Rerooting the Honorable Harvest
Updating the math from 2019
Four years ago, I ‘did the math’ to discover how long it would take to ‘earn’ $1B:
Using the same method, this is what it takes today (November 4 2023):
If you had received $1,354.28 every day since year zero you would have $1B today:
2023 years x 365 days = 738,395 days
738,395 days x $1,354.28 = ~$1B ($999,993,581)
They can’t give it away, even if they try…
So it’s probably not surprising that even before the stock transfer made her one of the richest women in the world, just a month after her divorce was settled, and two years ago this month, Scott signed the Giving Pledge, a public promise to give away the bulk of her wealth. “We each come by the gifts we have to offer by an infinite series of influences and lucky breaks we can never fully understand,” she wrote in her pledge. “In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share.”
That is the position in which MacKenzie Scott found herself in July 2019, when her divorce from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was finalized and she became the owner of 4% of Amazon’s stock. She was a single woman in her 50th year with about $38 billion to blow. Since then Amazon’s share price has grown like the piles of cardboard boxes it leaves on quarantined homes’ doorsteps, so estimates of her wealth are even higher, something like $57 billion. And that’s after giving $5.9 billion away.
A Simple Solution
I initially proposed this in the original article four years ago:
Imagine if the people on this list tithed 10% of this capital to investing in the productive capacity of the communities & industries that have been devastated by their predatory capitalism. That would put $127B back in play, which, coincidentally, is roughly the net worth of Jeff Bezos in 2019 after his divorce which lowered his net worth by $38B.
Seeding an investment fund with this initial $127B changes the game. A global commitment by all players — billionaires and non-billionaires alike — to tithe 10% of their accumulated wealth to support access to wealth production tools for all creates a whole new sustainable game, one that is framed by the Honorable Harvest in which we commit to a covenant of reciprocity between humans and the Earth. This simple commitment may seem like a quaint prescription , but it is the root of a sophisticated ethical protocol that could guide us in a time when unbridled exploitation threatens the life that surrounds us.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in the Yes! magazine article ‘The “Honorable Harvest”: Lessons From an Indigenous Tradition of Giving Thanks’:
The canon of indigenous principles that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest. They are “rules” of sorts that govern our taking, so that the world is as rich for the seventh generation as it is for us.
The Honorable Harvest, a practice both ancient and urgent, applies to every exchange between people and the Earth. Its protocol is not written down, but if it were, it would look something like this:
