Review of Politics Without Politicians by Hélène Landemore

Hélène Landemore, a political theorist who writes frequently on democracy, has a new book titled Politics Without Politicians. It is in many ways the culmination and popularization of her previous work on democratic theory and practice, all of which argues in favor of the wisdom and capability of ordinary citizens. In this new book she forcefully makes the case that the problems facing many representative democracies of the world would best be addressed through giving power to randomly selected groups of citizens. That is the main thesis of the book, which I will expand on below.

But first, why does she think this? Right away, Landemore says that, after thinking about democracy and resisting this conclusion for a decade, she has finally admitted “electoral politics is beyond repair. But democracy isn’t.” (1). Her book thus begins by listing common problems facing government in America and other wealthy democracies—most specifically, the continued dominance by discredited elites and the persistent unpopularity of our elected leaders.

Some commentators claim that the people are the source of these current problems and that the solution is less democracy. On this score, she mentions Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy and Garett Jones’ 10% Less Democracy. (Other books advocating this perspective include Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter and, less radically, Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, I would add).

Landemore, correctly, goes in the other direction. If the problem is economic and political elites, the solution is more democracy, not less. So what would it mean to have politics without politicians? Won’t anyone who gets involved in a leadership or decision-making role become a politician (with all the negative connotations this entails—out of touch, elitist, corrupt) over time?

To answer this question, how should we define these two categories? For Landemore, “ordinary citizens are those who are not professionally involved in politics.” On the other hand,“politicians, by definition, hold professional political responsibilities that set them apart from the rest of us.” (33).

How can we get ordinary citizens involved in politics without turning them into politicians? Again, as will be detailed below, the answer for Landemore is bringing citizens into political decision-making through temporary bodies of randomly selected citizens. But first let’s step back and ask again why we might want this.

William F. Buckley Jr. famously said “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” While Buckley was a conservative, there is nothing inherently conservative or liberal, right or left, in this particular quote. What it embodies, rather, is a democratic attitude and this is why Landemore mentions it. As she says, “a large, random sample of the population might not be such a bad mix of people. In fact, it could be both more democratic and more effective to be governed by them than by a group of Harvard academics.” (5).

(It is also a litmus test for your political gut. Do you instinctively agree with the Buckley quote, as Landemore and I both do? Or do you recoil and feel the opposite way? Answers to this question also cut across conventional political cleavages.)

A random selection of citizens would be more democratic, sure. But why might it be more effective? First, Landemore points to the “problems with existing representative systems. Ordinary citizens are peripheral to them, convened now and again for the purpose of selecting representatives but kept at bay most of the time.” (8). Landemore’s alternative, citizen-led approach, “consists…of a vision of politics centering deliberative processes—ordinary people talking to one another with the goal of coming to a joint decision that works for most.” (9).

She thus envisions a form of democracy where “politics is neither a job nor a chore. It is instead a civic duty…” (11). Her vision also “centers on deliberative assemblies of citizens appointed through civic lotteries.” (11). Below I will consider some of the strengths and weaknesses of lottery versus a self-selection approach to participatory politics. For now note that her approach avoids the creation of a new political class because people will be randomly selected to deliberate and decide on certain issues before returning to their day-to-day lives. In the world of citizen lotteries there would be no professional class of politicians just as there is no professional class of jurors in the United States.

Another piece of evidence for widespread democratic discontent lies in the many protests in democratic countries around the world in the past decade-plus, especially in the oldest representative democracies. “The common thread seemed to be widespread discontent with a political system seen as detached, incompetent, corrupt, and fundamentally unjust.” (29). Again, the defining feature in many of the longstanding representative democracies of the world is “profound dissatisfaction with the economic and political system, and distrust of ruling elites.” (30). This connects with my claim, in Does Democracy Have a Future?, that the 21st century will be defined not by emerging democracies and how they consolidate, but by systemic problems facing the longstanding, consolidated democracies of the world.

Landmore argues that our biggest problem is “how we select our ruling class. The issue isn’t just governance—it’s electoral representation and the professional class of politicians it perpetuates.” (30). The problem with politicians lies not with who they are as individuals but instead with their existence as a group that, by running for elections, fundraising, and holding office for a long time, “stay in power so long that they become a class of their own.” (23).

