Stanley Katz, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Chronicle Review, traces out what appears to be a new form of philanthropy that in turn makes a new ‘math’ in giving.

As we have all heard, bonuses for directors of top national banks, for traders, and, of course, for hedge-fund managers have continued to rise. That is the New Social Math in America that lies behind the New Philanthropic Math. The expectation is that such windfall wealth (I know, they “earned” it) will roll over into charitable giving.

From the start, modern philanthropy, which was substantially the creation of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and their contemporaries, was a response to the unprecedented amount of liquid and disposable wealth available to the first generation of the industrialist superrich. Both Rockefeller and Carnegie found, quite literally, that traditional charitable donations did not permit them to give away their wealth fast (or efficiently) enough to satisfy their sense of financial stewardship. They thought a new strategy for giving was demanded by the times, and they called it “philanthropy.” If charity was the giving of alms — that is, the alleviation of individual cases of distress — philanthropy was a strategy for doing good works in gross. Rockefeller and Carnegie agreed (if only on this) that the key to philanthropy was the search for the root causes of distress (whether physical, economic, or social) and for the techniques to eradicate them. Philanthropy was the application of the same organizational and scientific skills to giving away money that had enabled the first generation of philanthropists to amass such stunning levels of wealth.

via artsjournal