Read The New Prophets of Capital Online
Authors: Nicole Aschoff
And yet we're not. The popularity of mind-cure, inside-stuff strategies for alleviating alienation and achieving autonomy and success rests on our deep, collective desire for meaning and creativity in the face of overwhelming structural odds against achieving self-actualization. Literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson would say that the Oprah stories, and others like them, are able to “manage our desires” only because they appeal to deep fantasies about how we want to live our lives. This, after all, is what the American Dream narrative is aboutânot necessarily a description of life lived, but a vision of how life should be lived. When the stories that manage our desires break their promises over and over, the stories themselves become fuel for change and open a space for new, radical stories. These new stories must feature collective demands that provide a critical perspective on the real limits to success in our society and foster a vision of life that does fulfill the desire for self-actualization.
45
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1
Oprah Winfrey, Harvard commencement speech, May 30, 2013.
2
Janet Lowe,
Oprah Winfrey Speaks: Insight from the World's Most Influential Voice
, New York: Wiley, 1998; Oprah Winfrey interview with Moira Forbes, “A Conversation with Oprah winfrey,”
www.youtube.com
, September 18, 2012.
3
“Remarks by the President at the Presidential Medal of Freedom Ceremony,”
Whitehose.gov
, November 20, 2003.
4
Janice Peck,
The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era
, Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008, p. 110.
5
Rapoport and Wheary,
Where the Poor and the Middle Class Meet
.
6
Oprah Winfrey, Spelman College commencement speech, April 19, 2012.
7
Heather Laine Talley and Monica J. Casper, “Oprah Goes to Africa: Philanthropic Consumption and Political (Dis)Engagement,” in Trystan T. Cotten and Kimberly Springer, eds.,
Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture
, Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2009.
8
Clifton Fadiman, “Party of One,”
Holiday
, February 6, 1957, quoted in Richard Weiss,
The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent
Peale, New York: Basic Books, 1969; Mark Twain,
The Story of the Good Little Boy
, 1875.
9
Weiss,
American Myth
.
10
Winfrey, Spelman commencement speech.
11
Peck,
Age of Oprah
; Eva Illouz,
Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture
, Columbia University Press, 2003;
O, The Oprah Magazine
, “What I Know For Sure,” May/June 2000.
12
Peck,
Age of Oprah
, pp. 130, 220;
The Best of Oprah's What I Know for Sure
, Supplement to
O, The Oprah Magazine
, Nov 2000.
13
The Best of Oprah's What I Know for Sure
, Supplement to
O, The Oprah Magazine
, February 2001; Lowe,
Oprah Winfrey Speaks
, p. 167; Winfrey, Harvard commencement speech.
14
Peck,
Age of Oprah
, pp. 25, 32.
15
Peck,
Age of Oprah
, p. 217;
O, The Oprah Magazine
Facebook page,
www.facebook.com/oprahmagazine/info
.
16
O, The Oprah Magazine
, January 2014.
17
O, The Oprah Magazine
, February 2014.
18
O, The Oprah Magazine
, December 2013.
19
Ibid.
20
O, The Oprah Magazine
, January 2014.
21
O, The Oprah Magazine
, December 2013.
22
O, The Oprah Magazine
, January 2014.
23
Tally and Casper, “Oprah Goes to Africa.”
24
Oprah Winfrey, Stanford University commencement speech, June 15, 2008.
25
Douglas Hartmann and Teresa Toguchi Swartz, “The New Adulthood? The Transition to Adulthood from the Perspective of Transitioning Young Adults.” in
Constructing Adulthood: Agency and Subjectivity in the Life Course. Advances in Life Course Research
, Vol. 10, edited by R. Macmillan, Oxford, 2007, quoted in Jennifer M. Silva, “Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty,”
American Sociological Review
77: 4, 2012, 508; see also Anthony Giddens,
Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
, New York: Polity Press, 1991.
26
Gary Vaynerchuk, TED Talk, Web. 2.0 Expo, September 2008.
