 |
| Photo from Matthew Johnson's Pinterest. |
A funny thing happened on the way to today's David Brooks column, originally entitled something like "Giving Away Your Billion, Warren Buffett", judging from the url, but omitting Buffett's name from the final headline, perhaps because he couldn't decide how to punctuate it, or what it would mean:
Recently I’ve been reading the Giving Pledge letters. These are the letters that rich people write when they join Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge campaign. They take the pledge, promising to give away most of their wealth during their lifetime, and then they write letters describing their giving philosophy.The funny thing was that he couldn't stand reading the letters enough to get more than six paragraphs out of them:
- Three for George B. Kaiser, an "oil and finance guy from Oklahoma" who realized with humility that he owed his eight billion dollars not to any special "personal character or initiative" but to the fact that he was "blessed to be born in an advanced society with caring parents", which certainly explains why so few of us have eight billion dollars—I should add that he's clearly nowhere near as stupid as Brooks's quotation technique makes him sound, indeed probably not stupid at all, though I expect I disagree with him about a lot of stuff.
