Iceberg: Recession and more

pg 220

"If I was to fail financially tomorrow, it would cause a recession that would be felt from one end of the United States to the other..."

In economics, a recession is a business cycle contraction, It is a general slowdown in economic activity. Macroeconomic indicators such as GDP(Gross Domestic Product), investment spending, capacity utilization, household income, business profits, and inflation fall, while bankruptcies and the unemployment rate rise.

Recessions generally occur when there is a widespread drop in spending (an adverse demand shock). This may be triggered by various events, such as a financial crisis, an external trade shock, an adverse supply shock or the bursting of an economic bubble. Governments usually respond to recessions by adopting expansionary macroeconomic policies, such as increasing money supply, increasing government spending and decreasing taxation.

Andrew Carnegie built librarie, John D. Rockefeller set up foundations for science and education."

Andrew Carnegie November 25, 1835 – August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century. He was also one of the highest profile philanthropists of his era; his 1889 article proclaiming "The Gospel of Wealth" called on the rich to use their wealth to improve society, and stimulated wave after wave of philanthropy.

Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, and emigrated to the United States with his very poor parents in 1848. Carnegie started as a telegrapher and by the 1860s had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, bridges and oil derricks. He built further wealth as a bond salesman raising money for American enterprise in Europe. He built Pittsburgh's Carnegie Steel Company, which he sold to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $480 million (the equivalent of approximately $13.5 billion in 2013), creating the U.S. Steel Corporation. Carnegie devoted the remainder of his life to large-scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, education and scientific research. With the fortune he made from business, he built Carnegie Hall, and founded the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Carnegie Hero Fund, Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, among others. His life has often been referred to as a true "rags to riches" story.

Among his many philanthropic efforts, the establishment of public libraries throughout the United States, Britain, Canada and other English-speaking countries was especially prominent. In this special driving interest and project of his he was inspired by a visit and tour he made with Mr. Enoch Pratt (1808-1896), formerly of Massachusetts but who made his fortune in Baltimore and ran his various mercantile and financial businesses very thriftily. Pratt in turn had been inspired and helped by his friend and fellow Bay Stater, George Peabody, (1795-1869) who also had made his fortune in the "Monumental City" of Baltimore before moving to New York and London to expand his empire as the richest man in America before the Civil War. Later he too endowed several institutions, schools, libraries and foundations in his home commonwealth, and also in Baltimore with his Peabody Institute in 1857, completed in 1866, with added library wings a decade later and several educational foundations throughout the Old South. Several decades later, Carnegie's visit with Mr. Pratt for several days; resting and dining in his city mansion, then touring, visiting and talking with staff and ordinary citizen patrons of the newly established Enoch Pratt Free Library (1886) impressed the Scotsman deeply and years later he was always heard to proclaim that "Pratt was my guide and inspiration".

The first Carnegie library opened in 1883 in Dunfermline. His method was to build and equip, but only on condition that the local authority matched that by providing the land and a budget for operation and maintenance. To secure local interest, in 1885, he gave $500,000 to Pittsburgh for a public library, and in 1886, he gave $250,000 to Allegheny City for a music hall and library; and $250,000 to Edinburgh for a free library. In total Carnegie funded some 3,000 libraries, located in 47 US states, and also in Canada, the United Kingdom, what is now the Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, and Fiji. He also donated £50,000 to help set up the University of Birmingham in 1899. In the early 20th Century, a decade after Mr. Pratt's death, when expansion and city revenues grew tight, Carnegie returned the favor and endowed a large sum to permit the building of many Carnegie Libraries in the Enoch Pratt system in Baltimore and enabled EPFL to expand through the next quarter-century to meet the needs of the growing city and supply neighborhood branches for its annexed suburbs.

Carnegie Library at Syracuse University

As Van Slyck (1991) showed, the last years of the 19th century saw acceptance of the idea that free libraries should be available to the American public. But the design of the idealized free library was the subject of prolonged and heated debate. On one hand, the library profession called for designs that supported efficiency in administration and operation; on the other, wealthy philanthropists favored buildings that reinforced the paternalistic metaphor and enhanced civic pride. Between 1886 and 1917, Carnegie reformed both library philanthropy and library design, encouraging a closer correspondence between the two

John D. Rockefeller

From his very first paycheck, Rockefeller tithed ten percent of his earnings to his church. His church was later affiliated with the Northern Baptist Convention, which formed from American Baptists in the North with ties to their historic missions to establish schools and colleges for freedmen in the South after the American Civil War. As Rockefeller's wealth grew, so did his giving, primarily to educational and public health causes, but also for basic science and the arts. He was advised primarily by Frederick Taylor Gates after 1891, and, after 1897, also by his son.

Rockefeller believed in the Efficiency Movement, arguing that: "To help an inefficient, ill-located, unnecessary school is a waste... it is highly probable that enough money has been squandered on unwise educational projects to have built up a national system of higher education adequate to our needs, if the money had been properly directed to that end."

He and his advisers invented the conditional grant, which required the recipient to "root the institution in the affections of as many people as possible who, as contributors, become personally concerned, and thereafter may be counted on to give to the institution their watchful interest and cooperation."

In 1884, Rockefeller provided major funding for a college in Atlanta for African-American women, which became Spelman College (named for Rockefeller's in-laws who were ardent abolitionists before the Civil War).The oldest existing building on Spelman's campus, Rockefeller Hall, is named after him. Rockefeller also gave considerable donations to Denison University and other Baptist colleges.

Rockefeller gave $80 million to the University of Chicago under William Rainey Harper, turning a small Baptist college into a world-class institution by 1900. He also gave a grant to the American Baptist Missionaries foreign mission board, the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society in establishing Central Philippine University, the first Baptist and second American university in Asia, in 1905 in the Philippines.

His General Education Board, founded in 1903, was established to promote education at all levels everywhere in the country. In keeping with the historic missions of the Baptists, it was especially active in supporting black schools in the South. Rockefeller also provided financial support to such established eastern institutions as Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley and Vassar. The study had been undertaken by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; it revolutionized the study of medicine in the United States.

Rockefeller and his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1915

Despite his personal preference for homeopathy, Rockefeller, on Gates's advice, became one of the first great benefactors of medical science. In 1901, he founded the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. It changed its name to Rockefeller University in 1965, after expanding its mission to include graduate education. It claims a connection to 23 Nobel laureates. He founded the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission in 1909, an organization that eventually eradicated the hookworm disease, which had long plagued rural areas of the American South. His General Education Board made a dramatic impact by funding the recommendations of the Flexner Report of 1910.

He created the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913 to continue and expand the scope of the work of the Sanitary Commission, which was closed in 1915. He gave nearly $250 million to the foundation, which focused on public health, medical training, and the arts. It endowed Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, the first of its kind^. It also built the Peking Union Medical College in China into a notable institution. The foundation helped in World War I war relief, and it employed William Lyon Mackenzie King of Canada to study industrial relations. In the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a hookworm eradication campaign through the International Health Division. This campaign used a combination of politics and science, along with collaboration between healthcare workers and government officials to accomplish its goals.

Rockefeller's fourth main philanthropy, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation, was created in 1918. Through this, he supported work in the social studies; this was later absorbed into the Rockefeller Foundation. In total Rockefeller donated about $550 million.

"...use my money to assist the Cancer Crusade...."

There seems to be no organization called simply the Cancer Crusade. THere is a Kid's Cancer Crusade and things of that nature.