Carnegie, Andrew. 1889. “Wealth (aka Gospel of Wealth Part I)” ed. Allen Thorndike Rice. North American Review 148(391): 653–65. http://google.com/books/edition/The_North_American_Review/i5U2AQAAMAAJ?hl=en (January 17, 2027).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Clay_Frick

for - meme - abolish philanthropy - to - critique - Andrew Carnegie essay - The Gospel of Wealth

meme - abolish philanthropy - Agree. Corporations, through externalizing social and ecological impacts, have created a majority of the problems of the polycrisis, that non-profits are created to solve - It would be far more efficient to NOT create those problems to begin with - see my annotations on Andrew Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" - where I critique Carnegie's philosophy

to - critique - Andrew Carnegie - essay - The Gospel of Wealth - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.carnegie.org%2Fabout%2Four-history%2Fgospelofwealth%2F&group=world

for - quote / critique - it is upon us, beyond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a waste of time to criticize the inevitable. - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - alternatives - to - mainstream companies - cooperatives - Peer to Peer - Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) - Fair Share Commons - B Corporations - Worker owned companies

quote / critique - it is upon us, beyond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a waste of time to criticize the inevitable. - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - This is a defeatist attitude that does not look for a condition where both enormous inequality AND universal squalor can both eliminated - Today, there are a growing number of alternative ideas which can challenge this claim such as: - Cooperatives - example - Mondragon corporation with 70,000 employees - B Corporations - Fair Share Commons - Peer to Peer - Worker owned companies - Cosmolocal organizations - Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)

for - quote / critique / question - Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. - The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie

quote / critique / question - Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. - The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie - The problem with this reasoning is that it is circular - By rewarding oneself an extreme and unfettered amount of wealth for one's entrepreneurship skills creates inequality in the first place - Competition that destroys other corporations ends up reducing jobs - At the end of life, the rich entrepreneur desires to give back to society the wealth that (s)he originally stole - If one had reasonable amounts of rewarding innovation instead of unreasonable amounts, the problem of inequality can be largely mitigated in the first place whilst still recognizing and rewarding individual effort and ingenuity

for - quote / critique - The price we pay for this salutary change is, no doubt, great - Andrew Carnegie

quote / critique - The price we pay for this salutary change is, no doubt, great - Andrew Carnegie - Carnegie goes on to write that the great freedoms offered by industrial mass production has an unavoidable price to be paid - Successful manufacturing and production cooperatives, B-Corporations, worker-owned companies, etc have disproved that it is an either-or situation. - Consider the case of the Spanish manufacturing giant, Mondragon, a federation of worker cooperatives employing 70,000 people located in Spain - where this price is NOT paid - Carnegie's essay reflects a perspective based on the time when he was alive - Were Carnegie alive today to witness the natural conclusion of his trend of progress in the Anthropocene, he would witness - extreme pollution levels of industrial mass production threatening to destabilize human civilization itself - astronomical wealth inequality - And these two are linked: - wealth inequality - a handful of elites have the same wealth as the bottom half of humanity - carbon inequality - that same handful pollutes as much as the bottom half of humanity

to - Mondragon cooperative - explore - https://hyp.is/GeIKao1rEe-9jA_97_KRBg/exploremondragon.com/en/ - Oxfam wealth and carbon inequality reports - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=oxfam

for - critique - destruction of Individualism - The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie - individual / collective Gestalt - Deep Humanity

critique - destruction of Individualism - The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie - From a Deep Humanity perspective, the individual and the collective are intertwingled - This is the individual / collective gestalt - Communism and Capitalism are both extreme poles - the truth lies somewhere in the middle - which acknowledges both are individual AND collective nature simultaneously - and works to balance them

for - critique - extreme wealth inequality cannot be avoided for the greater improvement of society - The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie - stats - Mondragon corporation - comparison of pay difference between highest paid and lowest paid - adjacency - Gandhi quote - Andrew Carnegie beliefs in The Gospel of Wealth

critique - extreme wealth inequality cannot be avoided for the greater improvement of society - The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie - It's a matter of degree - Wealth differences within US corporations of 344 to 1 are obscene and not necessary, as proven by - Wealth difference of 6 to 1 in Mondragon federation of cooperatives - To quote - Gandhi, there is enough to meet everyone's needs but not enough to meet everyone's greed - The great problem with such large wealth disparity is that those who know how to game the system can earn obscene amounts of money - and since the concept of luxury goods is made desirable and proportional to monetary wealth, it creates a positive feedback loop of insatiability - The combination of engaging in ever greater luxury lifestyle and power is intoxicating and addictive

