Does MacKenzie Scott’s Philanthropy Really Change Anything?

In many ways, MacKenzie Scott is Andrew Carnegie’s virtuous foil. The duo offers a striking contrast. Yet, Carnegie, despite being a far more enthusiastic capitalist, may be the philanthropist who better models how philanthropy can challenge the power of capitalism.

Carnegie is the nineteenth-century empire-builder who celebrated capitalism and believed in the superior merit of those with the discipline and intellect to accumulate great fortunes. Scott is the wealthiest woman in America today, in part due to her efforts to help ex-husband Jeff Bezos found Amazon, but as an indirect beneficiary of the business’s explosive growth. Where Carnegie believed wealthy men could bring “superior wisdom, experience, and ability” to use money for causes that benefited poor people “better than they would or could for themselves,” Scott’s perspective on wealth is far more self-effacing. Scott credits her immense wealth not to the visionary leadership of Amazon (and certainly her ex-husband, Jeff Bezos) but to “a collective effort” that was “enabled by systems in need of change.” Scott believes “it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that solutions are best designed and implemented by others,” particularly people from historically marginalized communities who have suffered oppression based on race, gender, sexual and gender identity.

In their respective rhetoric about wealth and philanthropy, one philanthropist’s narrative rings harsh, the other more sweetly, to our contemporary ears. Carnegie comes across as the evil industrial baron who believed wealth conveyed superior ability and exploited millions of workers. Perhaps worst of all, he believed that philanthropy validated his wealth, providing a triumphant culmination of his career. By contrast, when Scott gives her fortune away, she does so with humility and contrition about systemic injustice, ideals that would have no place in Carnegie’s bootstrap philosophy. To Scott, giving is still the ideal use of wealth, but as an act of reparation and compensation that is meant to redeem rather than celebrate her vast fortune.

Read more at The Daily Beast.