It’s not every day that a former president of the United States reads your book. Or is bothered enough by it to rebut it. So imagine my surprise when I got a Google alert this past weekend alerting me that Bill Clinton had discussed me in his new Citizen: My Life After the White House.
In a four-page section in the middle of the book, Clinton lifts up my book “Winners Take All” as a counterpoint to his views about philanthropic and other private-sector solutions to public problems. To his credit, the former president accurately and deftly summarizes my argument that, as he puts it, “inequality keeps increasing because the principal architects of the global ‘winners take all’ economy do try to do some good, but never propose anything that will make a significant difference because doing so would reduce their wealth and power.” He even allows, “There's something to it.”
Then he rebuts the argument from his point of view. It’s thoughtful, borne of his experiences in public and civic life, and, ultimately, lands in a different place than I do.
But I want to know what you make of our debate about whether we’d be better off with or without billionaires and their schemes and visions to “change the world.”
So check out my deconstruction of this stretch of the Clinton book, which I did along with our friend Nastaran Tavakoli-Far. And please let us know what you think.
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