27
Dan Schwabel, “Marie Forleo: How She Grew Her Brand to Oprah Status,”
Forbes
, May 16, 2013.
29
Oprah Winfrey, Harvard commencement speech.
30
O, The Oprah Magazine
, March 2014.
31
Madeleine Schwartz, “Opportunity Costs: The True Price of Internships,”
Dissent
, Winter 2013.
32
Mark Babbitt, “25 Jobs in a 50-Year Career: Is Gen Y Ready?”
Savvy Intern
, October 9, 2013.
33
See
www.freelancersunion.org
.
34
Ibid.; Freelancers Union, Instagram, February 18, 2014.
36
Jeremy Rifkin, “The Rise of the Sharing Economy,”
Los Angeles Times
, April 6, 2014.
38
Ibid.; see also Atossa Araxia Abrahamian's piece on the Freelancers Union in
Dissent
, Winter 2012.
39
C. Wright Mills,
The Sociological Imagination
, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1959], p. 6.
40
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in J. Richardson, ed.,
Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education
, New York: Greenwood, 1986, pp. 241â58.
41
Miles Corak, “Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility,” Discussion Paper No. 7520, Bonn: Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit, July 2013.
42
Thomas Picketty,
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.
43
Jennifer Silva, “Becoming a Neoliberal Subject: Working-Class Selfhood in an Age of Uncertainty,” 2011,
blogs.sciences-po.fr
; Silva, “Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty.”
44
Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis, “Changing the Subject: A Bottom-up Account of Occupy Wall Street,” Murphy Institute, City University of New York, 2013.
45
Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,”
Social Text
1 (Winter 1979), 130â48. See Kathi Weeks in
The Problem with Work
on the power of the demand.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead may or may not have said this, but it is Melinda Gates's favorite quote, and it aptly sums up the philosophy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gateses
are
changing the world. Since its founding in 1997, the Gates Foundation has transformed the medical and research fields for diseases like malaria and pneumonia and is at the center of an education reform movement in the United States. The Gates's recent efforts to publicize philanthropy, and their ability to leverage their wealth for social change, are encouraging other billionaires to commit to the Giving Pledge to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes.
The transformation of Bill Gates's image over the past two decades is remarkable. Gates, the ruthless, greedy monopolist, caricatured by Tim Robbins in the 2001 film
Antitrust
, has been supplanted by the earnest, humble Bill, a “worldwide force for good.”
1
Melinda Gates, the other half of the foundation, is a shyer Samaritan, but is equally influential in shaping the foundation's trajectory.
Forbes
ranks her at number three on its 2014 list of the World's Most Powerful Women, right behind Angela Merkel and Janet Yellen.
The Gates Foundation is at the forefront of a new form of philanthropy called “philanthrocapitalism.” Unlike the traditional foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), philanthrocapitalists don't believe in old-fashioned charity. They have greater ambitions. Philanthrocapitalists want to harness the forces of capitalism that made them fabulously wealthy to help out the rest of the planet. As Bill Gates said in his Harvard commencement speech in 2007, “If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.”
2
Philanthrocapitalists think profitable solutions to social problems are superior to unprofitable ones because they give private capital an incentive to care.
These new philanthropists are no less popular for their devotion to profit. In an era of declining state legitimacy and yawning social divides, people and countries are looking for solutions, and the philanthrocapitalists seem to have them. Matthew Bishop, New York bureau chief for the
Economist
, and Michael Green, a writer and economist, call philanthropists like the Gates “hyperagents”âactors “who have the capacity to do some essential things far better than anyone else” because they don't have to deal with voters, shareholder demands, or fundraising. They are free to think outside the box and take risks.
