Stanford Politics

“All around us in America is the clank-clank-clank of the new,” writes Anand Giridharadas in the prologue to his 2018 book Winners Take All. “But these novelties have failed to translate into broadly shared progress and the betterment of our overall civilization.”

The claim is substantial, and Giridharadas levels the full weight of his criticism on the “win-win,” market-based solutions to social problems championed by tech entrepreneurs, consulting firms, and thought leaders. These solutions are characterized by their profitability and by what he claims to be their failure to ask essential questions about the roots of the problems they seek to address. Harnessing rhetoric that emphasizes changing the world and co-opting the language of grassroots activism, economic elites are privatizing a toothless brand of social progress that doesn’t threaten the status quo they continue to profit from. It’s the cynical product of a neoliberal culture that increasingly lacks faith in public sector solutions, Giridharadas argues — the belief “that capitalists are more capable than any government could ever be of solving the underdogs’ problems.” And if it goes unchecked and unchallenged, he warns, society’s winners will have free reign to engineer and sustain a system that will only ever benefit the world at large to the extent that it continues to benefit them.

By asserting that the products they help create are abstractly “making the world a better place,” employees at major tech corporations avoid more serious discussions about their complicity in perpetrating injustice and inequality. An employee at Facebook can claim that their work promotes global interconnectivity even as the company faces accusations of facilitating housing discrimination, promoting gentrification, and undermining democracy; employees at Amazon might argue that the company has created revolutionary online marketplace while the creation of that marketplace has systematically crushed other small businesses and corporations.

“Nowhere is this idea of entrepreneurship-as-humanitarianism more entrenched than in Silicon Valley,” Giridharadas writes, “where company founders regularly speak of themselves as liberators of mankind and of their technologies as intrinsically utopian.”

Stanford was founded, per its mission statement, “to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of humanity and civilization, teaching the blessings of liberty regulated by law, and inculcating love and reverence for the great principles of government as derived from the inalienable rights of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But its graduates, like those of its peer institutions on the east coast, are overwhelmingly drawn to work, primarily in tech, consulting, and finance. 19 percent of the undergraduate class of 2017 went on to work in “Computer and IT” industries, according to data published by Stanford BEAM, and another 19 percent were employed in “Business, Finance, Consulting, and Retail.” The list of graduates’ “top employers” is overwhelmingly composed of tech, finance, and consulting giants, including Google, Facebook, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs. The mean starting salary of a Stanford graduate in the class of 2017 was $85,000.

That Stanford serves as an institutional pipeline to prestigious, high-paying corporate positions is hardly a revelation. Despite the overwhelming numbers of graduates working for the world’s largest corporate institutions, however, the university still touts its founding mission statement. Moreover its students speak the language of disruption, social entrepreneurship, and, always, “changing the world.” But what, exactly, does changing the world mean—and what, if anything, is actually being changed?

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For some, this change comes through the idea of social enterprise, a type of commercial organization whose primary goal is social benefit, rather than profit. Based on an idea which became especially popular in the past decade, social enterprises differentiate themselves from traditional non-profits by relying on business revenue rather than donations. As a result, they can sustain themselves indefinitely by reinvesting profits into their mission goals, at least in theory. While social enterprises can be implemented in many different ways, at Stanford the term has mainly been used in the context of tech startups. Anywhere on campus, from classrooms to dorm rooms, you’ll hear the term pop up in student discussions as a potential path after graduation. While working at a large, profitable, and socially minded firm like Tesla—whose mission statement is “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”—is no doubt a dream for many students, the reality is that many social enterprises will never grow into the Fortune 100 behemoths which Stanford graduates pour into after graduation. Yet, the term’s popularity among the student body is an indication of how its promises of sustainability and social impact have conveniently aligned with students’ desires to “do good” with traditionally career-oriented fields like finance and tech.

Kathryn Rydberg ‘18 is the president of the Stanford Social Entrepreneurial Student Association (SENSA). SENSA’s mission is to “promote and enhance Stanford’s social entrepreneurship ecosystem.” For example, the club hosts a Social Impact Night where students pitch ideas for potential enterprises to solve social issues. One freshman pitched an app which allows users to sample the quality of water in their area, and share it with scientists for research purposes. She is planning on working on the project for the summer.

For SENSA, and Rydberg, social entrepreneurs can be more successful than government officials at solving many problems. “This is not only because they tend to have ‘business skills,’” Rydberg said, but also because they are are forced to make a profit “in a way that nonprofits and the government are not.”

