Mr. Koch just doesn't want people to desecrate his family grave when he finally bites the dust. I don't buy it for a second that he has truly changed. He will die rich while the rest of us try to clean up the mess he and his brother created.

Forgive my asking - what's cynical about this title? Should we not believe in people? Is the world not top-down oriented? Sorry - just confused.

Koch has spent a fortune on destabilizing public infrastructure in midwest cities. If he "believed in people", he could show it by not tearing down public transit systems which disenfranchises poorer people.

Is public transit bottom up? I'd say just the opposite.

Id say it is. It's the local government chosen by the people deciding the infrastructure, rather than big car and oil companies controlled by a small group of oligarchs

Maybe it's a more complex matter? How about if people at the bottom were not continuously smacked by rich libertarian assholes and had a chance of having freedom of leisure, education, movement & all that good stuff that can make a citizen, who then is able to participate in decision making progress instead of being treated as animals for being poor? Feels bottom-up to me.

Why should anyone believe an oligarch, who has been the embodiment of top-down influence, wants "the people" to direct how society operates?

His version of "bottom-up" is heavily funding astroturf campaigns as well as more populist groups through which he can control what they do.

He spent hubdreds of millions of dollar doing the exact opposite. You know what they say, put your money where your mouth is. He's lying in plain sight.

As the article points out the Koch's themselves, running a 100+ billion dollar empire, were quite happy buying themselves into the highest echelons of power, spreading their beliefs from the top down

Mr. Koch and his late brother David seeded the political landscape with conservative and libertarian ideas, then built an infrastructure to nurture them. Koch-aligned ventures fund more than 1,000 faculty members at more than 200 universities, helped bankroll think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, and supported the American Legislative Exchange Council (a nonpartisan organization of similarly minded state legislators) to write bills that were introduced and championed by Republican state lawmakers across the country.

You know what would really decentralise the country and create a bottom-up utopia? If no single entity had the resources the Kochs has. But in the world of the Kochs privately funded authoritarianism does not count.

Well obviously it's not title per se, but title in relation to the authors of the book.