Do you know what it's called when the young and the vulnerable and the poor depend on the whims of rich people rather than our shared institutions? Feudalism.
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What I've spent the last three years trying to investigate and demonstrate in
@WinnersTakeAll is that "giving back," noble as it seems, is really just trickle-down-economics with a cherry on top.1 reply 11 retweets 50 likesShow this thread -
I want to say one more thing, speaking very personally. Starting when I was little boy, my family would leave Ohio and fly to India every couple years to visit our relatives.
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We in America did things around the house for ourselves. But our relatives in India had servants. And those servants lived dependent on the whims of those with money.
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There was no meaningful Indian safety net to speak of, no common institutions in the society to buffer them from the ups and downs of fate, no labor laws that were actually enforced for house servants.
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And so when rains flooded their village, or their roof fell in, or their child took ill, or malaria came for them, what did the servants do? They sought a donation.
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And affluent Indians are happy to make those donations. It makes them feel good and helps the servants. Win-win. But those affluent Indians don't pay servants a living wage. Don't fight for a safety net that will cost them. Don't abide by labor laws limiting the workday.
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Donors choose, indeed. But when we look at a faraway country, it may be more clear to us that that isn't a fair society. The donation is an act of generosity that is allowed to substitute for justice.
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America is becoming such a place. A society in which the rich ensure that there are no common institutions capable of helping ordinary people, which saves the winners money and makes them feel important when donations must be sought.
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I remember writing about the founder of TaskRabbit. This was her vision of the economy of the future. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/02/us/02iht-currents02.html …pic.twitter.com/OplbiLnYvz
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We are heading toward a state in which a small few throw bucks and tips and donations at the many while capturing and draining our shared institutions. A Downton Abbey republic. If you want to go deeper, there is a book where this thread came from: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/539747/winners-take-all-by-anand-giridharadas/9780451493248/ …
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Replying to @AnandWrites
This is incredibly accurate. A scary look at our future.
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Replying to @AnandWrites
Where are these “shared institutions” you speak of? You mean the police who harass the poor and protect the rich? Or the schools that indoctrinate (or incarcerate) the poor while empowering the rich (conformists at least)?
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