Philanthrocapitalism

In June 2010, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett announced the Giving Pledge: a commitment to give away the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. The launch was organized around a series of private dinners attended by about forty of the wealthiest people in the United States. By 2023, more than 230 billionaires from thirty countries had signed, representing combined pledges of over a trillion dollars. The press coverage was broadly admiring, and mostly ignored the question of who would decide where the money would go. The combination of great private wealth and public purpose is not new. Andrew Carnegie, who accumulated his fortune partly by suppressing wages and, in 1892, hiring Pinkerton detectives to break a strike at his Homestead plant that left ten workers dead, spent his final decades funding libraries, universities, and concert halls. By 1919 he had given away the equivalent of roughly five billion dollars in today’s money. Cities that received Carnegie libraries did so on…