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Give It Up!Rachael Larimore takes readers' questions about the Slate 60 index of top philanthropists.


Updated Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008, at 3:45 PM ET

Slate's Rachael Larimore was online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, Feb. 14, to discuss the Slate 60 index of 2007's top American charitable donors. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

Rachael Larimore: Greetings, everyone! I'm looking forward to answering your questions about Slate 60 and philanthropy. Let's get started

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Northwest Washington: Is an annual list fair in that Buffet pledged more than $40 billion last year and doesn't show up this year? Sadly, Helmsley was more charitable in death than she ever was known for in life.

Rachael Larimore: That's an excellent question, and I'm glad you asked it. Philanthropy is a tricky thing to track and the Slate 60's methodology has evolved over the years.

Beginning with our list published in 2007, which marked the biggest gifts of 2006, we settled on counting gifts and pledges, as we've always done, but not counting payments on previous pledges. Doing so is effectively double counting. If we credit Warren Buffet for $43 billion in 2006, as we did, and then give him credit for the (I believe) $1.7 billion payment he made this year, it would create the impression that he's given even more than he had.

As far as Leona Helmsley, yes, that was an interesting bequest. It goes to show that sometimes you can never truly know people.

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Washington: Why doesn't Slate list the worst contributors of the year? There must be a way to find out who among the country's richest people does not give as much as they ought to to charitable causes. Maybe this would shame these penny-pinchers into giving more.

Rachael Larimore: It's funny you mention that. When Michael Kinsley, Slate's founding editor, started the Slate 60, it was precisely to shame the super-rich into giving more of their income. And the goal of the Slate 60 is to promote giving in a positive way—to say, "See here, look what these people are doing."

I think, though, we'd like to avoid getting egg on our face. All these years, we could have been shaming Leona Helmsley, for example, only to learn that she was planning to make her charitable trust one of the largest in the country upon her death.

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MerityRabbit: I don't mean to look a gift horse in the mouth ... well, yes, I guess I do ... it's extremely generous of these people to leave huge chunks of money to foundations and whatnot, but think about how much money these people still have. Even the poorest of the billionaires (kind of an oxymoron, right?) still are wallowing in dough and a life of luxury. I'd say the real giving begins when it actually hurts the givers' own pocketbook and makes a dent in their lives.

Rachael Larimore: You raise a good point. Interestingly, some of the newer generation of philanthropists do plan to give almost all of their money away. Bill and Melinda Gates, for example, have vowed to give away almost all of their fortune. And eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and his wife Pam, have made a similar pledge.

One thing to take into consideration, though. If you look at the names on the Slate 60, many, many of the donors are self-made billionaires. They've worked extremely hard to get where they are, and have often improved the lives of thousands of other people through creating jobs. And they're still working. If they wake up one morning and give up 97 percent of their fortune, they're hampering their own ability to create more wealth and opportunity for others, and more philanthropy down the line.

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Washington: Just want to say thanks to Slate for producing the Slate 60—I work for a nonprofit, and it's a huge resource for us. We scour the list every year in search of big donors who we might be able to approach in the future if their interests appear to line up with our mission. So I've always been curious—was this one of the uses Slate had in mind when creating the index?

Rachael Larimore: Glad that our list can help your organization. I wasn't around when we started the Slate 60, but I'd like to think that being a resource for nonprofits was one of the happy but unintended benefits.

Our founding editor, Michael Kinsley, got the idea for the Slate 60 after reading a quote from Ted Turner in a Maureen Dowd column, in which Turner complained that the Forbes 400 was hurting philanthropy. he worried that the superwealthy were reluctant to give money away and hurt their standing on the list.

He thought a list that rewarded the biggest philanthropists might serve to offset any pain those donors felt from dropping down on the Forbes 400.

Good luck and thank you for your charitable work!

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Brooklyn, N.Y.: With so much suffering in the world and so many people in need, it seems strange to me that rich people often give so generously to universities. Why not disease-based charities or overseas help? What is the attraction of giving to a university? Is it just to get buildings named after them?

Rachael Larimore: That's a good question. We've got another similar question, so I'm going to try to reply to both at the same time.

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