The gospel of wealth

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1. telesillaJun 2026
   >The Gospel of Wealth

   The book from anti-union Carnegie, which recommended to his fellow wealthy that they uplift society while actively undermining the efforts of workers to improve their own lives?

   By "let's" I mean us, as voters, as citizens.

   "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." (Edmund Burke)

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2. kelseyfrogFeb 2026
   Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth[1] lies squarely in the center of the foundational belief that those who've acquired such means have done so because they reflect "the highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished."

   It takes only a brief glimpse of the real world and its most wealthy to recognize that an abundance of virtue is not what's reflected in reality. In fact, the benevolence Carnegie describes, serves as a smoke screen for cruelty, degenerate acts, and the slaughterhouse of the soul. We've sold out every moral for a bait and switch and it's well past time to reneg on the social contract.

   1. https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/

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3. kelseyfrogJul 2025
   We do have the persistent cultural myth that money = merit[1][2], so it's not entirely different.

   1. Acres of Diamonds. Russell Conwell. 1900. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rconwellacresofdia...

   2. The Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie. 1889. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gospel_of_Wealth

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4. cratermoonMar 2025
   Prosperity gospel is a peculiar American brand of protestant pentecostal evangelism that is the motivating aspect of the Green family. While it has no Biblical basis, it does riff on Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth and has a number of parallels in the so-called Effective Altruism movement.
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5. alaxsxaqAug 2023
   Maybe find a way to inspire in the rich the kind of philanthropy practiced by Andrew Carnegie. He wrote his views in, The Gospel of Wealth - not having read it, but having long heard Carnegie's name as an example of wealth turned to good, I'm planning to give it a read.

   Unfortunately with a political system wholly owned by the wealthy (US), I fear that there may be more truth than I want in my father's admonition that things will never get better in this country until we have another revolution. I've been around a bit and so much of today seems to be a rinse and repeat of the issues I experienced when I was young - not the world I wanted to see for my daughter. Hopefully the next generation has a stronger backbone - mine and the couple after seem to have surrendered our dreams to greed and consumerism.

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6. _deliriumMar 2014
   In a way that's what some of the early 20th century Marxists (in the group of "Orthodox Marxists") were arguing. In the extreme form of that view they had a view on management that aligned nearly 100% with the view of the big capitalist "barons". A common view among industrialists of the era (starting in the late 19th century) was that modern scientific management, statistics, supply-chain-management, etc., was making bazaar-style capitalism obsolete, and ushering in an era of efficient, centralized, vertically and horizontally integrated, scientifically optimized production. That was one of the arguments used against anti-trust legislation: industrialists argued that anti-trust legislation was just purposely shoring up obsolete, inefficient models based on the medieval bazaar, which were out of touch with a modern scientific, centralized industrial sector.

   A certain variety of early Marxism said more or less: yes, we agree with all that. Except for one thing: once industrial capitalism has centralized the economy, with a few huge trusts running things as a smoothly oiled production machine, the shareholders are now more or less superfluous. So, we'll just knock 'em off and distribute the proceeds of this machine among all the workers equally. The industrial capitalists only disagreed with the idea of socialist central planning in that they didn't want to distribute the proceeds of central planning, not in believing that decentralized planning was better. Many did agree that some kind of redistribution was necessary so that all society benefitted, but they preferred redistribution managed by the monopoly capitalists themselves in the form of philanthropy, which they felt they would be able to thoughtfully manage (Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth is representative of this view).

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