—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Anand Giridharadas is a writer.
He is the author of, most recently, "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World," published by Knopf in 2018. His other books are “The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas,†about a Muslim immigrant’s campaign to spare from Death Row the white supremacist who tried to kill him (optioned for movie adaption by Annapurna Pictures); and “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking,†about returning to the India his parents left.
He is an editor-at-large for TIME, an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times, having written, most recently, the biweekly “Letter from America.â€Â His datelines have included Italy, India, China, Dubai, Norway, Japan, Haiti, Brazil, Colombia, Nigeria, Uruguay, and the United States. He has also written for The Times's arts, business, and travel pages, and its Book Review, Sunday Review, and magazine--and for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he was raised there, in Paris, France, and in Maryland, and educated at the University of Michigan, Oxford, and Harvard. He worked briefly as a consultant for McKinsey & Company in Mumbai, before becoming a journalist in 2005, reporting from that city for the International Herald Tribune and The Times for four and a half years. He was appointed a columnist in 2008. He first interned for The New York Times at age 17, writing two articles on money and politics.
He has appeared regularly on TV and the radio in the United States and globally, and has given talks on the main stage of TED and at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the New York Public Library, the Sydney Opera House, the United Nations, South by Southwest, the Asia Society, PopTech, the Royal Society of Arts, and Google. He has been the recipient of honors from the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale, the Henry Crown Fellowship of the Aspen Institute, the 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year award, the Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture from Harvard University, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award.
Anand lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Priya Parker, and two children.
With some guests I have a hard time finding a quote to start the episode with. With Anand, I had the opposite -- at least half of what he said wowed me. When I first saw him speak and saw the title of his book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, I wondered if someone at the elite event I attended would really challenge a community he was in. He did. You'll hear Anand in the first few minutes describe the starting point of the book. His book shows how our society is leading people who believe they are helping. Though trying to decrease the inequities toward classes of people who, through no fault or lack of their own, lose out on society, they end up sustaining and increasing that inequity. That's just the book's starting point. I highly recommend his book, especially if you're interested in helping others and want to make sure your efforts create the results you want. Intent alone is no guarantee. You might be caught by the same systemic effects they are. It's more subtle than we can capture in our conversation, but we talk about the effects since the book came out. We didn't have time to cover a point important to me: how a similar pattern happens in the environment -- that among the people and organizations most active and sincere in their attempts in, say, recycling, a circular economy, and carbon offsets. They too may be not changing the path we're on to more total waste but accelerating us on it. Listen and see if you can identify the pattern and its results. Read the book to check the results of your efforts -- not what you hope results but what actually results. Read the transcript.