Drawing on Bernard Manin, Landemore argues that elections are oligarchic, not fundamentally democratic. They lead to the selection of a distinct class of people, politicians, who have political power and get to make the laws that bind us all. The truly democratic mechanism, going back to Ancient Athens, is to either have everyone directly vote on the laws (what we now call direct democracy) or to randomly select a subset of citizens (often called sortition or lot), as we do for jury duty.

This would be the most effective way to reverse the depressing currently reality documented by scholars like Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, whose “empirical studies suggest that true power lies with the smaller, wealthier part of the population, and that electoral democracies are, indeed, plutocracies.” (57).

The Virtues of Lottery

Landemore runs through various reasons why electoral politics haven’t been working very well. Ultimately, she argues, it is due to how we select our leaders. Her basic suggestion seems to be that we can revitalize democracy through a combination of direct referenda votes on some issues and jury-style randomly selected mini-publics to decide others.

“…what we can learn, or relearn, from the Greeks is that political expertise is also acquired on the job. The less we give people an opportunity to participate the less capable they are. The more we ask of them, the more they learn.” (86). Landemore is here articulating one of the basic principles of participatory democracy. I couldn’t agree more.

What happened to selecting citizens by lottery? In Ancient Athens, while key policies were decided in an open vote among all citizens, key offices were filled via random selection, aka lottery. They also filled their large juries with a lottery of random citizens, as we still do today. However, using lot outside of jury duty disappeared “sometime between the middle of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century” (89). This is deeply disappointing, because lot is the best embodiment of political equality: “random selection has the merit of giving everyone the exact same mathematical chance of occupying a position of power.” (104).

Landmore also cites the diversity trumps ability theorem. This is the idea that, at least where there are correct answers, a diverse group of people will perform better than a homogenous group of highly capable people. Why? Because, with greater diversity, “everyone contributes a different perspective, piece of information, or argument to the political question of the common good, whereas even the smartest few are likely to miss elements of the big picture.” (112). 

In other words, groups of highly trained elites tend to be similar—they have the same prejudices, the same experiences, and the same blindspots. For a real world example think of the brilliant yet clueless people in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who dragged us into the Vietnam War. Whereas lot, by using random selection, best embodies the promise of diversity. “Lot’s instrumental value for collective intelligence comes from its ability to reproduce at small scale the cognitive diversity present in the larger group.” (113). A lot, in other words, produces a microcosm of the wisdom embodied in the millions of ordinary citizens that populate a democracy.

A key part of Landemore’s argument for the power of random citizens lies in the evidence she marshals concerning the positive impact of deliberative polls and other mini-publics. There are multiple examples to draw from, including the Irish citizens council on abortion as well as a French council on climate change.

Consider the French Citizen’s Convention for Climate, which ran from 2019 to 2020. President Macron’s proposed fuel tax (to address climate change) spurred the Yellow Vest movement, a widespread set of protests that crossed conventional political lines. In turn, the government set up this convention on climate, composed of 150 randomly selected citizens, with the goal of producing a better policy to address climate change. It was a 9 month process over seven weekends with a $6 million budget. Over the course of this time the citizens produced more than 100 proposals for addressing climate change, none of which involved a fuel tax. This convention revealed that ordinary citizens could come up with a range of proposals for addressing climate change that were far more popular (and innovative) than what conventional politicians could think of.

Landemore says that when given the power to initiate and formulate laws (or sufficiently law-like proposals) these random citizen participants are “citizen legislators.” They aren’t just offering recommendations like an advisory committee. Rather, citizen legislators are a “specific subset of citizen representatives: their function is to formulate legislative proposals and to draft laws. The term “citizen” signals that these actors are laypeople—not professional politicians or members of a demographically distinct elite.” (133).

Furthermore, Landemore reports on the openness, new connections, and even “civic love” that were forged during these extended sessions of citizen participation. As she says, “somewhere between the first and third sessions, the participants had clearly bonded, forming a genuine connection.” (156). Something similar can happen among jurors if they find themselves with the civic privilege and responsibility of serving on a multi-day trial.

