American journalist, former New York Times columnist, and author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), the sharpest popular indictment of what its subtitle calls the elite charade — the worldview in which the very processes of wealth concentration that produce modern inequality are also proposed, by their beneficiaries, as the solution to it. Giridharadas grew up in Ohio and Paris, worked for McKinsey after college (a detail he has used to good autobiographical effect), and has built a body of reporting on how American elites talk themselves into believing their own beneficence.
The central argument of Winners Take All is that "MarketWorld" — the circuit of Aspen Institute panels, TED talks, Davos, major foundations, mission-driven consulting, and philanthrocapitalist ventures — has successfully substituted private "doing well by doing good" for the democratic politics of redistribution and regulation. This is not an argument that wealthy philanthropists are insincere; it is the more damaging argument that their sincerity is part of the problem. The framework displaces the question of justice with the question of impact, depoliticizes what is inherently political, and preserves the underlying arrangements that produce the harms the philanthropy then treats.
His subsequent book The Persuaders (2022) turned toward the practical question of how democratic coalitions can be rebuilt in conditions of polarization and despair, arguing against what he sees as a left tendency toward purity-based purging rather than patient persuasion. He writes the newsletter The Ink, and in both books and reporting he occupies an unusual position — a leftward critic fluent in the vocabulary and personal networks of the elites he criticizes.