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Carnegie considered retiring at 35, when he was rich enough not to need to work more. But he kept working for the next few decades, and ended up making about 20
by byrneseyeview 16y ago
Carnegie considered retiring at 35, when he was rich enough not to need to work more. But he kept working for the next few decades, and ended up making about 200X as much.
He wrote himself a memorandum, in which he totaled up his net worth and income, and decided it was enough. Apparently it wasn't, but that's a couple thousand libraries, organs, etc. that he otherwise wouldn't have purchased.
Oddly enough, Warren Buffett wrote something similar at about the same age, when he also semi-retired. Like Carnegie, he went back to work, multiplied his fortune a few more times, and had a lot more to give away at the end.
- rbanffy 16y agoI agree that Carnegie, in the end, made a lot of good things possible. Still, it bothers me that we are so eager to consider that ends justify the means if the ends favor us. Carnegie ruined lots of people. Along with his good deeds, you must consider the good all these other people never were able to do thanks to him. What makes his good deeds more worthy than the good deeds he prevented?
- colinplamondon 16y agoHow did he ruin people? His company was incredibly progressive for its time.
- rbanffy 16y agoRuthless competition, mostly. The example that illustrates his character is not related to this kind of behaviour, but to how he treated his workforce. The Homestead strike was caused by a broken promise to tie salaries to profits which, made in a downturn, reduced payments. When profits returned, he broke the promise, refused to keep salaries tied to profits, locked out the union workers who protested and used violence to end them. In the end, he hired immigrant workers in place of the previous employees, working for less in harsher conditions. Not exactly role model. http://bit.ly/8XRSwN http://bit.ly/8XRSwN This quote is, IIRC (lost track of the book and had to resort to Google) from Theodore Roosevelt.
- Retric 16y agoFYI: There is no reason to use url shorteners on hn and many people will not click on them.
- rbanffy 16y agoSorry. The URL was so huge I felt bad. When more than 50% of the message is a insanely long URL, something is clearly wrong.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sp332 16y agoHN truncates the display of long URLs. Yours is http://books.google.com/books?id=ni0EsmebjYwC&pg=RA1-PA750&dq=if+andrew+carnegie+had+employed+his+fortune&hl=en&ei=cIZATMJ1hIqXB67cyZsO&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=if%20andrew%20carnegie%20had%20employed%20his%20fortune&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=ni0EsmebjYwC&pg=RA1-PA7...
- rbanffy 16y agoCool!
- orangecat 16y agoYes. In fact strike "on hn".