Such citizen assemblies demonstrate that citizens can be effective deliberators and decision-makers. “And one of the reasons why they succeed in solving problems, often precisely where politicians fail, is because they bond and learn to care for one another, and even to love one another.” (171). Her account offers considerable detail on what worked and didn’t work in the assemblies where she was involved as an observer but I won’t cover more of that here.

What are some concerns with Landemore’s account?

Will participation in these citizen assemblies be a waste of time? As Landemore rightly notes, “there is no point in convening a citizens’ assembly if its recommendations will only be ignored.” Agreed. She goes on to say “at the very least, there should be a credible commitment up front to seriously consider the conclusions of the citizens’ assembly—and, ideally, a clear and convincing explanation afterward of how the commissioning body plans to respond to them.” (198).

To be blunt, this simply isn’t good enough. This is where we need a dose of participatory democracy as defined by Carole Pateman, where people have the right to make binding decisions in government.

However, at later points in the book, Landemore strikes a more radical tone, suggesting that legally empowered random assemblies should be combined with legal referenda to create a politics without politicians. Doing so would, if institutionalized, move far beyond the sort of citizens’ advisory boards that she gestured at in the previous quote. To be meaningfully democratic, face-to-face groups of citizens, whether self-selected as in participatory budgeting or randomly selected by lot as in Landemore’s examples, must be empowered to make binding decisions. Take again the example of a jury—the jury listens, then deliberates, then makes a binding decision on the defendant’s guilt. To do less would be undemocratic and a waste of time.

As Landemore rightly asks, “what should legitimacy—and specifically democratic legitimacy—mean and require in the twenty-first century?” (250). Would randomly selected assemblies, and their resulting decisions, have legitimacy? Unlike direct and participatory democracy, where every citizen can, if they wish, vote on a policy, or representative democracy, where every citizen can vote on who to represent them, assemblies selected by lot would not involve everyone. Every citizen would be eligible, as with jury duty. And, as with jury duty, only a small subset would actually be randomly selected to serve on any given issue. First, this entails a predictive question: would people see these bodies as legitimate? If not, why not? Second, a normative question: should we consider them so? 

The virtues of randomly selected bodies of citizens are that, like juries, they are made up of a representative sample of ordinary people, not elites. They embody, as Landemore points out, political equality in a manner that elections do not. Is this enough to overcome the concern that not everyone gets to participate? Maybe. Perhaps their legitimacy rests firmly enough on the fact that all are eligible to participate, i.e. we are all in the random lottery selection.

There are tough trade offs here. The kind of face-to-face, participatory democracy envisioned by Pateman is open to all but faces self-selection issues: will the people who show up be similar to, or care about, the issues that a majority does? When participatory budgeting works well the answer has been “yes.” But there are plenty of examples of local government, especially concerning housing, where a small coterie of wealthy activists dominate the proceedings. I personally feel the pull of both types of face-to-face democracy.

The fact that selecting assemblies by lot (whatever their specific power) makes them a true cross-section of citizens is a strong argument in their favor. I’ll leave Landemore with the last words: “Randomly selected citizens’ assemblies produce ideas and proposals that are more aligned with the preferences of the larger population and draw on a more diverse pool of views and information than those of elected assemblies. As a result, their proposals are likely to be better and more likely to be accepted by the public than those of elected assemblies.” (255).

For further reading I can heartily recommend Landemore’s Open Democracy, a more academic but still accessible presentation of these issues as well as her co-authored book Debating Democracy, in which she debates libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan on the strengths and weaknesses of democracy.

Review of We Have Never Been Woke

Continuing with some common blog themes I am here reviewing We Have Never Been Woke by sociology professor Musa al-Gharbi. The book, though provocatively titled, is actually a detailed and substantial discussion of the professional class in America, what al-Gharbi terms “symbolic capitalists.” These are, more or less, the top quarter or so of American income earners, who mostly have (at least) a bachelor’s degree and work with ideas. As he says in an interview, symbolic capitalists are “people who work in fields like consulting, finance, law, education, media, science and technology, or human resources.”

His book has a wealth of data, is very informative and thought-provoking, and contains damning criticism of professional class elites, their political influence, and their self-regard.

