Best of: Anand Giridharadas

Why do we fund public schools according to the home value of people's parents' homes? Why we do that? That's what we do in this country. It's barbarism ... Can you explain to a six-year-old why the quality of their education correlates to how nice their family's home is? It's an insane idea.

Mark Zuckerberg, as far as I understand it, wanted to build a social network to help people at Harvard meet each other. He ended up being the most dangerous person in the world. And now, incidentally, as a byproduct of that, gets to have thoughts about how public schools are in America.

No one has so quickly, efficiently, and flamboyantly discredited the entire tau of philanthrocapitalism the way Donald Trump has in just two years. It is now inarguable that being a business person is no guarantee of intelligence. It is now inarguable that knowing one industry does not make you an expert even necessarily on that industry and certainly anything else. It is now inarguable that, in fact, being the guy who made ties in Mexico and China does not make you supremely qualified to bring jobs back from Mexico and China. Arsonists are not, in fact, the best firefighters.

People are actually waking up to the idea that we're not going to change the world through an app. We're not going to change the world through, like, management consulting firms, or CSR, or tech companies, or whatever—that you get the kind of society you're willing to invest in democratically. Democracy is not a supermarket.

One way to define the health of a society is: Is its middle class a poorer version of the rich or a slightly richer version of the poor?

I actually think the issue of inequitable public school funding is, in some ways, the gravest unresolved constitutional violation of this country.