In the spring of 1889, Andrew Carnegie published an essay on money. If possession confers knowledge, then there was no greater expert on the subject: Carnegie was possibly the richest American who ever lived. The essay, which was printed first in the North American Review, then in Britain’s Pall Mall Gazette, and later reissued in a pamphlet, became known as “The Gospel of Wealth.”

The “Gospel” opened with a discussion of inequity. This was the Gilded Age, and, even as most Americans were struggling to get by, the one-per-centers were putting up “cottages” in Newport. The disparity was, in Carnegie’s view, unavoidable. It was the price of progress, and progress, ultimately, benefitted everyone. “The ‘good old times’ were not good old times,” he observed. “Neither master nor servant was as well situated then as today.”

Having dealt with accumulation of wealth, Carnegie then turned to his real concern: what to do with it. Passing on riches to one’s children was a mistake, he argued, for inheritances “often work more for the injury than for the good of the recipients.” Handing out money to the poor was similarly ill-advised, since “neither the individual nor the race is improved by almsgiving.” Rather, the best way to dispose of a fortune was to endow institutions that would aid “those who desire to rise.” Universities were a good cause; so, too, were public libraries, music halls, and swimming baths. The “man of wealth,” Carnegie advised, should consider himself “the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer.”

“The Gospel of Wealth” has been called the “ur-text of modern philanthropy.” It advocated a new kind of giving, a form of charity that wasn’t charity but something more pragmatic and, at the same time, more ambitious—a giving aimed, in Carnegie’s words, at improving “the general condition of the people.” Acting on his own advice, Carnegie went on to endow Carnegie Hall, the Carnegie Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now part of Carnegie Mellon University), and more than twenty-five hundred local libraries. His contemporaries financed the Rockefeller Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Field Museum, and the University of Chicago.

The “Gospel” also prompted the ur-critiques of philanthropy. In 1890, the Reverend Hugh Price Hughes, a Methodist minister, wrote that, while he was sure Carnegie was “a most estimable and generous man,” his “Gospel” represented a “social monstrosity” and a “grave political peril.” William Jewett Tucker, a professor of religion who would later become the president of Dartmouth, was no less horrified. What the “Gospel” advocated, Tucker wrote, was “a vast system of patronage,” and nothing could “in the final issue create a more hopeless social condition.” To assume that “wealth is the inevitable possession of the few” was to evade the essential issue: “The ethical question of today centres, I am sure, in the distribution rather than in the redistribution of wealth.”

Carnegie made his money from railroads and steel. Three years after he wrote “The Gospel of Wealth,” he decided to break the union—the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers—at one of his company’s largest plants, the Homestead steelworks, outside Pittsburgh. Employees were presented with a new contract with pay cuts up to thirty-five per cent. When they rejected it, they were locked out. Carnegie Steel brought in Pinkerton agents to guard the plant, and in the resulting melee at least sixteen people were killed. In the end, the union collapsed.

To critics, the Homestead strike made explicit the inconsistency of Carnegie’s position. How could a person ruthlessly exploit his employees and, at the same time, claim to be a benefactor of the toiling masses? The Saturday Globe, a Utica-based weekly, published a cartoon showing two Carnegies, conjoined at the hip. One, smiling, handed out a library and a check; the other held out a notice telling workers that their pay had been slashed. “As the tight-fisted employer he reduces wages that he may play philanthropist,” the caption read.

We live, it is often said, in a new Gilded Age—an era of extravagant wealth and almost as extravagant displays of generosity. In the past fifteen years, some thirty thousand private foundations have been created, and the number of donor-advised funds has roughly doubled. The Giving Pledge—signed by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, Larry Ellison, and more than a hundred and seventy other gazillionaires who have promised to dedicate most of their wealth to philanthropy—is the “Gospel” stripped down and updated. And as the new philanthropies have proliferated so, too, have the critiques.

Anand Giridharadas is a journalist who, in 2011, was named a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. The institute is financed by, among other groups, the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Gates Foundation. The fellowship, according to its Web site, aims to “develop the next generation of community-spirited leaders” by engaging them “in a thought-provoking journey of personal exploration.”

Giridharadas at first found the fellowship to be a pretty sweet deal; it offered free trips to the Rockies and led to invitations from the sorts of people who own Western-themed mansions and fly private jets. After a while, though, he started to feel that something was rotten in the state of Colorado. In 2015, when he was asked to deliver a speech to his fellow-fellows, he used it to condemn what he called “the Aspen Consensus.”

“The Aspen Consensus, in a nutshell, is this,” he said. “The winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm.” The speech made the Times; people began asking for copies of it; and Giridharadas decided to expand on it. The result is “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.” “I hadn’t planned to write a book on this topic, but the topic chose me,” he writes.

“Winners Take All” is organized as a series of portraits: of a young, idealistic Georgetown graduate who goes to work for McKinsey; of a former McKinsey consultant who goes to work for George Soros; of various wealthy and generally liberal-leaning social entrepreneurs. What these figures all share, by Giridharadas’s account, is a desire to do good without questioning too deeply how it is they came to do so well. At one point, he sits down with Laurie Tisch, an heir to a family fortune estimated at twenty-one billion dollars and the benefactor of a philanthropy—the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund—whose stated mission is “to improve access and opportunity for all New Yorkers.” Tisch describes herself as racked by guilt. “It’s my compass,” she tells Giridharadas. But when he asks her whether she thinks inheritances like hers ought to be taxed more heavily, thus leaving her with less to feel guilty about, she won’t answer the question. “You’d have to be a better student of history than I am,” she says.

Perhaps aptly, a good deal of “Winners Take All” is set in a limousine. One day, Giridharadas rides in a black Lincoln with Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation. The two are headed to the offices of K.K.R. & Co., the investment firm made famous by “Barbarians at the Gate,” where Walker is scheduled to give a lunchtime talk.