Why read this book? Simply put, it will help you better understand America, especially the 2024 Presidential election and the ongoing political realignments currently roiling American politics. In addition to the book I will draw on al-Gharbi’s interview with Nathan Robinson because it is also helpful at times to have him describe these ideas in a more conversational manner.

As he asks, “Why is it that the winners in the prevailing order seem so eager to associate themselves with the marginalized and disadvantaged in society? What functions does “social justice” discourse serve among contemporary elites?” (302). These are the questions that drive the book.

As al-Gharbi says in the interview with Robinson, “the Democratic Party has reoriented itself around knowledge economy professionals. This matters because, as I show in chapter four of the book, especially for this group of elites that I call symbolic capitalists, we talk and think about politics in ways that are very different from how most other Americans talk and think about politics. And so, as the Democratic Party has reoriented itself around symbolic capitalists, many other Americans have started to feel like their values and perspectives and interests are not well aligned with the Democratic Party, and they've been migrating the other way.”

This helps to explain how, especially over the past decade, as a movement toward more “woke” rhetoric, focused on identity, came to influence the professional class, it drove  working class voters away from the Democratic Party and drew in more professional class voters. This all leads to 2024 where there is a huge education gap in voting, where Americans with BA’s heavily favor Harris and those with high school diplomas heavily favor Trump. This education gap persists, to varying degrees, across all racial groups.

Okay, this is true, if well-known by now. The novel point that al-Gharbi makes is that these “awokenings” as he calls them, have happened before. In brief, you get “awokenings”, i.e. elite-driven justice movements, when there is an overproduction of elites and they struggle to secure a livelihood. These struggling elites then seek to condemn the system they struggle in. There is plenty of truth to this. In the 1960s the draft drew thousands of young people, including elite college students, to the anti-Vietnam War movement. Was this partly driven by self-interest? Sure. 

More recently, the recession and post-recession economy hurt millenials. As al-Gharbi notes, “nearly half of upper-middle-class children born in the 1980s failed to replicate their class positions by age thirty”, including yours truly. (p. 96). 

These economic “anxieties were then channeled into a Great Awokening. Frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants sought to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” (96).

I think there is great truth to this and it helps to explain young, well-educated people, struggling with student debt and grim post-recession job prospects, joining Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and then flocking to the Sanders campaign in 2016. It doesn’t explain as well the Great Awokening though, from say 2014-2024. Certainly they overlap heavily. And a feeling that America is unfair informed both OWS and woke identity politics on campus a decade later. But they are also different.

The awokening focus on identity politics has been driven, arguably, not by precarious, downwardly mobile elites who are struggling (adjunct professors, unemployed lawyers, English majors working at Starbucks), but rather by the most successful elites—faculty, staff, and students at premiere colleges, staff employed in HR and DEI departments at major corporations as well as in medicine, media, publishing, etc.

The woke movement, I would argue, was not led by adjunct professors at state colleges commuting up and down the freeway, working out of their cars, and struggling to pay the bills. Rather, at universities, just to give one example, it is high-level staff, tenured and tenure-track faculty, and high-status, ambitious students leading the woke identity push.

Even if the latest awokening was driven more by successful elites than struggling ones, al-Gharbi’s basic analysis still rings true. Times of struggle for elites lead to broad dissatisfaction within the educated professional class, which then in various ways filters into and informs social movements among them.

Why do elites struggle at times? Because of elite overproduction. Here is Al-Gharbi, drawing on Peter Turchin’s ideas: “elite overproduction occurs when a society produces too many people who feel entitled to high status and high income relative to the capacity of that society to actually absorb elite aspirants into the power structure. Under these circumstances, growing numbers of frustrated erstwhile elites grow bitter toward the prevailing order and try to form alliances with genuinely marginalized populations in order to depose existing elites and install themselves in their stead.” (99).

As an example, consider that from 2000-2019 America produced 22 million new college degree holders but only 10 million jobs requiring a college degree. So I think clearly this is a key part of the story. And higher degrees tell the same story—too many JDs, not enough jobs for lawyers, too many PhDs, not enough jobs for professors, too many MAs, not enough jobs in publishing and journalism. And on and on it goes.

