this period of time that is somewhat unique in being a period defined by hyper technology

change, hyper globalization change, also, coincidentally, to those things not really

related but equally cataclysmic, demographic change. If you think about, for a moment,

in the last 30-40 years we've basically done the rise of women, the rise of ethnic minorities

and apparently in many places, LGBT people, in addition to the digital revolution and

globalization. There are some people who are on the right

side of all of those changes and it's just been helium balloons, but there's many people

who have received all five of those as headwinds and then there's many of us in-between. Those

elites who have been the winners of that period recognize that we live in an age of inequality,

recognize, yesterday I was lucky enough to be in the House of Commons during the vote,

and listened to every MP, regardless of how they voted, telling a three minute story about

what was actually going on in their constituency. Regardless of how they ended up, the stories

were all stories of ache, of jobs lost, of uncertainty, of people unable to see a future

that they can run into. I think the winners of our age, knowing from

Oxfam that 82% of new wealth generated in 2017 went to the global 1%, which means that

we're not only not fixing historical legacies, we're literally making it worse now. Knowing

all of that, have been determined to help, to change, to make a difference, that's why

you see every bank's got an impact investment fund. Every rich guy is giving away lots of

money, a philanthropic thing. Every silicon valley business claims it's a humanitarian

project. What I think, in general, the winners of our

age are unwilling to do, they're not willing to pay higher taxes or just stop avoiding

them. They're not willing to let go of their Double Dutch with an Irish sandwich, tax manoeuvre

they all use. They're not willing to pay people more to do their jobs. They're not willing

to stop lobbying against austerity and the kinds of public policies that we know are

going to hurt people but benefit financial elites. They're not willing to actually commit

to the communities that have made them as companies which they can now effortlessly

abandon by sourcing here and selling there. What's ironic about what you've

just said is the winners of our age are taking more and more from the common stock, from

the common wealth and yet the language they use to describe their action is the language

of win-win. All of these investors, and this is quite a difficult conversation for a social

change making organization. We have many projects and have had many projects for the last few

years. We've looked at some of these movements, like Impact Investment, Philanthrocapitalism,

Venture Philanthropy, where the language of change is couched in this non-radical, non-confrontational,

what's good for me is good for my neighbour. If I do well, it means I can do some good

thereby. Your argument seems to be that's an incredibly corrosive way of looking at

the world. One of the things I learned was a lot

of this is, as you say, couched in this language of win-win, I couldn't quite figure out what

was the problem with it. As I thought about it, it seemed to me that what the win-win

does is it takes a situation, a concept that's actually derived from the world of trade,

like you have ice cream, I have money, I want ice cream, you want money and we do a deal.

Then that narrow case, that actually is a win-win, that's exchange, that's market exchange,

that's correct use of win-win. What has happened is that this concept of

the win-win has been jammed into the sphere of social change and making the world better

and actually solving our biggest public problems, where it has no business. Feminism is not

a win-win problem. A lot of men are going to have to lose a lot of power and privilege

and the right to grope people at the office and have positions that their mediocrity did

not actually entitle them to, for that revolution to succeed.

When everything is couched as a win-win, what you are really saying is that the kinds of

social change that actually cost the winner something are ruled out. What you're really

saying is, "Yes, tell women the problem is their posture, they should lean forward and

raise their hand more," that way we don't actually have to pay them equally because

that would hurt shareholder value. What you're really saying is, "Yes, let's have charter

schools and let's have Mark Zuckerberg give some money to a school," because what you

really don't want to do in the United States, I know this is alien here, is end the unbelievably

barbaric system we have of funding public education by your local property taxes. Basically,

the nicer your house, the better the education you get in America, which is obviously crazy.

If you just say, "Well, I'm not touching the education system," you're going to lose your

next election or they'll have a pitchfork in your stomach. What the winners of our age

do is get out in front of it by saying, "No, I recognize the desire for more equity in

education system. Let's do charter schools. Let's do lean in. Let's not do higher tax

in public education, but let's do this new thing that they're promoting in Silicon Valley

where Silicon Valley companies pay for you to go to college, and then you pay them a

percentage of your income, which used to be called taxation but is now done as an app

only for the luckiest students with the highest likelihood of repayment."

I believe that this win-win thing, although it sounds so good, is actually part of the

privatization of the solution of public problems. I don't think all problems need to be solved

by the public. I hope my phones continue to be built by the private sector. I hope my

airplanes continue to be built by the private sector. I think, frankly, most things that

occur in this society or any society in the modern world will be privately built and arranged.

When you look at a problem like social mobility, like the empowerment of women, what trade

has done to communities in this country and the anger that it has aroused, those are the

kinds of problems that cannot be solved by really clever businesses or really fun apps

or rich people who happen to be feeling generous on a particular day. Those are the kind of

problems we can only solve together. Those kinds of solutions have been discredited by

the fantasy of the win-win that allows the winners to keep on standing on people's backs.