I installed the 'iTunes U' app on my iPad. It opens up a whole new world of learning, makes available both free and paid high level courses in many subject areas. I subscribed to the Yale Open course on financial markets presented by Robert Shiller. One of the suggested texts is Andrew Carnegie's "The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays", which is freely available in Googlebooks.
As one of the richest men and greatest philanthropists in history, I've read quite a bit about him in the past. It's fascinating to read his own words, his beginnings, influences and perspectives. As a Ghanaian who is used to seeing rich men express their wealth in real estate, cars and ostentatious living without regard to their responsibilities to society, it's both comforting and sad to read this book. It's comforting because I look at America today and appreciate the long term effects of what people like Carnegie did, and think that we can get there. It's sad to think that, intellectually, we are so far behind. One may criticize some aspects of Carnegie's thinking but that he found time to publish his thoughts, relish the debate that ensued from criticisms and backed up his ideas with his money is not something that I see any of our "big men" doing now.
His key point it is useless to worry about wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few men because men have varying capacity for wealth creation. However, beyond a modest requirement for oneself, the wealth is only held in trust for society and so must be applied to causes that promote the social welfare. The wealthy man who does not use his wealth for social good in HIS LIFE TIME but leaves a substantial estate, even if to charity, is not to be commended because he would have taken his wealth with him to the grave if he could, only parted from his wealth unwillingly.
A direct quote from the book:
As one of the richest men and greatest philanthropists in history, I've read quite a bit about him in the past. It's fascinating to read his own words, his beginnings, influences and perspectives. As a Ghanaian who is used to seeing rich men express their wealth in real estate, cars and ostentatious living without regard to their responsibilities to society, it's both comforting and sad to read this book. It's comforting because I look at America today and appreciate the long term effects of what people like Carnegie did, and think that we can get there. It's sad to think that, intellectually, we are so far behind. One may criticize some aspects of Carnegie's thinking but that he found time to publish his thoughts, relish the debate that ensued from criticisms and backed up his ideas with his money is not something that I see any of our "big men" doing now.
His key point it is useless to worry about wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few men because men have varying capacity for wealth creation. However, beyond a modest requirement for oneself, the wealth is only held in trust for society and so must be applied to causes that promote the social welfare. The wealthy man who does not use his wealth for social good in HIS LIFE TIME but leaves a substantial estate, even if to charity, is not to be commended because he would have taken his wealth with him to the grave if he could, only parted from his wealth unwillingly.
A direct quote from the book:
The purpose of this paper is to present some of the best methods of performing this duty of administering surplus wealth for the good of the people. The first requisite for a really good use of wealth by the millionaire who has accepted the gospel which proclaims him only a trustee of the surplus that comes to him, is to take care that the purposes for which he spends it shall not have a degrading, pauperizing tendency upon its recipients, but that his trust shall be so administered as to stimulate the best and most aspiring poor of the community to further efforts for their own improvement'I wonder what he would have thought of Ghana's elites.