3
The source of these hyperagents' superpowers is the mountains of money they have made over the past three decades. Dramatic political, economic, and social changes since the late 1970s resulting in the rise of finance, sharp declines in taxes on wealth, the tech boom, and globalization have created windfall gains for people like the Gateses, the Waltons, the Broads, and the Buffets, to name only a few. But, as some of these billionaires have acknowledged, the world has not benefited equally. Absolute poverty and childhood mortality are declining in many countries, but starvation and chronic hunger afflict more than a billion people. Every year millions of children die from preventable diseases and a third of the planet lacks clean water and access to a toilet. When Bill Gates came up for air in the late 1990s after creating the Microsoft empire he looked around and was “shocked” and “revolted” by the fate of poor people around the world. “We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not.”
4
Instead, he saw a system in which capitalist markets create health and prosperity for some but death and disease for others.
Rather than throwing up their hands in despair, the Gateses decided to channel their business acumen, penchant for innovation, and money into “refining the system.”
5
As successful businesspeople, the Gateses have a deep appreciation of the power of markets and view the problems of poor people as primarily a result of market inefficiencies. They note that while capitalist markets are great at creating wealth and spurring innovation, they don't naturally create equality. At the same time, governments and the private sector don't naturally put their resources into the right places to fix problems caused by market inefficiencies.
To ameliorate market inefficiencies, the Gateses set up a foundation with the resources necessary to change market incentives and rechannel “economic signals.” Their donations, along with Warren Buffet's annual contribution of about $2 billion, have created a foundation with an endowment of more than $40 billion, triple the size of the Ford Foundation, the next-largest foundation. Having this much money enables the foundation to “make bets on promising solutions that governments and businesses can't afford to make.”
6
These bets are risky and sometimes fail, but the Gateses say that their projects are always guided by a simple principle: every life has equal value. As Melinda Gates says: “We don't think that everybody has the same chance to grow up and live a healthy life and yet we think they ought to have that. We think there's something that our foundation can do about that ⦔
7
Bill Gates told the graduating class of Harvard that “humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunityâreducing inequity is the highest human achievement.”
8
In a world characterized by an unprecedented divide between rich and poor, this might sound daunting. But the Gateses are optimists. In their 2014 annual letter, they say that “[b]y almost any measure, the world is better than it has ever been.”
9
They believe that people are beginning to recognize the need to tackle social problems and that for the first time in history we have the toolsâbiotech, computers, the internetâto make lasting social change.
NGOs, Foundations, and Civil Society
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been an important part of American civic life since the nineteenth century. Their numbers have waxed and waned, but beginning in the postâWorld War II era, many countries, including the United States, saw a huge increase in the number of NGOs. The spread of internet technology in the 1990s gave NGOs an international presence and helped to solidify their power and influence.
The growing importance of international NGOs (INGOs) is a story intimately linked to the economic and political changes resulting from the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s and the 1980s debt crisis. As rural sociologist Phil McMichael argues, in the 1980s the “development project”âin which poor countries implemented national development strategies geared toward economic self-sufficiency and political sovereigntyâwas replaced by the “globalization project”âan ideological turn that encouraged states to lower their trade barriers, privatize resources and services, and embed themselves in global value chains.
10
In this climate, national states lost legitimacy and, during the debt crisis, structural adjustment programs forced developing countries to dramatically curtail spending on health, education, and food subsidies. To ameliorate the human crisis that resulted, international governing bodies (UN, IMF, World Bank) encouraged poor states to outsource welfare provision to Western INGOs, which were considered more efficient and knowledgeable than local institutions. Today, NGOs are a central part of global governance networks. They carry out aid work, conduct research, write policy reports, serve as experts, and act as conduits for development aid.
International NGOs are able to carry out these tasks because many of them are extremely well funded. Amnesty International, for example, has a bigger annual budget ($295 million in 2012) than the UN Human Rights Council ($177 million in 2012/13).
11
Big INGOs, like Médecins Sans Frontières and Oxfam, receive public monies for many of their activities, such as fighting global poverty and providing humanitarian aid. But most NGOs rely on sympathetic individuals and money from large philanthropic foundations to fund their organizations.