This belief directly mirrors the “win-win” doctrine in Winners Take All: that socially minded business can simultaneously do good for the world and keep their shareholders happy. Rydberg said, “[they]are often poised to make a bigger social impact using fewer resources than the government,” by measuring and optimizing for impact. Because “

are forced to decide how to make the biggest impact on the smallest budget,” Rydberg concedes that some large scale problems, like climate change and human rights, must be addressed with the power of governments that social enterprises simply do not have. Still, she is optimistic about the power of social enterprises, especially when they work in collaboration with the public sector.

Here, Rydberg shows an belief in what Giridharadas calls MarketWorld: a culture “defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo.”

“These elites believe and promote the idea that social change should be pursued principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common,” Giridharadas writes.

Proponents of social entrepreneurship like Rydberg are wary of a government that she perceives as “really slow and big and hard to make changes in.” And she’s not alone: a January 2019 Gallup poll of American adults found that a combined 63 percent of respondents reported having either “not very much” trust in the federal government’s ability to handle domestic problems, or “none at all.” Increasingly, the socially conscious are turning to the private sector, and putting their faith in the mythic power of “business savvy” as the antidote to persistent and often systemic inequities. Rydberg cites, for example, SENSA’s partnership with the startup SIRUM, a platform founded by Stanford graduates which facilitates the donation of unused medication to clinics for low-income patients. Such a social entrepreneurial project is doubtlessly well-intentioned, but it operates, as many such market-based solutions do, comfortably within the status quo. A well-intentioned company like SIRUM does not meaningfully address why there is a segment of the population that cannot afford prescription medication, question the comparatively high price of prescription drugs in the United States, or attempt to challenge the system that creates and perpetuates such an inequity.

“We aim to get medications to all 50,000,000 people who skip their prescriptions due to cost in the U.S.,” announces a graphic on home page of SIRUM’s website. There is no language that implicates any actors—pharmaceutical and insurance companies, for example—in this statistic.

Of the three co-founders listed on SIRUM’s website, all Stanford graduates, one worked previously at McKinsey and another at the Clinton Foundation.

Despite the optimism that Rydberg has about the power of the private sector to do good, many students ultimately do not choose to pursue a career in social enterprise. Rydberg estimates that 60 percent of those that initially express an interest in social entrepreneurship no longer think it’s a viable option post-graduation. Musing on the possible reasons for this change, she said, “the Stanford prestige puts pressure on people to make money,” which she attributes not only to Stanford’s status as an elite school, but also a student culture of pining after lucrative internships as something “you’re supposed to do.” Stanford’s reputation for fostering the next generation of tech billionaires, combined with the financial reality of being a college student in the modern era, pushes students towards traditional corporate players that offer prestige and financial security.

The multitude of career-oriented clubs and organizations at Stanford reflect this reality. A quick search through Stanford’s complete list of clubs reveals that there are nineteen different groups dedicated to “business,” and an additional seven committed to “entrepreneurship.” CS + Social Good works “to empower members of our community to leverage technology for social good.” Stanford Women in Business serves as a “community for empowering women in business.”

Grace Isford and Tashrima Hossain, the co-presidents of SWIB, spoke with Stanford Politics about how their mission of female empowerment relates to a desire to “do good.”

“[Members] may be entering profit or nonprofit fields, but at top of mind they are thinking of ‘what is my larger purpose and how can I create change beyond myself,’” Grace said. However, she and Tashrima also noted the difficulty of the “risk averse nature of high-achieving students”, who “see a mission beyond themselves but end up not finding ways to implement it.”

“Everybody wants to be validated and at the same time create some impact,” Tashrima said, which leads people to Google or Goldman because “that’s just something people celebrate.”

SENSA aims to foster social impact work while still participating in and embracing Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture.

“We’re totally at the intersection of people who want to do service and people who are interested in business,” Rydberg said. But does that intersection actually enable meaningful social change, or is it just a euphemism for compromise?

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“I think this kind of hyperbolic language about changing the world [and]saving people’s lives has been around since the inception of Silicon Valley,” Matthew Sun ‘20, president of the student organization CS + Social Good, told Stanford Politics.

According to its website, CS + Social Good was founded in 2015, and “grew out of the need for a unified and coordinated effort at Stanford to organize and connect students using technology to take action and collaborate on the world’s most pressing problems.” Like SENSA, the organization helps run classes, host events, and connect students with off-campus opportunities.

Echoing Rydberg, Sun said that “our mission is to build a tech for good ecosystem on campus by building change and fostering dialogue at the intersection of tech and social impact.”

