What it is
In June and December 1889, Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born steel magnate, published two articles in the North American Review that together became known as The Gospel of Wealth. The problem of the age, he wrote, was the proper administration of wealth.
He saw three ways to dispose of a great fortune: leave it to one’s family, which he called the most injudicious; leave it to public causes at death; or give it away during one’s lifetime, the path he urged. He also backed heavy, graduated taxes on large estates, calling them the wisest form of taxation. A rich man should live modestly, provide moderately for his family and manage the rest as a trust for the community. The essay’s most famous line is its verdict on those who fail to: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”
What it rejected, and what it built
Carnegie was scathing about charity that met immediate needs. He guessed that of every $1,000 spent on so-called charity, $950 was spent unwisely, in ways that produced the very evils it meant to cure. The rich should instead build what he called ladders for the aspiring: universities, libraries, medical institutions, parks and other public institutions. He followed his own advice, paying for more than 2,500 library buildings. See Carnegie’s public libraries.
Its legacy and its critics
Carnegie Corporation of New York, now the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, calls the essay a foundational document of philanthropy. Its central idea, that the very rich should give most of their wealth away, is alive today. The Giving Pledge, founded by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett, is a promise by the world’s wealthiest people to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes.
Criticism followed quickly. In 1892, at Carnegie’s steel works in Homestead, Pennsylvania, managers locked out workers to cut wages and break the union, and a gun battle with hired Pinkerton agents left nearly a dozen people dead. Carnegie, who had backed the plan from Scotland, was widely condemned as a hypocrite. More recently, in his 2018 book Just Giving, Rob Reich argues that large-scale philanthropy turns private wealth into public influence that is hard to hold accountable, can last indefinitely and is subsidized through the tax system.
Through the source lens
Carnegie’s gospel points upstream, to institutions that let people rise. Charitology doesn’t share his dismissal of relief, since every level of the depth scale is needed. And his critics press a question his essay answered with confidence in the judgment of the rich: when they decide what the public receives, who holds them to account? That is part of Open Problem 21, the Government Question, and of the Prestige Economy.