Foundations, like NGOs, have historically played an important role in capitalism. Bishop and Green think we are actually in the midst of a
fifth
golden age of philanthropy:
Since the birth of modern capitalism in Europe during the Middle Ages, rich businesspeople have consistently played a leading role in solving the big social problems of their day, often adapting the innovations of capitalism to make their philanthropy more effective. Indeed, to go further, it seems to be a feature of capitalism that golden ages of wealth creation give rise to golden ages of giving.
12
Philanthropy booms, triggered by rapid increases in inequality during periods of massive wealth expansion, serve as a kind of release valve for capitalism by ameliorating some of its worst excesses. Joan Roelofs, a political scientist and expert on the (former) giants of the foundation world (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), notes that the tycoons of the early twentieth century sought to “dole out their benevolence in a systematic manner. They also hoped to extract influence over social progress and public opinion, which was intensely anti-capitalist at the time” by working behind the scenes to shape movements and policy. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, was funded with money from numerous foundations, including Rosenwald, Peabody, and Rockefeller, and served as a crucial counterweight to the growing appeal of the Communist Party for black Americans during the 1920s. New Deal legislation of the 1930s was written by the Social Science Research Council, a Rockefeller organization, while Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs were developed from the Ford Foundation's “Gray Areas” experimentsâurban renewal programs designed to curb urban unrest and political organizing.
13
The story today is similar. The consequences of skyrocketing inequality are of increasing concern, particularly to the super-elites. They worry about the long-term economic impacts of inequality, in terms of growth and innovation, and the political consequences of inequalityâsocial unrest and demands for redistribution, particularly from the middle and upper-middle classes who believe in meritocracy. Philanthropy and /files/10/74/32/f107432/public/private partnerships are once again being touted as ways to manage those risks and solve social problems.
Creative Capitalism
One can never be sure why someone goes to the trouble of making billions of dollars only to turn around and give them away. Some say it's the tax breaks, or perhaps a sense of civic duty. Others take a more ideological approach and argue that wealthy people want to decide what gets done with their money rather than leave it up to the state. Why Bill Gates decided to give his money away is anybody's guess. David Banks calls Gates's contributions “the antitrust dividend,” noting that while Gates had given a few hundred million dollars to charity before 1998, his contributions in 1999 and 2000âthe years of the federal antitrust trial against Microsoftâwere staggering. Between October 1998 and January 2000 Gates put more than $20 billion into the foundation. Gates told an interviewer at the time that “he would gladly give up his fortune to make the antitrust trouble go away.”
14
Gates himself says that he always planned to give his money away after he retired from Microsoft, but that his mother's persistent urging to give back pushed him to speed up his philanthropic aims following her death after a long battle with breast cancer in 1994.
Regardless of their motives, when it came time to choose
what
to spend their money on, Bill and Melinda followed their gut. Travelling around Africa in the 1990s, the Gateses were horrified by the fates of poor people, particularly children. They were also distressed that US students seem to be falling behind their international peers, and in particular, that poor students of color weren't getting the skills they needed to succeed in the new technology society. They asked themselves why, in an era of global abundance, were children dying or failing to reach their potential?
For Bill and Melinda Gates, the answer to both questions is inefficiencies in capitalist markets. “In a system of capitalism, as people's wealth rises, the financial incentive to serve them rises. As their wealth falls, the financial incentive to serve them falls, until it becomes zero,” Gates remarked at the World Economic Forum in 2008. “Why do people benefit in inverse proportion to their need? Well, market incentives make that happen.”
15
Even though poor people need more than wealthy people, there is no incentive to meet their needs because the needs are not coupled with the ability to pay. Thus, the Gateses contend that poor children are dying from disease and malnutrition, or not succeeding in school, because capitalist markets are not serving them.
The Gateses don't stop at identifying the problem. They have a solution: creative capitalism. They think businesses, NGOs, foundations, and governing organizations like national states and the UN, need to work together to “stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities.” As Bill argues:
As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others. Capitalism harnesses self-interest in a helpful and sustainable way, but only on behalf of those who can pay. Government aid and philanthropy channel our caring for those who can't pay. But to provide rapid improvement for the poor we need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.
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