How to Give Away a Fortune
September 02, 2024 at 08:08PMMarlene Engelhorn is an Austrian heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune who believes in redistributing her wealth. To do so, she formed the “Good Council,” a group of 50 Austrians from all walks of life ranging in age from 16 to 85. Together they applied their collective knowledge and experience to decide how to give away Engelhorn’s $25 million euros. Citizen councils have been convened in Austria and in different countries previously, but their recommendations have been mostly nonbinding. Englehorn’s Good Council would differ here; her money waited in a trust for the members to agree on how to spend it. The only stipulation? The money was not to be given to private individuals, for-profit entities, political organizations, or groups whose activities were considered “unconstitutional, hostile, or inhumane.”
The Good Council, the text went on, would comprise fifty Austrians selected by lottery—Erna was among ten thousand who made the first cut—and meet for six weekends to come up with proposals for how to address inequality in Austria, where the richest one per cent controls half of the country’s wealth. Additionally, the council would have twenty-five million euros to distribute as it saw fit, money provided by Marlene Engelhorn, who was described in the letter only as the council’s “Auftraggeberin,” or principal client. The letter emphasized that the council would make decisions “freely and without influence.” Those selected as members would also receive twelve hundred euros per weekend as compensation for their time and labor.
Erna, who is eighty and long retired from her job as a waitress in a corporate cafeteria, ripped up the letter and threw it in the trash. She lives on a state pension of four hundred and fifty euros a month. What do I know about distributing millions? she thought. The next morning, however, she came across a newspaper article on the Good Council. Engelhorn, an activist and an heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, had announced its creation at a press conference in Vienna. She told journalists, “If politicians don’t do their job and redistribute, then I have to redistribute my wealth myself.”
Erna recalled the handful of euros she often gave a homeless man she passed in town, and the neighbor she’d accompanied to a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. She fished the scraps of paper from the trash, ironed them flat, and dialled the number included in the letter. Two days later, she received a call from a Good Council representative who asked her a series of questions about her income and education. By the end of the month, she had been selected as one of the council’s fifty members.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/02/how-to-give-away-a-fortune/
via IFTTT
Watch