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