about time
Last month I made a phone call to an attorney to start drawing up my will.
Last month I made a phone call to an attorney to start drawing up my will.
There is nothing wrong with me. But as my wife has informed me, “It’s about time.” As usual, she’s right.
Like registering for the military when you are a man of 18, this is a mortality-reflecting rite of passage. It’s a parental duty I have clearly put off for too long, as Fiona’s 5th birthday is next week.
When the attorney asked me where I wanted my money to go when I died, I very quickly and confidently answered, “All my money would go to my wife, Anna, but if something happened to both of us it should be distributed to our children.”
Not a very complicated will. And, for the most part, how every will for all of existence has read.
Wealth was accumulated and then distributed within a family. The result was exactly what you might expect: the rich got richer and the poor stayed the same.
Yet this practice abruptly changed in June 1889 with an essay called, “Wealth.”
Andrew Carnegie, the richest person in the world, wrote “Wealth” to share his philanthropic philosophy. He proposed a radical idea: a person’s money should not go to the family, but rather to the institutions that will help lift all people in a society — especially the poor and marginalized.
He was writing a manifesto on how he planned to give away $350 million, which would be $5.4 billion in today’s money.
Carnegie’s generosity is legendary. He built 2,811 libraries for working-class families. He endowed Carnegie-Mellon University. His charitable organizations are still giving out money today. In sum, his philanthropic giving exceeds that of every person in the history of the United States, combined.
But more importantly, his views on wealth created a core American value: philanthropy.
Until this point, charity was typically limited to the church and poor houses. The Internal Revenue Service did not even recognize tax deductibility for another 15 years after “Wealth” was written.
But the impact has been transformational.
One-hundred years after Carnegie’s death, America leads the world in philanthropy. We give away nearly twice as much per capita as the next-most generous country, New Zealand.
And Carnegie’s views on helping others spread well beyond the wealthy. It turns out the individuals who give the highest percentage of their income are the working poor. They give 4.6% of their wealth away, compared to the wealthy at 3%.
This mindset about philanthropy is the reason Americans still feel people and communities best solve most of our problems, not government.
Most charitable organizations in Europe are not funded by individuals, but by government. As a result, people there look for government to solve problems, not people.
Carnegie gave us a legacy of personal responsibility, lived out the American Dream and showed us the value of philanthropy.
When Carnegie died, his friend Charles Schwab said, “The world has lost a great man and a great benefactor to humanity.”
Schwab was right. The world lost a great man, but Carnegie’s philanthropy lives on.
That has me thinking: It’s about time I change my will.
