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Thomas Jefferson’s drastic Bible edit

Brainiac

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December 25, 2011|By Joshua Rothman

Andrew Carnegie (Getty Images )

The invention of giving big

What are America’s great contributions to the world? The historian Olivier Zunz suggests one we might overlook: philanthropy.

In his new book, “Philanthropy in America,” Zunz explains that modern philanthropy was really an invention of the late 19th century. The first philanthropists--almost all of them members of America’s corporate elite--explicitly aimed to rationalize giving. By filtering their own charitable impulses through a rational, corporate mind-set, they were able to unleash giving on a scale the world had never seen.

Andrew Carnegie was among the first to realize that he could manage his charitable giving the same way he managed his companies. Instead of randomly giving money to this or that cause, Carnegie set up an open-ended foundation, run by professional managers with business experience. He and others like him started taking on projects which, until then, had seemed more appropriate for governments--building school systems, starting universities, defeating diseases, and even encouraging world peace.

What makes American philanthropy unique, Zunz says, is its marriage of corporate organization to individual participation. Today, millions of Americans give to local charities, but they also raise money for huge, corporation-like nonprofits that pursue large-scale goals, like curing breast cancer. When this kind of collaboration was invented, it was a wholly new phenomenon. And it was enabled by governmental enthusiasm: Recognizing the power of the model, regulators began making space for tax-exempt, nonprofit corporations, seeing them as a way of harnessing the ingenuity and energy of the market for social good.

Today, Zunz writes, America’s nonprofit sector is singularly huge--it employs 10 percent of the country’s workforce, and its combined budget is larger than the Pentagon’s. It’s now being replicated around the world, and used to combat global problems. As such, Zunz argues, it is one of the most important recent American inventions.

Out-of-body science

Are out-of-body experiences real? Writing in Nature, the science writer Ed Yong profiles Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who has found a way to induce out-of-body experiences in the laboratory, using virtual reality and prosthetic body parts. By understanding out-of-body experiences, Ehrsson aims to illuminate our more typical “in-our-body” experiences.