Unlike SENSA’s emphasis on for-profit work, however, CS + Social Good partners largely with nonprofits, and “also [tries]to dabble in public sector work as well,” Sun said. The driving purpose of the organization is to make students studying and working in tech more thoughtful about the social impact of their work. For Sun, this also means promoting a more collectivist mindset in a culture that primarily idolizes self-made, solitary geniuses.

“I genuinely believe we have so many smart and talented folks here at Stanford and I think a lot of us at Stanford are biased towards thinking of our role and our impact in a very individualistic framework,” Sun said. “I think that’s just what a lot of capitalism sets you up to do is [think of]yourself as like one agent acting in this kind of a game of life.”

Sun is not shy about acknowledging the limits of computer science to fix the world’s problems. “I am very tired of having tech companies tell me that they’re solving the hardest problems,” he said. “The hardest problems are inherently social problems. They’re not like, building a server that has like three milliseconds less of latency…. Everyone needs to have a more sober view of the impact they’re going to make.”

What Sun is pointing to is the real trouble with social entrepreneurship, and the thing that most concerns Giridharadas. The problem isn’t the desire to have a positive impact, and it isn’t ultimately about the desire to make money either. What’s worrying is that when social entrepreneurs claim ownership over changing the world—when students assert that they can do more and better than the democratic system—they’re sapping public faith away from the idea of systemic change; and those that profit from treating the symptoms of social ills should perhaps not be trusted when they claim that we are cured. The call for sobriety, for a transparent and self-aware evaluation of the limits of social entrepreneurship, reflects the need to acknowledge and address the roots of injustice—which is not something that Stanford’s pre-professional attitude is overly concerned with.

CS + Social Good was featured last year in an Atlantic piece that lauded the program’s stated goals but questioned the true social impact of a club whose members overwhelmingly “[choose]a comfortable, low-risk lifestyle over work that directly addresses injustice.”

Sun is also involved with the housing justice organization SCoPE 2035, and emphasizes in particular the power that engineers have to organize for change within the industry. The Tech Workers Coalition, for example, is an organization of Silicon Valley workers pushing a variety of political and social justice agendas by applying pressure to major corporations like Google and Facebook. In May, activists with the Tech Workers Coalition protested Palantir, the data-mining company founded by Stanford graduate Peter Thiel, for its work with US immigration authorities.

“I think there is a difference between believing there’s a market-based solution to a lot of problems and believing that tech workers in the industry can organize for change,” Sun said. “I think those things are kind of different. I think you don’t need to have a market-based solution to believe that organizing and activism can be powerful in the private sector.”

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At first, Allison Tielking ‘20 tried working through the system. During the summer after her sophomore year, she was sexually harassed by three different Lyft drivers while  interning in Boston. Her experiences with Lyft’s customer services inspired her to write an op-ed in the Daily entitled “Why a $15 Lyft Coupon Won’t Fix Sexual Harassment”. Initially, Tielking reported two of the cases through Lyft’s help bot, and each time after she submitted her reports, she received an email from Lyft customer support promising that they would take the “required course of action.” Frustrated with Lyft’s response, Tielking pushed her worries aside. There was little she could do, she decided, to get recourse for what went wrong.

Not long after the Daily published the article, Lyft’s COO reached out to Tielking directly. She was invited back to Lyft to give a presentation on her experiences. In a room full of company executives, Tielking, and her friend Elizabeth Gray—a product design major—presented a prototype with alternatives to Lyft’s reporting interface as well as several stories which Tielking had compiled from other victims of ridesharing sexual assault.

It was the perfect launchpad for her to begin pushing for internal change. Following her presentation, Tielking thought she had gotten through to the executives: the COO told her that he had taken the job in part because his own daughter was worried about being alone on the road and not knowing what to do with unsafe, predatory drivers. She was paired with an engineer, and for the first several weeks, she corresponded often with Lyft customer support, who gave her frequent updates. Soon, the engineer had developed a prototype for a new reporting interface.

Then Lyft’s responses grew increasingly sporadic. The engineer could only do so much—her team had pushed aside the discussion surrounding the prototype—and Tielking felt increasingly helpless. While the MarketWorld approach initially seemed possible, Lyft appeared to do little more than pay lip service to the general changes Tielking had suggested. To make matters worse, Tielking’s own power to facilitate changes was growing increasingly unclear. Although Lyft had promised Tielking the freedom to create her own project, they soon reneged, instead offering Tielking more generic roles in software development and marketing.

