Two wealthy people can reach the end of their lives having accumulated similar fortunes and be remembered in completely different ways. One spends a lifetime accumulating and simply passes the fortune along at death, treating wealth as something to be preserved and handed down intact. The other treats accumulated wealth as something that comes with an active obligation attached to it while the person is still alive to discharge that obligation personally. Carnegie made this exact distinction explicit in "The Gospel of Wealth," the essay he published in 1889 laying out his philosophy of how the rich should handle surplus fortune. The line is deliberately harsh, and it was meant to be: he was not describing wealth itself as disgraceful, but describing a specific failure, dying with a large, undistributed fortune still sitting untouched- as a failure of duty rather than simply a neutral outcome.
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