donors we will introduce you to in this book.
Major donors affect your life more than you might know – maybe even more than you might find comfortable.
Ever been cared for by a nurse? Received a scholarship? Used a library? Consumed pasteurized milk? Then you've benefited directly from the decisions by major funders to support causes such as modern medical training, the arts, and public health. If you get your news from National Public Radio or allow Sesame Street to entertain and educate your preschooler, or if you're a woman who's had a Pap smear test, then your life is affected in a direct way by the actions of major donors. All of those innovations were driven primarily by philanthropic – rather than market or government – investments.
Many good things we take for granted are due in large part to wealthy donors giving big donations – things like community centers and local parks; beautiful churches, synagogues, and mosques; a world‐class higher education system; and even the ideas for a 911 emergency system and white lines on the sides of highways. The same can be said for the eradication of many bad things we no longer have to worry about (at least in the United States), like sewage in the streets, children working in factories, and diseases like polio and yellow fever.
Philanthropists were primary funders behind the development of modern mental health treatment, hospice care, and autism treatments. They helped create many of our institutions serving widows, orphans, and people with disabilities. Medical breakthroughs such as the use of insulin to treat diabetes and antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV were made possible by donors with singular dedications to those issues. And of course, outside the United States, philanthropic giving by large donors, from the Rockefellers to the Gateses, has literally saved millions of lives, whether through the eradication of hookworm, the fight against tuberculosis, or the availability of antimalarial bed nets.
But as the history of international giving shows, how – and how much – major donors affect our lives can sometimes be controversial. While most of us are happy that big donors in the past were behind nascent social movements such as the abolition of slavery, suffrage, and civil rights, other movements funded by philanthropists divide us just as they divide the donors themselves. For instance, major donors are backing both sides of the marriage equality and the charter school debates, both the prochoice and prolife movements, and both the founding of the state of Israel and the Palestinian desire for a homeland.1
Still think your life isn't fundamentally different because of the choices that major donors make?
While they have a complicated and sometimes disputed legacy, the impact of philanthropic giants like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford on American life is undeniable. They created enduring institutions like hospitals, universities, museums, libraries, and the modern philanthropic foundation. Philanthropy today is based largely on the ideas and innovations of these corporate lions. They set the norms and shaped our collective image for how major donors give. Yet there are many others who fit into this category of “big donors” and who often had tremendous philanthropic influence but whose names and stories are not as well known. They, too, have affected our lives, but in often underappreciated ways.2
This pattern continues with major philanthropists today. Many people know of the work of big donors with famous last names like Buffett, Hewlett, Packard, Bloomberg, and Walton. And you most likely have heard of a few members of the emerging class of Gen X and Millennial megadonors, people like tech billionaire Sean Parker, who practices what he calls “hacker philanthropy.”3 But what do we know of the less famous next gen donors who have significant resources to give, who will be tremendously important to all of our lives? What about the donors in your hometown – some of whom might just be in their 20s or 30s – who write big checks to your community theater or that women's shelter you pass on your way to work?
As the influence and power of major donors – well‐known or anonymous – expands, this lack of awareness becomes even more problematic. Those at the top of the donor pyramid have more and more wealth to give, and donors of the next generation – both young inheritors and earners of major wealth – are increasingly taking their place at that apex of giving, so our need to know about them is urgent and growing. Our current global and domestic political tumult only increases this need to decipher and then help inform the plans of the most powerful and generously resourced elites. In times of uncertainty, major donors can step into the fray and shape our lives and futures in even more profound ways.
Profiles of a few celebrated individuals won't suffice. We need to understand the collective mindset and plans of the donors of this generation, even if we don't yet know which of these donors will be the Carnegies and Gateses of the future.
The impact of the next group of big donors will eclipse even the giants who've come before them, in part because they are not content to just step passively into their predecessors' shoes; they want to forge bold new paths in those shoes – muck them up and wear them thin. If the philanthropists of the fabled Gilded Age of the early 1900s set the norms for our current giving, the donors of a Golden Age of Giving that is now dawning want to change those norms. They want even greater impact.
The New Golden Age of Giving
We are entering what prominent philanthropic observers are starting to call a Golden Age of Giving, a new era that will exceed in size and influence the Gilded Age of a century ago, when modern philanthropy was invented.4 Like that previous period, this one is driven both by the bold, entrepreneurial ideas of big donors and by the sheer volume of resources they have to give.
We live in a time of incredible and rapidly soaring wealth concentration. We've all seen the numbers. The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own 75 percent of all the wealth, while the wealthiest 1 percent own an astonishing 43 percent.5 This discrepancy gets even more dramatic as you go up the scale. Advocacy groups like Oxfam and Institute for Policy Studies depict this wealth inequality in stark terms: The 20 richest billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans combined (about 152 million people), and the richest eight individuals in the world own more than the poorest half of the world's population (about 3.7 billion people).6 The comparison is hard to wrap your head around: 8 versus 3,700,000,000 – each with the same total wealth.
And this concentration is growing at a remarkable rate. From 1978 to 2012, the share of wealth owned by the richest 0.1 percent of families in the United States jumped from 7 percent to 22 percent.7 Between 1978 and 2014, according to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO pay in the United States increased by almost 1,000 percent, while pay for the average worker went up only 11 percent.8 Data from the annual Forbes lists shows that in 1987 there were 41 billionaires in the United States; 30 years later, in 2016, there were 540.9
So will this current era of extraordinary wealth creation and concentration also be an era of extraordinary amounts of giving? Research has shown that nearly every high‐net‐worth household (91 percent) reported some giving to charity, and that American families with $1 million or more in net worth account for 50 percent of the total amount of charitable contributions, even though they are only 7 percent of the total population.10 Even if the giving rate stays the same for the wealthiest individuals, the sheer amount they will give will climb. How these big donors give will make a big difference.
Furthermore, as more wealth is held by fewer families, this wealth is being transferred across generations within those families. In fact, we are living in the midst of the greatest transfer of concentrated wealth in human history. A 2014 study by the Boston College Center on Wealth and Philanthropy estimated that just over $59 trillion will be transferred across generations between 2007 and 2061.11 Not $59 billion —$59 trillion. Most of this wealth transfer is happening