This explains a huge part of the discontent of the past ten years, especially among young people on the left. It is a counterpart to the decades of frustration among working class people whose towns have been deindustrialized and hollowed out and who have flocked to the right in recent years. These groups are not the same but they are each part of the story of America’s changing political and economic dynamics. To simplify, the struggling educated young flocked to Sanders and the struggling older working class flocked to Trump.

The problem, again, with Al-Gharbi’s account is that it is precisely not “disenfranchised elites” leading the awokening. Harvard Law students are not disenfranchised elites. High level admin at elite universities, high level HR staff at global corporations, are not disenfranchised elites. It is successful elites pioneering the awokening. The adjunct with a PhD, the barista with an MA, regardless of their individual beliefs, don’t have the power to lead the way on these issues. I and many of my friends are confirming examples of this. (I suspect the downwardly mobile PhDs are much less woke than the conventionally successful ones.)

With that said, I think al-Gharbi is onto something profound here. His analysis, as much as any in recent years, offers key insights into American politics. He is right that when symbolic capitalist professionals get involved in justice movements they often focus on symbolic topics that don’t matter rather than real, material issues. He rightly gives the example of renaming schools and buildings as a cause celebre for woke elite. A cause, of course, that neither matters to nor helps poor people of any race.

And more broadly, he argues that all these social movements and “awokenings” have achieved little, for “America in 2020 eerily resembled the United States of the gilded age in many respects.” (105). I largely agree with this, though I would place the emphasis more on the successful implementation of neoliberal economic policies and less on the failures of social movements. But it is true that by many metrics America has become much less equal since the 1970s.

In sum, he argues that “awokenings tend to be driven by elite overproduction, and they tend to collapse when a sufficient number of frustrated aspirants are integrated into the power structure or come to believe their prospects are improving.” (110). Again, although I don’t agree with all the specifics, this does by and large seem to be true.

There is much more that could be said in a review of al-Gharbi’s engaging and provocative book. (I have many pages of notes). I will conclude by saying that al-Gharbi’s account of elite behaviors and attitudes lends much insight into some of the central political, economic, and cultural changes of the past couple decades.

Three Cheers for Poison Ivy by Evan Mandery

Evan Mandery, a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) published an excellent book in 2022 titled Poison Ivy. It merits a brief review because it provides a very compelling critique of the role played by elite universities in American culture. Mandery specific focuses on the economic role that elite universities, what he terms the Ivy-plus, have in reproducing our ruling class.

For clarity, the Ivy-plus refers to the most elite universities in the US, basically the Ivy League as well as universities like Stanford, Duke, MIT, and the University of Chicago.

Here, in Mandery’s words, is the “basic premise” of the book: “That, whatever they may say to the contrary, elite colleges are engines of class stratification.” (preface, xi). Much later in the book he sums his thesis again: “the fundamental mission of elite colleges remains class reproduction.” (224).

What is Mandery’s point? Why did he write this book? His argument is that, when you dive into the data as he does, you see that America’s elite universities primarily admit and graduate only wealthy, elite students. In other words, although they may claim to promote diversity and mobility, they primarily funnel America’s elite teens through their doors and out the other side into America’s elite jobs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. In one telling statistic, he shows that for every poor student Princeton graduates they also graduate nearly 50 rich students. What do elite universities do? As those numbers illustrate, they reproduce and maintain the elite class in its position of power.

And this means in turn that America’s most elite institutions, from Wall Street banks to IT firms to media are populated by the highly credentialed children of the wealthy. This makes them increasingly disconnected from those who have not attended such elite institutions, let alone those with no college degree whatsoever.

To illustrate this point, Mandery asks “why should someone from Appalachia trust journalists if they’ve never met one? By the same logic, why should they trust scientists, academics, and elite colleges in general if neither they, their children, nor their neighbors have any chance of ever attending such an institution? Democracy depends in part on elite colleges democratizing access to the elite.” (preface, xvi).

Now consider how things work in practice: the average salary for Harvard grads at their tenth reunion is $200,000 per year. There are more Harvard students from the top 1% than the bottom 50%. The average family wealth of a Harvard student was over $500,000 last decade and is likely even higher now.

