Читать книгу Generation Impact - Goldseker Sharna - Страница 8

We are entering what prominent philanthropic observers are starting to call a Golden Age of Giving, a new era that will exceed in size and influence the Gilded Age of a century ago, when modern philanthropy was invented.4 Like that previous period, this one is driven both by the bold, entrepreneurial ideas of big donors and by the sheer volume of resources they have to give.

We live in a time of incredible and rapidly soaring wealth concentration. We've all seen the numbers. The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own 75 percent of all the wealth, while the wealthiest 1 percent own an astonishing 43 percent.5 This discrepancy gets even more dramatic as you go up the scale. Advocacy groups like Oxfam and Institute for Policy Studies depict this wealth inequality in stark terms: The 20 richest billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans combined (about 152 million people), and the richest eight individuals in the world own more than the poorest half of the world's population (about 3.7 billion people).6 The comparison is hard to wrap your head around: 8 versus 3,700,000,000 – each with the same total wealth.

And this concentration is growing at a remarkable rate. From 1978 to 2012, the share of wealth owned by the richest 0.1 percent of families in the United States jumped from 7 percent to 22 percent.7 Between 1978 and 2014, according to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO pay in the United States increased by almost 1,000 percent, while pay for the average worker went up only 11 percent.8 Data from the annual Forbes lists shows that in 1987 there were 41 billionaires in the United States; 30 years later, in 2016, there were 540.9

So will this current era of extraordinary wealth creation and concentration also be an era of extraordinary amounts of giving? Research has shown that nearly every high‐net‐worth household (91 percent) reported some giving to charity, and that American families with $1 million or more in net worth account for 50 percent of the total amount of charitable contributions, even though they are only 7 percent of the total population.10 Even if the giving rate stays the same for the wealthiest individuals, the sheer amount they will give will climb. How these big donors give will make a big difference.

Furthermore, as more wealth is held by fewer families, this wealth is being transferred across generations within those families. In fact, we are living in the midst of the greatest transfer of concentrated wealth in human history. A 2014 study by the Boston College Center on Wealth and Philanthropy estimated that just over $59 trillion will be transferred across generations between 2007 and 2061.11 Not $59 billion —$59 trillion. Most of this wealth transfer is happening within a relatively small group of high‐net‐worth families. The study estimates that 20 percent of affluent families will account for approximately 88 percent of the wealth transfer.

This remarkable amount of wealth passing between generations also means a remarkable amount of money available for charitable giving. The Boston College study, considering both normal giving rates and the amount of transferred money earmarked for charitable purposes, estimates that during these same 55 years, almost $27 trillion will be designated for charity, either at some point during the wealth‐holders' lifetimes or as bequests from their estates. Of course, if heirs decide to give more of their inherited family assets to charity, this philanthropic largesse will expand even further. Many of the next generation inheritors discussed in this book will be the active stewards of enormous assets for decades to come. Some have already taken on this role with verve.

At the same time, others in the next gen are busy making their own wealth, often in staggering amounts. Techies, hedge‐funders, and other young entrepreneurs are becoming part of the 1 percent – or even the 0.1 percent – that owns a bigger and bigger slice of the pie.

In short, with these two socioeconomic dynamics converging, Gen X and Millennial philanthropists have access to dramatically greater resources than any previous generation. And more money means more potential for giving.

But we are entering a new Golden Age of Giving not just because donors will have more money to give. Even more significant is the fact that next gen donors want to revolutionize philanthropy to make it more effective. These leaders of the new Golden Age want nothing less than an Impact Revolution.