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posted by Jason Kottke  ·  gift link

How to Give Away a Fortune

Marlene Engelhorn inherited millions from her family and decided to give much of it away (€25 million). She formed an independent council called Guter Rat für Rückverteilung (“good council for redistribution”) made up of 50 randomly selected Austrians chosen to reflect the makeup of Austria’s population, and they decided where to direct the money. Engelhorn’s mission statement is worth a read:

Democracy is about cultivating relationships: a society works on doing well. And a society is doing well when the people in that society are doing well. At the moment, this does not apply to everyone: wealth, assets and property are distributed unequally and unfairly. And so is the power in our society.

In Austria, the richest one percent of the population hoards up to 50 percent of the net wealth. This means that one hundredth of society owns just under half of the wealth. And 99 percent of people have to make do with the other half. Almost four million households struggle to get by every day. And the one percent? Most of them have simply inherited.

We are talking about dynasties that amass wealth and power over generations. They then withdraw from our society as if it were none of their business. I also come from such a dynasty. My wealth was accumulated before I was even born. It was accumulated because other people did the work, but my family was able to inherit the ownership of an enterprise and thus all claims to the fruits of its labour.

Wealth is never an individual achievement. Wealth is always created by society. A few people get rich because they buy other people’s time and profit from it. Because they have a patent on a product that others urgently need. Because they buy a piece of land that increases in value and because society builds infrastructure around it. In the process, they destroy the environment to harvest the resources.

Fascinating idea. (via ny times)

Discussion  2 comments

Joshua Leto

This is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in a while. I saw it a day after experiencing a highly frustrating bureaucratic nightmare, which I could clearly see would have impacted my less fortunate neighbors (literally–I live in an apartment building) much more significantly. Income inequality was front of mind.

I was struggling with the stress of it and the stories about the conferences almost brought me to tears. Absolutely beautiful.

I re-subscribed (I keep a tight budget and love patronage, so I shift it between different people often) to comment on this very story. Thank you for the posts. This is my favorite weekend reading.

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Jason KottkeMOD

Joshua Yaffa on How to Give Away a Fortune.

The concept of a citizen council — a democratic forum with roots in ancient Greece — is straightforward: a selected group of people come together to discuss a matter of public policy, with the goal of making proposals or clarifying public attitudes. Hélène Landemore, a professor at Yale and the author of "Open Democracy," which argues for a more inclusive system of participatory governance, told me, "Parliaments are now largely defined by partisanship and the logic of power. You're there to win, not to learn or change your mind." The members of a citizen council, on the other hand, come without partisan allegiances and are typically more familiar with the realities of daily life. "It's a very small subset of the population that enters traditional politics, and, once they do, they tend to stay there too long," Landemore said. "They don't know the price of a pain au chocolat or a metro ticket. They're disconnected."

In recent years, citizen councils in Ireland, France, and Austria have considered such issues as abortion, end-of-life care, and climate change. For the most part, the conclusions of these efforts have been nonbinding. The Austrian Citizens' Climate Assembly, for instance, which convened in 2022 as a result of a nationwide referendum, produced a hundred-page report with dozens of recommendations, including the introduction of tariffs on greenhouse-gas-intensive food imports and mandatory charges for returning online orders. But no government agency was required to pursue them. The Good Council was different: Engelhorn's millions were held in a trust and would be distributed in strict accordance with the council members' instructions.

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