He’s got no issue per se with well-heeled do-gooders trying to change the world. He is prolific on Twitter, naturally, and is quick with substantive rants as well as pithy put-downs like “Plutes be pluting.” His arguments resonate with other idealistic insiders (some of whose crises of conscience he recounts in Winners Take All), even if those arguments aren’t changing the practices of those insiders’ employers. He gives paid speeches and attends swell parties, rubbing shoulders with the one percent. Educated at Harvard and launched into the working world as a consultant at McKinsey, he has given two TED Talks, was a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and is now an editor-at-large for Time magazine. An Ohio native with a vertical shock of salt-and-pepper hair, Giridharadas checks all the boxes of the global elite. Indeed, the 37-year-old journalist is that most dangerous form of critic, the insider who bites the hand that feeds him. Giridharadas knows his subject because he’s a full-fledged member of the club. Where others see noblesse oblige, in other words, Giridharadas spies disingenuous self-dealing.

These include for-hire “thought leaders,” as distinguished from nobler critics philanthropists and “impact” investors who prescribe fixes for their benighted beneficiaries without asking how they’d like to be helped and the merry band of attendees of what he calls the “TED, Davos, and Aspen conference circuit” who reinforce one another’s rarefied conceptions of goodness. His list of privileged culprits and their enablers is long. “I felt there was a phenomenon of the people who benefited most from the last four decades entrenching their monopoly on the future,” he says, “by claiming to be leading the charge to fix our biggest shared problems.” When a big company donates thousands of computers to public schools while lobbying to squelch tax hikes that would keep those schools funded, that’s MarketWorld in action.

Giridharadas thinks the MarketWorld ethos enables those in charge to convey a sense of sacrifice while comfortably calling the shots, thereby preserving their place at the top. He calls it MarketWorld, a place where any problem can be solved by market forces-including issues involving public health or primary education, which common sense suggests only governments or massive publicly funded institutions can possibly tackle. The villains in Giridharadas’s tale live in a land Fortune readers will recognize.

Giridharadas winners take all