<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Perhaps it&amp;#039;s that the man begins his\u00A0letter of a couple\u00A0thousand words, amounting to a manifesto, with the sentence, &amp;quot;Your\u00A0mother and I don&amp;#039;t yet have the words to describe the hope you give us for the future.&amp;quot; Perhaps it&amp;#039;s that the conceit of the post is that the wondrous beauty of the Chan-Zuckerberg offspring has required the salvation of the world. Or perhaps it&amp;#039;s just the\u00A0weird fact that this young man has the ability to throw around a quantity of money that can only be compared to the GDP of small nations.\u00A0 Or perhaps it is\u00A0the single most extraordinary fact of the message, which is that it somehow, almost inexplicably, makes a charitable donation of $45 billion appear narcissistic. Perhaps it&amp;#039;s the vagueness of the post&amp;#039;s terms:\u00A0&amp;quot;advancing\u00A0human potential\u00A0and\u00A0promoting equality.&amp;quot;\u00A0(These goals coincide with literally every political ideology from libertarianism to Communism.)\u00A0 Whatever it is, Mark Zuckerberg has made the millennialest gesture of all time.\u00A0 Reducing people to their generation is almost always unfair and stupid. The only members of a\u00A0generation that ever really thought of themselves as being determined by generation were the Boomers, and they maintained that chronological fascination because they clung to their youth with such tenacity. But as the Boomers slowly fade from the picture, generational markers mean less and less. No matter what age, everybody loves Adele and everybody smokes pot. Nonetheless, the group of Americans currently under the age of 30 continue to endure a weird journalistic practice\u2014grouping social behavior by age category and then slapping the phrase &amp;quot;millennial&amp;quot; on it. There&amp;#039;s a lot of money to be made from old people fearing and despising young people, and therefore millennials endure a host of silly stereotypes. On Tuesday, those stereotypes\u00A0received a massive injection of legitimacy with the Facebook post by Mark Zuckerberg announcing his\u00A0pledge to donate\u00A099 percent\u00A0of his Facebook shares to charity.\u00A0 I don&amp;#039;t mean that as a criticism. Not entirely, anyway. The donation is an enormously powerful gesture of commitment to social justice, which is a notable feature of Zuckerberg&amp;#039;s cohort. The word that usually precedes &amp;quot;millennial&amp;quot; in newspapers and magazines is &amp;quot;selfish,&amp;quot; but statistically speaking, that&amp;#039;s bullshit. Research proved\u00A0long ago that millennials are by far the most generous generation in proportion to their income, despite their poverty.\u00A0The Zuckerberg donation is a millennial gesture in that sense, first of all. It represents a generational trend towards charity.\u00A0 The timing is also crucial. Traditionally, when the American megawealthy give away their fortunes, they do so at the end of their lives, not when they have their first kid. Carnegie pioneered the American library system when the working capital he needed to create his steel empire was no longer required. Zuckerberg is vague\u00A0in his Facebook post\u00A0about the specifics of when and how he is going to give away his money, but 99 percent\u00A0is a pretty clear signal that he intends to give away his capital.\u00A0 Zuckerberg is obviously trying to be like the rest of the people in his generation: broke. In 2010, when Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were touring the world asking billionaires to give away their fortunes, they received some surprising resistance from the more socialistic countries. In Germany, in particular, which has a fully working welfare state\u00A0and is in many ways one of the sanest countries in the world, the most generous billionaires didn&amp;#039;t like the idea. A man who had given away large sums to African charities voiced his disapproval of the Gates plan in an interview with Der Spiegel:\u00A0 Kr\u00E4mer:\u00A0I find the U.S.\u00A0initiative highly problematic. You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. That&amp;#039;s unacceptable. SPIEGEL:\u00A0But doesn&amp;#039;t the money that is donated serve the common good? Kr\u00E4mer:\u00A0It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. So it&amp;#039;s not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That&amp;#039;s a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow? Legitimate or not, the transfer from the state to the billionaires is nearly complete in the United States of America. Zuckerberg&amp;#039;s post doesn&amp;#039;t identify where his money will go (in fact, doubts have already been raised about how much will explicitly go to charity), but the hints in the post point in eccentric directions:\u00A0&amp;quot;Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people, and building strong communities.&amp;quot;\u00A0That personal touch may be what marks Zuckerberg&amp;#039;s donation most clearly as the definitive act of his putative generation\u2014more than the generosity and the carelessness toward capital and the obsession with children and the narcissism.\u00A0 Where society goes is the decision of the ultra-wealthy now.\u00A0 &amp;quot;Advancing human potential&amp;quot; is just another rich man&amp;#039;s whim. \u00A0 "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a40137/mark-zuckerberg-donating-shares/>