liberation from particularism for the masses is a positive achievement of modernity—make an uneasy pair. Business leaders looking to invest in their communities might find the same communities weakened by the process of transcending particularism.

The tenor of Giridharadas’s analysis can also run in different directions. He charges critics of economic elites of pulling their punches: for example, Amy Cuddy, a feminist scholar who uses a TED talk to plug power poses rather than to interrogate systematic sexism. There’s also Darren Walker, the President of the Ford Foundation, who writes an open letter critical of big philanthropy, but then soft-pedals his views when speaking in front of a corporate audience.

How does Giridharadas himself fare in this regard? Sometimes he comes down hard on his subjects, both by what he says and what he leaves out. Giridharadas does not present anyone as a clear example of change done right; everyone falls short in some way or another (perhaps the closest we get to such an example is Andrew Kassoy, an initial founder of the benefit corporation movement). A counterexample or two of individuals who got it right, whether drawn from the contemporary landscape or (if none could be found) from the past, would be useful.

On the other hand, Giridharadas can also strike a softer tone. Throughout the book, he offers qualifications about the intentions of economic players, sometimes right alongside his criticisms. They “often genuinely aspire to improve things,” he writes. “To question the doing-well-by-doing-good globalists,” he states at the end of the book, “is not to question their intentions or results.” As Giridharadas freely admits in his acknowledgements, his book “is a critique of a system of which I am absolutely, undeniably a part.” Winners Take All is, he says, “a letter, written with love and concern, to people whom I see yielding to a New Faith, many of whom I know to be decent.”

One can certainly accept that Giridharadas knows decent people, but we should be also be willing to question elite intentions, as the overall thrust and thesis of Giridharadas’s book itself suggests. Considering human nature, one must admit the general possibility of compromised intentions. When money and power are at issue, we have that much more reason to watch carefully—especially since the issues at hand are not only how the wealthy choose to give away their money, but also how they make it in the first place.

If Giridharadas’s account is accurate, we need language to describe it. A good word for unjust economic behavior is sin. The word “sins” appears three times in Winners Takes All. Giridharadas may be using the term loosely, but it is properly, of course, a religious term. And as it turns out, religion may be an especially appropriate place to turn to grapple with this subject, despite Giridharadas’s praise for modernity’s gift of freedom “from the particularisms of . . . churches.”

One of Giridharadas’s subjects is Sean Hinton, a scholar of Mongolian music turned McKinsey employee, who was later hired to run a program at George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Giridharadas says of Hinton, a Bahá’í, that “in his own life, he felt his faith to be one of the few forces strong enough to counterbalance the business way of thinking. . . . . many bearers of the business mind had, like him, a religious or spiritual life on the side, he [Hinton] said, ‘but I think that somehow that thinking never overlaps with that mind.’ He added, ‘People don’t have permission to think about those things in their working life. We’ve decided that those are separate domains, and it’s kind of not really okay in my circles to talk about religious faith.’”

Hinton finds his faith useful as a counterweight to materialism, and Giridhardas writes of Silicon Valley “star” Justin Rosenstein that he “considers himself deeply spiritual, which made him determined to serve others.” (Rosenstein, however, “avoid[s] the word God generally.”) Mark Zuckerberg himself remarked, in 2016, that “I was raised Jewish and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important.”

Perhaps religion could benefit economic winners by providing a sense of sin. Giridhardas’ critiques of “MarketWorld” have at least three interdependent strands: how the wealthy make their money, how they choose to direct their charitable efforts, and how they block or ignore the kinds of political or legal reforms he thinks are necessary. When it comes to the first area, especially, a greater sense of sin would be salutary. “Without this sense,” wrote John Henry Newman, “there is for man, as he is, no genuine religion.”

Sin, unlike a looser term like “harm,” cannot be weighed in any balance or made part of any cost-benefit analysis; it can only be repented of and renounced. Sin, properly used, is a sharp word; it reveals hard truths rather than softening them. Giridharadas sees his friends “yielding to a New Faith.” Perhaps they might look to lessons from an old one. When it comes to rich persons who unjustly profit off the poor, the Old Testament does not pull its punches. Nor, indeed, does the Christian tradition, which considers oppression of the poor and injustice to the wage-earner sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance.

We urgently need contemporary religious voices who can give voice to these traditions without being assimilated into or domesticated by the narratives of the wealthy elite, without easing the consciences of Democratic Party donors or letting anyone off the hook with half-measures. Pope Francis, at his best, has spoken to the concerns described by Giridharadas, for example in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” He is not the only Catholic leader to have done so. Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput has said “I’ve said many times over many years that if we ignore the poor, we will go to hell: literally.”

But the Catholic Church is currently riled in its own internal controversies and scandals, which may occupy a good portion of its attention for some time to come. It is not clear from what quarter a public clarion call can come and be heeded. But in the meantime religious leaders or advisors who are in a position to be heard by those who have, in the book’s words, a “religious or spiritual life on the side” might speak to them, in love, of sin.