Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland in 1835 and immigrated with his family to Allegheny, Pennsylvania, when he was thirteen years old. Carnegie began to work right away and eventually built connections with the local telegraph company in Pittsburgh. This, along with his self-taught knowledge of telegraphy earned him a job as an assistant at the Pennsylvania Railroad. With the help of his boss, Thomas A. Scott, Carnegie was able to learn how to invest money successfully and then reinvest his profits. His investments were so successful that he was able to move into the iron and iron products industry, manufacturing components for bridges and railroad tracks. By this time, Carnegie had accumulated a large amount of money that would later became …show more content…
One should never fully help another person but to instead offer them a way to help themselves. Carnegie believed that the proper way to distribute money was during one’s lifetime but very few followed his lead. During his lifetime he had given away roughly $350 million of his own money which helped found Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, benefit Scottish universities and his hometown in Scotland, establish pension funds for his workers, build 2,509 free public libraries throughout the United States and Canada, as well as donate a large number of pipe organs to be installed in churches (p. 483). John Kenneth Galbraith, an author who wrote many books on subjects such as economics, would have disagreed with Carnegie’s view about the proper distribution of wealth (p. 499). Galbraith states in his essay, “The Position of Poverty”,
“In the past, we have suffered from the supposition that the only remedy for poverty lies in remedies that allow people to look after themselves- to participate in the economy. Nothing has better served the conscience of people who wished to avoid inconvenient or expensive action than an appeal, on this issue, to Calvinist precept- “The only sound way to solve the problem of poverty is to help people help themselves.”