Anand Giridharadas

What people respect in our time is entrepreneurship, is go it alone business success, is hacking it and making it in the free market.

We live in an age that's called the age of meritocracy, is being very smart and being very credentialed and making something and making something of yourself through that.

They figured out they needed to make a story about the naturalness of this inequality in this time by telling a story of their brilliance, their enterprise, their grit, their perseverance in making these fortunes.

And this is the really interesting twist.

Because I think they began to understand

the anger that was emerging over inequality.

People are not stupid.

They know when they're hurting.

So these elites, and this is the twist, they went further than many elites in not only saying we earned it.

They told a second related story, which is those of you who are mad and don't maybe think we earned it or think that even if we did earn it, this ain't right.

You all need to simmer down because

If you really want change, which is what you say you want, if you really want reform, if you really want to change the world, you really want revolution even, actually in our time, in a time like ours, the only way to get it is, lo and behold, for us rich people at the very tippy top of our society to give it to you.

That's right.

The only way to change the world now is for Mark Zuckerberg

to eradicate diseases and Elon Musk to fight climate change and Google to organize all the world's information and transform education and make YouTube videos for the poor and Goldman Sachs to bring finance to rural farmers in Africa.

And this was where this ruling class story got so smart.

They were basically saying, if you mess with

us billionaires and these big companies.

If you come for us, if you tax us, if you regulate us, you're not hurting us.

You are hurting the wretched of the earth who we are on the cusp of liberating through our apps and through our foundations and through our give one, get one products.