- Joined
- Nov 22, 2021
I'll be the first to admit that some of the philanthropy done back in the late 1800s and early 1900s was for cynical public relation whitewashing purposes, especially when it came to J. P. Morgan and John Rockefeller. Then you had Andrew Carnegie who wrote the "Gospel of Wealth" essay and seemed to genuinely believe in the idea.even the history channel docs admit it took the fear of being murderer to get them to do it, and i'm not talking some woke modern history channel doc. like they straight up admin in "the men who built america" doc that came out in 2012 that it took the fear of getting murdered to get them to try helping the country. beyond that they all built real things, you can't really make US Steel outside of the US because of the natural resources and foundary quality, same thing with trying to make US oil outside of the US or build US trains outside of the US.
the same decade the US income tax was at its highest was also the era when all the richest people were oil barons or coal barons or other types that literally couldn't just outsource their way to success, you can't ship overseas a job involving extracting shit from US soil, they were fucking stuck. meanwhile the modern richest people got their riches from coding, they could do their job anywhere in the world as WFH proved. so of course they aren't as likely to help out americans.
It really takes a special kind of modern person, and that almost always means american born, to give a fuck and give back. Having said that its always a fun fact to bring up how the son of asian immigrants went full howard hughes on Las Vegas in the 2010s and basically donated a quarter billion to make downtown a cool place. you don't really hear about rich dudes going full Rockefeller on places and it turning out well so its cool to bring up.
The mindset on the matter seems so different now compared to then. Perhaps a lot of it has to do with changes in cultural values. I don't see Musk or Zuckerberg doing something similar (ulterior agendas disguised as "charity" not included) unless their personalities suddenly changed. Other then that Asian man you mentioned the only other person I can think of that did that much on a massive scale is the recently deceased Chuck Feeney. He gave away his fortune by donating over 8 billion dollars anonymously over the course of his lifetime and apparently not one of the thousand buildings that were built with his funds bear his name.
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