Philanthropy by Numbers (Postscript)
In my last post I tried to argue for a different approach when trying to understand giving levels of our wealthy. In the post I argued for measuring donations relative to the wealth of the donor as opposed to the absolute number. Here it is https://medium.com/@daniel_1959/philanthropy-by-numbers-490bdcbc6d08
The concept of relative as opposed to absolute should not be a foreign concept to any of us.
Income tax is paid relative to your income. If you earn $50,000 you pay less tax than someone who earns $150,000. We would all be outraged if someone earning $200,000 paid the same income tax as someone earning $50,000 and would hardly congratulate the $200,000 person for meeting their societal requirements if they paid the same tax as someone on $50,000 of income.
Maybe we need to think of donations as a kind of social cohesion tax. In 1889 Andrew Carnegie wrote the Gospel of Wealth were he argues that philanthropy is a requirement to keep social cohesion. Worth a read.
If philanthropy can be viewed, perhaps, as a social cohesion tax (or gratefulness tax or guilt tax or luck gene pool tax) then the idea of using a relative measure to track giving is obvious.
It would therefore be natural to expect someone with $200m to give proportionally more away than someone with $50m and someone with $4b should be giving WAY more than someone with $50m.
The fact that we have let our wealthy get away with using absolute numbers is a con, a shell game, an act of deception.
Someone with $6b in wealth who is giving away 0.029% of their wealth per year is not someone worthy of fanfare but rather mild applause. Someone who has $50m — $Xb in wealth and who gives nothing away is a social pariah.