Why does this matter? Because, as Mandery rightly points out, “the story is the same at every elite college. Their core business isn’t lifting poor kids out of poverty. It’s keeping rich kids rich.” (from Introduction, xxv). I’m listing some emblematic quotes but it is worth noting that Mandery provides abundant data to back up his claims. Indeed that is part of what makes it such worthwhile reading. It is engaging, enraging, and full of data. Mandery is also great at summarizing his key findings in pithy quotes.

As he points out in an argument that resonates with William Deresiewicz’s equally good Excellent Sheep, “it would be one thing if elite colleges turned affluent high-school graduates into do-gooders. They do the opposite. They steer them into careers in finance and consulting, further exacerbating inequality. Elite colleges are essentially the only means of access to the most elite jobs—at Goldman Sachs, Mckinsey, and the like.” (intro, xxvi). Much of the book shows how elite universities actively steer idealistic or aimless undergrads into careers in finance and consulting.

Why are things like this? A fair question. Mandery notes, for example, that “what’s so confusing is that elite colleges are populated almost exclusively by liberals. Yet these institutions are conservative in every sense of the word—their policies favor rich white people, and they have invested a fortune in protecting the status quo.” (intro, xxvi). Indeed. After all, these institutions could dramatically expand enrollment or work to recruit large numbers of under-privileged teens in the cities where they are located. They do not do this because it would undermine their actual mission—to provide credentials for ruling class individuals and to network them and shepherd them into ruling class jobs. This is why the Ivy-plus exist.

But how can anyone believe in a game that is so rigged? Mandery tackles this question in a chapter on the role of the SATs that is both informative and funny. The history of the SAT and the institutionalized interests behind it also makes for useful reading. In perfect summary he notes that “tests like the SAT convert the natural advantages of birth and wealth into a neutral score, which has a veneer of scientific validity that makes it feel fair, or at least not grossly unfair.” (68). Unfortunately, as the author notes, colleges that go “testing optional” generally aren’t any better. All the non-testing options for admissions also reflect class inequality, sometimes even worse than standardized tests do. And thus middle and upper class suburban kids compete in a rat race for access to these institutions that they have been led to believe are meritocratic.

This is a problem, for “belief in meritocracy changes the very nature of education. It places emphasis on who wins the education beauty pageant over what is learned. It treats intelligence as static, instead of something that can be nurtured.” (138). This of course takes all the hope and idealism out of education. Instead of a place where you learn and grow, colleges are a place where the supposedly already smart and talented meet their fellow ruling class members before moving from Cambridge or Princeton to Manhattan. This is because “elite colleges convert advantages of wealth, like high SAT scores and extracurricular opportunities, into a tradable currency—a prestigious diploma.” (168).

In a later section of the book, Mandery notes how most professors lean liberal. Among sociologists studying elites this is especially so. Therefore he asks, rightly, “how can a system run by liberals be so conservative?” (176). One could push back and say that a bloated bureaucracy of administrators actually runs the universities.This is in many respects true. But Mandery’s point remains relevant because the elite university administrators identify as liberal in similar numbers to the faculty. This especially poses a problem for credibility in a highly polarized country that is also deeply populist. Yes, conservatives will doubt the credibility of elite university leadership but so will ordinary citizens.

On this exact point Mandery asks,“how can anyone be expected to continue to follow the academy’s leadership when the nation’s top colleges and universities have been so thoroughly exposed as bastions of inequality—when the average Harvard professor makes over $250,000 per year, and the average Harvard student comes from a family making more than twice that?” (286).

Is there any positive takeaway from this admittedly depressing critique? Thankfully, yes! As Mandery repeatedly points out, many public universities do the hard work of mobility that the Ivy-plus only claim to do. His own system CUNY, as well as the State University of New York System (SUNY), the Cal State system, and the University of California system, for example, provide world-class education to working and middle class kids and produce genuinely dramatic upward mobility. It is public institutions like this that produce a deep dose of service to the public good, opening new pathways for first-generation college students and opening doors for those who were previously excluded.

Mandery presents considerable data for this claim and then sums it up evocatively: “The CUNYs and Cal States of America produce our nation’s teachers and public servants. The Ivy-Plus colleges produce investment bankers, management consultants, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.” (123). One of these serves democracy in America and the other undermines it.

For related reading I can recommend Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent, Richard Reeves, Dream Hoarders, and Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All.