What S Wrong With Putting The Rich In Charge

  Just before Anand Giridharadas took the stage at the Chicago Humanities Festival earlier this month, in the auditorium at the private and pricey Francis W. Parker School in upscale Lincoln Park, a giant “Thank You” to the Robert R. McCormick Foundation flashed up on the screen. It was followed, in smaller type, by thanks to 20 other sponsors: organizations like ITW, the MacArthur Foundation, Allstate, and Bank of America.



  An accomplished speaker with an approachable presence and an aura of cool (the uniform: waxed jeans, black blazer over black tee, sneakers, and an impressive salt and pepper coif), Giridharadas, himself a onetime McKinsey consultant and Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, is fully aware of the ironies here.



  For Giridharadas, the question became, “What’s the relationship between the extraordinary elite helping and the extraordinary elite hoarding?”



  Real change in the social and political sphere, he said, is not going to be win/win.  v