Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Does Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth adequately solve problems created by those who employ the philosophy of Social Darwinism?

That's a tough question...  I suppose I would probably say no.  Here's why:


The problems that you ascribe to Social Darwinism are, presumably, the poverty and poor working conditions experienced by working class people during the Gilded Age.


The Gospel of Wealth held, as its main concept, the idea that the people who got rich during this time should use their money for the benefit of the people who didn't.  However, the ways in which the used their money (the charities to which they gave) were not usually designed to help the working people in the short term.


Just two examples are all the money that Carnegie spent on public libraries and the money Rockefeller spent to create my alma mater, the University of Chicago.


Both of these could be said to help people in the long term, but they didn't give the working poor much immediate help.

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