on philanthropy, and a few shocking ideas. the secondary unplanned consequences of Lorge anoint of wealth.From Fred Turner.
The special mandate of the philanthropic or voluntary gift economy. And it will suggest ways in which the artistic and literary culture can begin to celebrate and offer guidance to the philanthropic enterprise.
Estimates of the amount of wealth that will be inherited or given away in trusts and the like in the next
few years range from ten to twenty trillion dollars, riches that will be provided as a gift, riches not earned, not acquired by conquest, nor legislatively appropriated. The amount over the next 55 years is estimated at between 41 and 136 trillion. This is an almost inconceivable sum—around seventeen thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child on the planet—and it will surely alter the world’s economy profoundly, loosening the tie between effortful production and personal wealth that has been so important a feature of capitalism.
Other periods of history give testimony about the benefits and also the great dangers of such large wealth transfers. In the last years of the Roman republic, a period of gigantic untaxed fortunes, gifts and
bequests to the Roman people and its army by the great magnates—such as Sulla, Marius, Lucullus,
Pompey, Julius Caesar, Octavius, Antony—were a crucial instrument of policy. The publication of a will
before or after the donor’s death could and did alter the course of world history. The result was enormous wars, a flowering of cultural production, and an epochal change from republic to empire. The Black Death in Europe, combined with a ripening of technological development and a warming of the climate, created another huge wealth transfer, ushering in the Renaissance, the Reformation, and more large-scale wars. More modestly, but perhaps in the long run just as momentously, the vast generational wealth transfers that occurred in Europe through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided almost every novel, opera, and drama of the period with the mainspring of its plot—the will or entail that frustrates or liberates the lovers. The accumulated capital of the Industrial Revolution fell into the hands of a section of society that had tired of the process of money-making, while being kept from the aspiring classes that would have been happy to put it to use.
