The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Just one guest today on

Ingrittress, author of Winners Take All, the elite charade of changing the world just out from Knopf.

Rich people's do goodery doesn't attract enough critical attention.

Perhaps because the journalists and academics who would normally do that sort of work don't want

to alienate potential sources of funding.

The roles of elite private foundations in shaping social science research and co-opting political

activism are both profound but little remarked upon.

For example, the Ford Foundation had a heavy hand in shaping race relations

and our understanding of them in the U.S. shifting the focus, as Leah Gordon told us in the June 2015 appearance on behind the news from power to

prejudice from structural concerns like the power of money and control of the

state to individual psychology and feelings.

Ford has also been all over U.S. foreign policy for decades,

from eating Suharto's coup in Indonesia

to training the economists who serve Pinochet and Chile,

to co-opting community organizers in South Africa.

Similar things can be said of names like Rockefeller and Carnegie, who work to limit the

militancy of the political left at home and abroad.

More recently, a fresh approach to do goodery has arisen among a new voriche not philanthropy in the traditional sense,

pots of money administered by semi-independent program officers,

but a more directly business-inspired approach.

Now we've got Mark Zuckerberg and hedge fund guys running school reform pretty directly.

And we've got businesses who think that their activities can do good in themselves.

...