https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/ethics-inheritance-nussbaum-levmore/547934/
It's good to donate and be a philanthropy. Article talks about why it's good and reasons why people donate.
An excerpt from the article:
Olen: Is it selfish to leave money to your children instead of giving it away?
Levmore: One of the nicest things I remember happening when I was dean is there was a young person, a person of means, and he wanted to endow something but he didn’t want to do it while his children were young. And then it occurs to him to give the money away in order to be an example to his kids—like they could come visit our university and see, you know, how this helped poor people in our clinics, they could see this clinic that was named after their grandfather that their father had given. And they can think, “Wow, this is a good reason to work hard and make money. You can give it away and make the world a better place.” And they can be proud of him.
So I think teaching your children to be proud of being helpful is probably a really good thing for a lot of rich people, even though it tells the kid that you have a lot of money, and even though there might be moments when they think, “Why’d you give away that money? You could have given it to me!” But I think he was proud of it, and it’s nice to see your parents do good deeds. Maybe you’ll react accordingly.
Nussbaum: With inheritances, it’s really important not to give the impression that you’re extorting your children, and one way you can not do that is to make it clear to them that you're not leaving the whole of your estate to them at all, but to various charitable organizations. I think we need to remember that not all children have rich parents and we need to do things to bring about overall social welfare. Hopefully the tax system will do a good deal of that, but perhaps not. So we have to be aware of what might be neglected. In my case, I give a lot to animal welfare because I think that's pretty neglected in America.
So there are many reasons why one might want to donate and they're all good reasons. Like donating to the opera house, hoping it will keep the prices low etc. Or you don't want to spoil your kids.
But the title of the article hinted that we should give all of our money away when we die so our kids can't get that head start. After reading the article and conversation I also get the idea that poor people need my money more than my own kids. That's not what the article was saying per se, but that's the idea I was getting from.
"In my case, I give a lot to animal welfare because I think that's pretty neglected in America."
Levmore: Well, I think there’s less uncertainty—you don’t know how long you’ll live, but you can see that you've saved a certain amount of money, and that you can have a certain amount of income per year, and you know you won’t starve. So you don’t feel this tremendous need to set aside money for yourself for the uncertainty of what’s ahead.
It's good to donate but I think that last statement is a bit irresponsible. How much should we donate, how much should we save up? If you or your kids get cancer for example, you can go bankrupt on just chemotherapy. And that's the problem with America today. We don't save enough. We spend all the money we have. Poor people are actually able to save up enough to buy a house but rich millionaires can't. The more you make, the more you spend.