to - stats - Mondragon corporation - comparison of pay difference between highest paid and lowest paid - https://hyp.is/QAxx-o14Ee-_HvN5y8aMiQ/www.csmonitor.com/Business/2024/0513/income-inequality-capitalism-mondragon-corporation

for - critique - extreme wealth a reward for rare management skills - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - Mondragon counterexample - to - stats - Mondragon pay difference between highest and lowest paid - article - In this Spanish town, capitalism actually works for the workers - Christian Science Monitor - Erika Page - 2024, June 7

critique - extreme wealth a reward for rare management skills - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - Mondragon counterexample - This is invalidated today by large successful cooperatives such as Mondragon

to - stats - Mondragon corporation - comparison of pay difference between highest paid and lowest paid - https://hyp.is/QAxx-o14Ee-_HvN5y8aMiQ/www.csmonitor.com/Business/2024/0513/income-inequality-capitalism-mondragon-corporation

for - quote / critique- Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor - Andrew Carnegie

quote / critique - Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor - Andrew Carnegie - Carnegie is writing from his perspective of the contrast between - life when he grew up, lived in an age of perceived universal squalor and - the world he helped shape through industrial mass production that produced high quality goods in such numbers that they became available to all - Yet, even before Carnegie, inequality had existed, for the world prior to Carnegie had its share of kings, queens, emperors and authoritarians - Even today, the best we might say of modern democracies is a decoupling of wealth and official governance - although even that is inaccurate as the thriving lobbying industry allows industrial magnates to decide upon rules of governance that are friendly towards their businesses - In contrast, from the commons perspective, and especially from the Cosmolocal movement of production, there is proposed a road that leads to - much less and much more tolerable levels of inequality and no universal squalor - a civilization existing within safe and just earth system boundaries

for - from - MSN article - How a poor boy from Scotland became the richest man on Earth - The life of Andrew Carnegie - Daniel Coughlin - essay - The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie - philanthropy adjacency - Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - Anthropocene - critique

summary - It is interesting to read this article from the perspectives of a commons activist - The link to the MSN article that led me to Carnegie's essay is below and it provides a good summary of his life. - He came from a very challenging life of poverty, growing up in a family and in circumstances where they were constantly struggling to make ends meet - His is the story of the deep imprint of poverty providing him with motivation to escape it - Having risen to become the world's richest man, and then giving his fortune away due to the deep imprint of poverty experienced in childhood, - he formed an opinion on inequality and capitalist material production that was borne out of his experience as a successful entrepreneur and the contrast of quality of life between: - a pre-industralized society in which he was familiar from childhood experiences and - the profound material improvements accessible to all due to mass production that he helped to pioneer - In the essay, he sees the inequality found in society to be the price that needed to be paid for everyone to have access to a higher standard of living - This is where critical analysis from a modern post-Marxist, post-Capitalist perspective might provide an interesting critique, - especially from the anthropocene perspective, where the epitome of the system Carnegie praised has led to a state of environmental destruction so vast that Carnegie could never have foreseen it - A question: would Carnegie have written his essay differently were he alive to witness the environmental destruction of the Anthropocene?

from - MSN article - How a poor boy from Scotland became the richest man on Earth - The life of Andrew Carnegie - Daniel Coughlin - https://hyp.is/urXCfo1hEe-OdSMr4kqwyg/www.lovemoney.com/news/135656/the-astonishing-rags-to-riches-story-of-andrew-carnegie

for - stats - Mondragon corporation - pay difference comparison between highest paid and lowest paid - from - essay - The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie - Carnegie organization

from - essay - The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie - Carnegie organization - https://hyp.is/dIoiDo16Ee-0n2OpOK3lwg/www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/

stats - Mondragon corporation - comparison of pay difference between highest paid and lowest paid - Modragon - 6 to 1 - typical US - 344 to 1 - typical Spain - 77 to 1

for - to - essay - The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie

article details\ - title: How a poor boy from Scotland became the richest man on Earth - author: Daniel Coughlin - publication: https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/how-a-poor-boy-from-scotland-became-the-richest-man-on-earth/ss-AA1snaUl?ocid=widgetonlockscreen&cvid=7d9709f2a3784d09b14e49f448a1a4cc&ei=12#image=25 - date - 2024, Oct 18