people that they can “do well by doing good.” Thus when Cohen and her friends sought to make a difference, their approaches were less about what they wanted to take down or challenge and more about the ventures they wanted to start up, she said. Many of them believed there was more power in building up what was good than in challenging what was bad. — 17: 284-287
The promotional materials put out by the new Beeck Center illustrated, for example, how business language has conquered the sphere of social change and pushed out an older language of power, justice, and rights. — 27: 448-449
Carson made clear that he did not believe they were right in their sense of victimhood. But in order to get his job done, he decided to honor the feeling. — 52: 851-852
“Does its introduction lessen the pressure for collective action, either private collective action like unions or public collective action like social movements?” he asked. “It would be a sad irony if a great new Band-Aid headed off the major surgery—expanded unemployment insurance, paid family leave, unions and new union alternatives, and so on—that an insecure citizenry so desperately needs.” Hacker was referring back to groups of individually powerless citizens potentially banding together to gain strength in numbers and stand up to powerful interests—the idea, in short, of political action. — 59: 960-964
Cohen began to worry that this idea of business training as a way station to world-changing was just a recruiter’s ruse, and one made easier to sell by the glow of MarketWorld’s seemingly noble intentions. What was the value in the problem-solving methods she had signed up to learn? Working on client projects, she began to run a parallel exercise in her own mind, ignoring the McKinsey toolkit and just asking herself what she thought the right answer was. “Very rarely, if ever, did the step-by-step, perfectly linear process of ‘here’s how we’re going to conduct this exploration’—very rarely did that actually surface the right answer,” she said. Often, that process—the thing for which McKinsey was famed—was “used primarily for communicating the answer, rather than generating it,” she said. The answers were derived through intelligence and common sense, and then the team would make them look more like trademark McKinsey answers: “We would backfill them into the template,” Cohen said. — 36: 506-512
“It is the best of times for thought leaders. It is the worst of times for public intellectuals,” declares Daniel Drezner, a foreign policy scholar, in his recent treatise The Ideas Industry, a part-academic, part-first-person account of how an age of inequality, among other things, has distorted the work of thinking. — 100: 1474-1476
Yet in Drezner’s view it is rising inequality that has most altered the sphere of ideas. It has had a paradoxical effect. On one hand, extreme inequality has created “a thirst for ideas to diagnose and treat the problems that seem to plague the United States.” On the other, it has spawned “a new class of benefactors to fund the generation and promotion of new ideas.” So America is more interested than ever in the problem of inequality and social fracture—and more dependent than ever on explainers who happen to be in good odor with billionaires. — 101: 1492-1496
In the poem “Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry,” by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet realizes that he has no chance of getting his way because the language in which he is forced to speak belongs to another domain. The businessperson’s amortization is factored into his tax bill, but what about the poet’s “amortization of the heart and soul”? The businessperson gets a break for his debts, but can the poet claim the same advantage for his indebtedness “to everything/about which/I have not yet written”? — 116: 1710-1714
The irony of all this is dark: Scaling back her critique of the system had allowed her to be wildly popular with MarketWorld elites and more easily digested by the world at large; and so she became famous, which drew the system of sexism into her life as never before and heightened her awareness of it; and its ferocity convinced her not to take on that system but to conclude that it might never change; and this acquiescence made her turn from uprooting sexism to helping women survive it. She had been drafted into a growing brigade: the theorists of the kind of change that leaves the underlying issues untouched. “I might have a view that’s a little bit unorthodox,” said Cuddy, “which is that, actually, we have done a really good job of documenting the problems and the mechanisms underlying them,” she said. “We really fully understand all of the structural and psychological and neurological mechanisms that lead to prejudice. We get it.” This view of scholars’ work perhaps made it easier to justify the punch-pulling for MarketWorld, but it was also problematic. After all, her academic colleagues in other fields like race, gender, and sexuality—to cite just a few examples—worked, in a slow, winding, often unheralded way, producing tangible change in an entire culture’s way of talking. Sometimes even the most risk-averse politicians now casually voiced concepts coined at universities: “micro-aggressions” (Chester Pierce, psychiatry, Harvard, 1970); “white privilege” (Peggy McIntosh, women’s studies, Wellesley, 1988); “gender identity” (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine); “intersectionality” (Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, critical race theory, University of California at Los Angeles, 1989). — 120: 1767-1779
