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田园高中 陈应宏 Kids, I’m Giving It Away With tons of money and now lots of leisure time, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will retire on Friday as one of the most envied men in the world. But don’t bother envying his three children, the youngest of whom is only 6 years old. Last week, Gates announced he planned to give all his wealth, $58 billion in total, to charity. Speaking about the joint-decision he made with his wife, he said: “We’ve chosen not to pass it on to our children.” Many rich Americans have long given money away to charities, rather than to their children. In a survey by Fortune magazine in 1986, of 30 multimillionaires, six said their children would be better off with only minimal inheritance. Almost half planned to leave at least as much to charity as to their heirs. The trend has continued in recent years. Since 1988, the US has seen a massive decline in the percentage of wealthy individuals who inherited their wealth. A study by the Wall Street Journal in April suggests that 65 percent of today’s multimillionaires made their wealth themselves. Americans’ coldness to inherited wealth might be influenced by the nation’s culture. While the English aristocracy (贵族) respected inherited wealth, the Americans respect self-made heroes like Andrew Carnegie. He once said that “the man who dies rich dies disgraced.” He emigrated from Scotland to the US, became the world’s second richest man in the 1870s, and gave away all of his fortune. Today, the respect for self-made heroes lives on. The two richest businessmen in the US, Bill Gates and the investor Warren Buffet, are following in the Carnegie tradition. Last year, Buffet also decided to donate most of his fortune to charity. He believes that setting up his heirs with “a lifetime supply of food stamps just because they came out of the right womb” can be “harmful” for them. He called it an “anti-social act”. To him, the perfect amount to leave a child who is a college graduate is “a few hundred thousand dolla