Philanthropist Peter Buffett talked to me about how it was no coincidence that the first philanthropic organizations were created in the Gilded Age, against the backdrop of industrialization, which, alongside creating enormous concentrations of wealth, also led to anxiety, depression, and existential crises. For most people, work had gone from mostly autonomous productive activities that involved a sense of purpose and satisfaction, like craftsmanship or farming, to being a cog in the assembly line of industry somewhere, lacking any sense of agency or power. “It led to one hundred fifty years
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