The position of many of the winners of our age of the last 30-40 years,
this period of time that is somewhat unique in being a period defined by hyper technology
change, hyper globalization change, also, coincidentally, to those things not really
related but equally cataclysmic, demographic change. If you think about, for a moment,
in the last 30-40 years we've basically done the rise of women, the rise of ethnic minorities
and apparently in many places, LGBT people, in addition to the digital revolution and
globalization. There are some people who are on the right
side of all of those changes and it's just been helium balloons, but there's many people
who have received all five of those as headwinds and then there's many of us in-between. Those
elites who have been the winners of that period recognize that we live in an age of inequality,
recognize, yesterday I was lucky enough to be in the House of Commons during the vote,
and listened to every MP, regardless of how they voted, telling a three minute story about
what was actually going on in their constituency. Regardless of how they ended up, the stories
were all stories of ache, of jobs lost, of uncertainty, of people unable to see a future
that they can run into. I think the winners of our age, knowing from
Oxfam that 82% of new wealth generated in 2017 went to the global 1%, which means that
we're not only not fixing historical legacies, we're literally making it worse now. Knowing
all of that, have been determined to help, to change, to make a difference, that's why
you see every bank's got an impact investment fund. Every rich guy is giving away lots of
money, a philanthropic thing. Every silicon valley business claims it's a humanitarian
project. What I think, in general, the winners of our
age are unwilling to do, they're not willing to pay higher taxes or just stop avoiding
them. They're not willing to let go of their Double Dutch with an Irish sandwich, tax manoeuvre
they all use. They're not willing to pay people more to do their jobs. They're not willing
to stop lobbying against austerity and the kinds of public policies that we know are
going to hurt people but benefit financial elites. They're not willing to actually commit
to the communities that have made them as companies which they can now effortlessly
abandon by sourcing here and selling there. What's ironic about what you've
just said is the winners of our age are taking more and more from the common stock, from
the common wealth and yet the language they use to describe their action is the language
of win-win. All of these investors, and this is quite a difficult conversation for a social
change making organization. We have many projects and have had many projects for the last few
years. We've looked at some of these movements, like Impact Investment, Philanthrocapitalism,
Venture Philanthropy, where the language of change is couched in this non-radical, non-confrontational,
what's good for me is good for my neighbour. If I do well, it means I can do some good
thereby. Your argument seems to be that's an incredibly corrosive way of looking at
the world. One of the things I learned was a lot
of this is, as you say, couched in this language of win-win, I couldn't quite figure out what
was the problem with it. As I thought about it, it seemed to me that what the win-win
does is it takes a situation, a concept that's actually derived from the world of trade,
like you have ice cream, I have money, I want ice cream, you want money and we do a deal.
Then that narrow case, that actually is a win-win, that's exchange, that's market exchange,
that's correct use of win-win. What has happened is that this concept of
the win-win has been jammed into the sphere of social change and making the world better
and actually solving our biggest public problems, where it has no business. Feminism is not
a win-win problem. A lot of men are going to have to lose a lot of power and privilege
and the right to grope people at the office and have positions that their mediocrity did
not actually entitle them to, for that revolution to succeed.
When everything is couched as a win-win, what you are really saying is that the kinds of
social change that actually cost the winner something are ruled out. What you're really
saying is, "Yes, tell women the problem is their posture, they should lean forward and
raise their hand more," that way we don't actually have to pay them equally because
that would hurt shareholder value. What you're really saying is, "Yes, let's have charter
schools and let's have Mark Zuckerberg give some money to a school," because what you
really don't want to do in the United States, I know this is alien here, is end the unbelievably
barbaric system we have of funding public education by your local property taxes. Basically,
the nicer your house, the better the education you get in America, which is obviously crazy.
If you just say, "Well, I'm not touching the education system," you're going to lose your
next election or they'll have a pitchfork in your stomach. What the winners of our age
do is get out in front of it by saying, "No, I recognize the desire for more equity in
education system. Let's do charter schools. Let's do lean in. Let's not do higher tax
in public education, but let's do this new thing that they're promoting in Silicon Valley
where Silicon Valley companies pay for you to go to college, and then you pay them a
percentage of your income, which used to be called taxation but is now done as an app
only for the luckiest students with the highest likelihood of repayment."
I believe that this win-win thing, although it sounds so good, is actually part of the
privatization of the solution of public problems. I don't think all problems need to be solved
by the public. I hope my phones continue to be built by the private sector. I hope my
airplanes continue to be built by the private sector. I think, frankly, most things that
occur in this society or any society in the modern world will be privately built and arranged.
When you look at a problem like social mobility, like the empowerment of women, what trade
has done to communities in this country and the anger that it has aroused, those are the
kinds of problems that cannot be solved by really clever businesses or really fun apps
or rich people who happen to be feeling generous on a particular day. Those are the kind of
problems we can only solve together. Those kinds of solutions have been discredited by
the fantasy of the win-win that allows the winners to keep on standing on people's backs.