Sinek had initially set out to study law in Britain, but he realized not long after the course began that “it didn’t fit me and I didn’t fit it.” He quit in the middle of his first year, to his parents’ horror, and went into the world of advertising. There he “learned the importance of the role of emotions,” he said; “that it’s not just an argument but rather that you can make somebody feel a certain way or connect to them in a certain way.” He learned that “rather than just facts and figures, if you can get someone to associate their lives and themselves to whatever it is you’re doing, and assert whatever it is you’re doing into their lives, you’re more likely to create not only a saleable product but love.” — 123: 1815-1820
“Poverty is essentially a question that you can address via charity,” he said. A person of means, seeing poverty, can write a check and reduce that poverty. “But inequality,” Giussani said, “you can’t, because inequality is not about giving back. Inequality is about how you make the money that you’re giving back in the first place.” Inequality, he said, is about the nature of the system. To fight inequality means to change the system. For a privileged person, it means to look into one’s own privilege. And, he said, “you cannot change it by yourself. You can change the system only together. With charity, essentially, if you have money, you can do a lot of things alone.” This distinction ran parallel to Cuddy’s reframing of her antisexism message in her TED talk. What motivated her to study the topic was inequality—specifically, a lack of power in one set of students because of the power held by another set (and people like them). This was a crime with a victim and a perpetrator. By the time this idea made it to TED, the inequality, as we’ve seen, had been resculpted into poverty. “Women,” Cuddy said, “feel chronically less powerful than men.” The crime was still a crime, but now it wanted for suspects. — 134: 1985-1994
One means of enforcement is the preference these days for thinkers who remind winners of their victorious selves, Giussani said. — 136: 2015-2016
Pinker’s actual point was narrow, focused, and valid: Interpersonal violence as a mode of human problem-solving was in a long free fall. But for many who heard the talk, it offered a socially acceptable way to tell people seething over the inequities of the age to drop their complaining. “It has become an ideology of: The world today may be complex and complicated and confusing in many ways, but the reality is that if you take the long-term perspective you will realize how good we have it,” Giussani said. The ideology, he said, told people, “You’re being unrealistic, and you’re not looking at things in the right way. And if you think that you have problems, then, you know, your problems don’t really matter compared to the past’s, and your problems are really not problems, because things are getting better.” Giussani had heard rich men do this kind of thing so often that he had invented a verb for the act: They were “Pinkering”—using the long-run direction of human history to minimize, to delegitimize the concerns of those without power. There was also economic Pinkering, which “is to tell people the global economy has been great because five hundred million Chinese have gone from poverty to the middle class. And, of course, that’s true,” Giussani said. “But if you tell that to the guy who has been fired from a factory in Manchester because his job was taken to China, he may have a different reaction. But we don’t care about the guy in Manchester. So there are many facets to this kind of ideology that have been used to justify the current situation.” — 138: 2041-2052
Porter was making clear that “business” is not a fixed quantity. It can be done in different ways, following different approaches. It happened in recent decades to have been taken over by protocols that, in the name of making everything optimal, granted a license to neglect and even hurt others. “We sort of created a cartoon,” Porter said, “which is this view of, if you can force your employee to work overtime without paying them, then you should do it—that’s free markets, and that’s profit maximization.” — 162: 2394-2397
The protocols’ spread to social questions also gave elites a chance to limit the range of possible answers. “You absolutely constrain the solution set that you’re prepared to look at,” he said. “It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? If you only have English speakers in the car, then the solution is going to be done in English.” In Hinton’s view, it was not a matter of malice. “It’s the banality of inattentiveness,” he said. “It’s not wickedness. It’s not conscious self-censorship. It’s just habit.” He brought up that meeting of nonexpert experts he had hosted in that conference room above West 57th Street. “I’m guilty of that,” he said. “I’ve got a pretty broad Rolodex. But when you reach out, you reach out to smart, articulate people like yourself. I mean, we all do that. So it self-replicates.” — 165: 2442-2447