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The Modern Medici: Patterns, Motivation, and Giving Strategies of the Wealthy Paul G. Schervish For the foreseeable future, the quality of social and cultural life will more than at any other time in history be linked to growth in material life. Both publicly and personally, nationally and internationally, I expect that the leading intellectual, emotional, and behavioral issues of the day will revolve around the determinants, dilemmas, and dynamics of personal decision making in an age of affluence. This is not the first time in history that a confluence of material and cultural forces has produced a new terrain of obstacles and opportunities affecting everyone’s lot. Every era offers a combination of newly fashioned material apertures and barriers for obtaining happiness. For instance, historian Simon Schama chronicles how seventeenth century Dutch society was among the first in history to be characterized not only by widespread affluence but by widespread moral anxiety about how to live with what Schama calls an “embarrassment of riches” (Schama 1988). What is new about the forthcoming epoch is that vast numbers of the world’s population will reside not just within a sphere of affluence, but within a widespread, and growing, sphere of wealth. We will, especially in the United States, increasingly find ourselves carrying out our commercial, political, cultural, social, and spiritual lives within the context of a dramatically increased material standard of living. One manifestation of this new era of financial capacity will be substantial developments in the quantity and quality of philanthropy by wealth holders. Andrew Carnegie (Gospel of Wealth 1962) distinguishes between those who are wealthy and those who enjoy economic competence. The wealthy are those whose financial security can withstand virtually all but the most devastating personal or economy-wide financial crises. The economically competent are those whose financial standing provides a generally worry free economic life but whose affluent standard of living remains vulnerable to unanticipated expenses or changes in personal financial fortunes, such as a long bout of unemployment. Even given Carnegie’s heuristic framework, the working definitions of what constitutes wealth and economic competency are constantly being adjusted upward both in the public’s perception and in the minds of wealth holders themselves. Let me suggest that the economically competent are today’s upper affluent who possess a net worth approaching $1 million and extending to $3 million. This would include many professionals whose wealth is based on the value of their home and pension. The wealthy might be defined as those with current net worth above $3 million to $5 or $10 million, while the thoroughly wealthy are those with current net worth in active and passive investments in excess of $10 million, and growing. In this paper I address three aspects of the relationship between wealth and philanthropy that can serve as foundations for understanding and influencing what I consider to be a forthcoming golden age of philanthropy: the large and exponential growth in wealth; the motivational array that inclines wealth holders to contribute to charity; and the array of strategies they use in carrying out their philanthropy. The overarching philosophical and practical theme of this paper is that inclination sooner breeds generosity than coercion, and that wealth holders like everyone else are inclined toward, although not automatically effective in, allocating their wealth in order to produce happiness for themselves and others. In the first section of the paper, I (A) summarize the findings of our research on the current patterns of charitable giving, (B) review our findings on the forthcoming wealth transfer that provide the stage for expanded choice among wealth holders, and (C) project the potential growth in charitable giving that could result from wealth holders continuing to include philanthropy as a major category in their allocative decision making. I also examine the current patterns of charitable giving by wealth holders and project the potential for expansion. In the second section, I present the array of motivations that inclines wealth holders toward devoting sizable portions of their wealth to philanthropy. In the third section, I set out the array of strategies among which wealth holders may choose to carry out their charitable giving. In the final section I discuss the implications of these findings for mobilizing the potential of wealth for a service of care. I refer to today’s wealth holders as modern Medici in order to evoke the historical comparison with that self-made medieval family that extended its self-expressive world building into the entire gamut of human endeavor from war to commerce, and from politics to the arts. Just as the unifying family trait of the wide-ranging Medici was nothing less than being producers rather than receivers of the world in which they dwelt, the class trait of modern wealth holders is what I call hyperagency--that admixture of self-confident disposition and material capacity to be founders of the world in which they reside, from businesses to government, and from personal homes to social philanthropy. That the modern Medici, like the medieval Medici, embody and express a psychological wherewithal of determined individuality and a material wherewithal of worldly principality is the underlying motif of what I have to say about the distinctive motives and strategies of charitable giving among today’s wealth holders. The findings and analyses I present throughout the paper are derived from research I have carried out with John J. Havens and others at the Boston College Social Welfare Research Institute. This research has been supported by the T. B. Murphy Foundation Charitable Trust, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Lilly Endowment, Inc. Download "The Modern Medici: Patterns, Motivations, and Giving Strategies of the Wealthy" in its entirety. |