Can Your Career Change the World? | Anand Giridharadas

Doing well by doing good is essentially the idea that you can kind of have your cake and give it back too, that you can make a killing and make a difference. This is a culture that really benefits billionaires and plutocrats, but it's not a culture that is confined to billionaires and plutocrats. And I think if so many of us didn't passively believe their stories, they would have no power in telling them. As I've been traveling around for the book, I meet so many people who confess, sometimes publicly and often privately, their own feelings of being hoodwinked by this kind of age of market hegemony. And young people who say, gosh, I actually don't want to work for the place I'm working, but I was told that I was going to be able to sort of make change if I went there. Young people have been kind of fooled, in many cases, into believing that working for large, ruthless companies is sort of the modern equivalent of doing the Freedom Rides in Mississippi. And that's preposterous. But I think there's been such a concerted marketing campaign to basically make you feel like going to work in the Valley or at Goldman or McKinsey, all these places, is like the way of fighting for millions of people. And that if you don't, you're going to be helping a hundred people. It's so successful and it's so fraudulent. And one of the things I really wanted to do with the book is start to dismantle that belief that it takes the personnel and methods and resources of capitalism to fight for justice. What are government, non-profits, the civic sector not doing, or should be doing to bring those young people to aspire to careers in civic service and public service? I think the first order of business is to not feel entitled to a better government than the one you have, but to feel responsible for making it as good as you want it to be. And we need another round of kind of what John Kennedy called for when he told people to go into public service. We need people willing to take the pay cut. I don't know what to say. Not everything in life is about money. If it were up to me, I would wipe clean the college debt of anybody who goes into public service. Let's make that choice easier for people. But we need people in every sphere of public life. We need the best people. We can't afford for all the best people to go build some app that is going to make it easier to rate different kinds of cappuccino. We misallocate talent grossly in this country right now. And we need the best people thinking about the institutions we share in common, and way more of them going into civic and public life.