For their part, Lyft did eventually enact some of the changes which Tielking and Gray proposed. The help bot was eliminated, and the app now requires half the number of steps which it once did to report an unsafe or predatory driver. But in spite of the changes made to sexual harassment reporting by both Lyft and Uber, the problem of unsafe and predatory drives persists—according to a 2018 report from CNN, 103 Uber drivers alone were accused of sexual assault or abuse. And as an article from The Ringer notes, Uber and Lyft may face a fundamental conflict of interests in screening drivers intensively at all: in prioritizing efficiency, both companies need “as many drivers serving as many riders as possible—above all else.”

Tielking doesn’t entirely believe that this profit-maximizing ethos consciously drives the day-to-day decisions made by software engineers. She was, after all, paired with an ordinary engineer at first, who seemed genuinely excited to help. Even as some engineers individually expressed their concerns about sexual harassment, however, Tielking sensed that the company lacked the internal motivation to enact large-scale changes. “I get it,” Tielking says, “especially when [Lyft] is trying and really struggling to make money from the current system, there isn’t an incentive.”

That engineers are generally paid well at companies like Lyft further reduces their incentives to consciously examine company practices. As an intern at Facebook, Tielking had noticed a similar willingness among the employees to blindly accept decisions from company leadership. “I don’t think people ever really questioned or dissented. They were kind of happy to just eat the food,” she said. “It’s a struggle to find a company that’s supportive of individual voices.” Giridharadas explains this basic conundrum in Winners Take All: those with wealth and privilege will seldom examine the sources of their power even if they claim to care about promoting social good. If companies pay employees well while promising to “make the world a better place”—so much so that software engineers are among the highest paid workers in the modern workplace—the employees themselves have little incentive to truly question the company’s social impact.

Tielking has since shifted her focus to promoting regulatory changes for ridesharing companies. She recently started the Instagram account TakeBackTheRide to both share the stories of other survivors and to give inspiration for legislators to act.  Having worked with company management, Tielking understands that companies like Lyft and Uber often lack the incentives to make internal changes of their own volition. “I’m definitely in favor of more regulation of tech companies in general,” Tielking said. “They can always promise that they’ll make changes but it’s not enough.”

Despite her experiences, however, Tielking remains hopeful that Lyft’s reforms can come from the inside—her dream is to someday become an executive at a company like Lyft where she’ll have the power to push for such changes herself. But as time has gone on, Tielking has come to understand that companies like Lyft and Uber might ultimately choose to pursue other concerns. “It’s just like right now, I’m a little voice, and I got frustrated a lot because it’s like ‘why aren’t they listening?’” she said. “But it makes sense—I’m in college and I don’t have that much experience, so my career goals are to be able to get to that position and make bigger changes.”

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To Giridharadas, the central values of MarketWorld can be summed up with a simple quote: “You could change things without having to change a thing.”

The graduating class of 2019, like the classes that came before it, will overwhelmingly pursue careers in finance, consulting, and tech. They will learn essential business and problem-solving skills at McKinsey—perhaps believing that the job is only a necessary pit stop on the way to true world-changing—and develop well-intentioned apps that seek to revolutionize some market to be more equitable or more efficient while also remaining profitable. They will become industry leaders and coveted speakers. Perhaps a handful will run for office. Maybe a few will become activists, clinicians, researchers or public defenders. But if they weren’t already members of the global corporate elite when they arrived at Stanford, there’s a good chance many of them will be joining it when they leave.

Most of the students we spoke to did not consider Stanford itself to be particularly influential in generating a “MarketWorld” culture on campus. Sun acknowledged that Stanford “might be complicit” in the dominance of corporate superpowers at career fairs, but stressed that Stanford’s student body is a self-selecting group that tends to “value prestige.” But it’s worth questioning whether Stanford is living up to its founding mission, and whether it is effectively intervening to ensure that the next generation of world-changers has the world’s best interest in mind.

Every year Stanford administers an extensive survey to outgoing seniors collecting data about where Stanford students go after graduation, what they plan to do, and how Stanford has gotten them to that point. The administration did not respond to repeated requests from Stanford Politics to see this data, before informing us that the survey information is never made available to the media, to students, or to the public.

This data may hold the answers to many of the questions Giridharadas is raising. As Stanford students pursue prestigious careers with established corporate players, to what extent will their “social entrepreneurship” ever question corporate dominance? As Stanford itself benefits from the prestige and riches of Silicon Valley, to what extent will it’s students ever seek to “disrupt” the valley’s established structures? As Stanford students plan to “change the world,” how will our entrenched institutions and values frame the scope of our world changing? Will we change anything at all?