In the United States, the top one percent by net worth holds 31.7% of the nation’s wealth, the highest share in almost four decades per Forbes. According to the 2025 “State of the Acad” by The Milton Paper, 43.8% of respondents’ families earn over $500,000, which sits between top 1% and 2% of household earnings.
Thus, Milton urges us to reconcile our desire for monetary success with acknowledgement of socioeconomic inequality. Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 article “The Gospel of Wealth” answers this dilemma. Starting as a manual laborer at age 12 working 10 hours a day, Carnegie would eventually become the richest man alive and donate $6.9 billion (numbers are adjusted for inflation) by the end of his lifetime.
At the time, Carnegie’s veneration of the upper class as trustees of the poor struck at the moral foundation of many readers. For Reverend William Jewett Tucker, who published a critique of the provocative philosophy in June of 1891, there is “no greater mistake to society than that of trying to make charity do the work of justice.” Many socialists argue that the wealthy’s financial duty to enlighten the lower class should be enforced by law. However, government redistribution of wealth violates a key principle of Carnegie’s argument: that the “man of wealth,” as a trustee of the poor, does financially “for his poorer brethren better than they would or could do for themselves.” While we find that this argument has some merits in its application of the upper class’s financial knowledge to moral causes, we also find it overly simplistic since it starts to dehumanize “poorer brethren” without considering unchosen life circumstances that can lead to poverty. Carnegie also writes that socialism’s heavy taxation, instead of voluntary donation, to the poor would extinguish individualism, a danger we deem uniquely lethal to the economy’s crucial invention and entrepreneurship. This independence allows for human-ity’s economic evolution; Carnegie disapproves of the destruction “in endeavoring to uproot” society through superficial economic engineering instead of gradual evolution through “[bending] the universal tree of humanity in the direction most favorable to the production of good fruit.”
Despite causing socioeconomic inequality, the accumulation of wealth through competition progresses society for the benefit of all, Carnegie argues. By this argument, members of the Milton community should not shame themselves for seeking money in our capitalist economy.
However, to ease their conscience, the wealthy often recklessly donate their money: Miltonians, for example, scan their IAs on a whim at fundraisers. According to Felix Stuart ’27, when his history teacher asked the class whether they would give a dollar to a random homeless person, everyone except him answered ‘yes.’ The Gospel agrees with Stuart: Carnegie wrote that one philosopher “gratified his own feelings” in “one of the most selfish and very worst actions in all his life” by giving a quarter dollar to a beggar, since the gift promoted the panhandler’s passive survival and thus disheartened the working poor. Carnegie’s ruthless philanthropic prioritization mandates that we Miltonians think rationally before we scan our IAs.
To Carnegie, quality of donation matters much more than quantity, and he recommends several effective areas: from universities and public libraries to hospitals and swimming pools. From Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to Carnegie Hall to the over 2500 libraries the tycoon donated, his philanthropic legacy in education and the arts still holds relevance today. Critically, the community must maintain these gifts lest “the public [cease] to take interest in it, or, rather, never [acquire] interest in it,” as Carnegie described. Through such strategic altruism, Carnegie’s impact lasts while Milton Academy students’ does not.
Today, we are living through what some experts call the “second Gilded age” per ABC news; as Forbes presents, the top ten percent of households hold 68% of America’s wealth. Massive donation pledges—such as The Giving Pledge where billionaires such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet pledge to give over half of their wealth to philanthropy—run rampant in ultrarich communities who seek to cleanse their moral conscience. However, the $568 billion collectively given to Africa, for example, has had marginal impact, according to NBC News; on average, Africans were richer 50 years ago than they are today, and as Former Finance Minister of Nigeria Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala put it, “Africans do not want to be viewed as a charity case,” and the continent instead needs “a set of tools” to tangibly improve the economy.
As we ponder our desire for monetary success, acknowledge socioeconomic inequities, and seek to positively impact the world, we must remember Andrew Carnegie’s “The Gospel of Wealth.”