Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising, New York University

Claire Gaudiani is the author of "The Greater Good:  How Philanthropy Drives the American Economy and Can Save Capitalism" and six other books.  She is currently teaching at NYU's Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising and was formerly Senior Research Scholar, at Yale Law School.  She was also President of Connecticut College for 13 years.

Planned giving makes donors investors in the future –the future significantly beyond their own lifetimes and in a manner that benefits themselves as well as others. They become the economic engines of the pursuit of happiness that our Founding Fathers presented as one of the three rights inalienably endowed by the Creator to each person.  Let me argue that planned giving officers can powerfully and legitimately connect their clients to the Founders and enable these donors to see their patriotic role in modern society. 

Generosity toward our fellow citizens feeds innovative risk-taking and economic growth from which we all profit. By releasing new potential in human capital, physical capital and intellectual capital, individuals who have reaped the rewards of capitalism are re-investing in economic growth, democratically. Why is the interplay between democracy and capitalism so delicate and so vital? In the United States, our form of democracy protects the individual from the power of the state, insisting that the state exists to assure the greatest amount of happiness to the largest number of people. 

Often planned givers and others who could and should be, don’t see their power as co-Founders with the signers of the Constitution.  But they are. And planned giving officers can enable them to see the patriotism in their planned gifts. Planned giving officers help people pursue happiness.

Happiness is both an individual and a collective concept. Some actions involve the pursuit of highly personal, individualistic aspirations. But others, often thought of as ‘generous actions,’ are destined to contribute to collective happiness or greater good, to the sum of well-being across the population. Scottish Enlightenment leader John Hutcheson, a clear influence on Jefferson, believed that generosity was the main cause of happiness: “The surest way to promote …private happiness [is] to do publicly useful actions…the action is best which procures the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers…the general happiness is the supreme end of all political union.”1

The individual dimension of the pursuit of happiness is the one most commonly thought of today. We tend to think of this idea as the right to pursue our own vision of happiness without interference from fellow citizens or the government. The government is to do no harm. It may not arbitrarily threaten the lives, decisions, or the security of citizens, nor restrict their personal freedoms to speak, associate, practice religion, or pursue personal ideals and goals so long as they fit within the framework of the rule of law and do not destroy the common good.

To the Founding Fathers, however, the concept of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ was social as well as individual. They affirmed “that the happiness of the society is the first law of every government.”2 David McCullough quotes John Adams on the reason for the very existence of government: “The purpose of government, he had said in his Thoughts on Government, was the ‘greatest quantity of human happiness.’”3 The greatest quantity of human happiness, quite reasonably, translates as the greatest number of people enjoying the most happiness.

In addition to ensuring the individual the right to pursue happiness, in other words, the founders were also voting to protect what to us would seem to be the virtue of generosity. The rights to life and liberty set the framework of personal well-being. The focus of the right to the pursuit of happiness connects the individual to the collective good. It expresses collective confidence in the value of each citizen as one whose ideas and actions could contribute to the economic success of the nation through self-sufficiency and personal motivation.  The right to pursue happiness is an invitation to self-expression, to make each individual’s efforts an asset to the individual and to the rest of society.

Acts of generosity, or the pursuit of happiness for others, constitute one example of what Toqueville called  ‘self interest, rightly understood.’ 

Planned gifts most clearly illustrate ‘self interest, rightly understood.’  The catalytic interaction between acts of generosity, higher levels of happiness for individual donors and society in general seem to help produce the more robust economic activity that defines the energy and the optimism of America.

Planned gifts affirm a deep connectedness in each person’s well being. Donor and recipient insight, ambition, and way of seeing the world is meant to create new possibilities for the individual and for the common good.  To the extent that one person’s talents can work with that person’s motivation and self-discipline to make something happen in society, progress occurs.

The entrepreneurial spirit of Americans is, I think, a direct result of our right to pursue our own happiness. Each age, and in fact, each person, defines this pursuit a bit differently but the result over hundreds of years is a flexibility and responsiveness to the future and change. Ideas, new ideas, are born and feed the society and the economy.  The status quo, the way things have always been, has less status in the United States. The pursuit of happiness is at the core of change, which is, of course, imbedded in the power of the individual to see the world in a particular way.

The right to pursue happiness may not link citizens directly to wealth, but it does instill a spirit of hope that is often supported through the philanthropic investments of fellow Americans. That hope manifests itself as a belief in the possibility of upward mobility. In countries where education is generally restricted to the children of the first and second wealthiest quintiles, the children of those in the fourth and fifth quintiles have a difficult time moving up.

The development of human, physical and intellectual capital via philanthropic investments sustains our belief in upward mobility as a democratic imperative.  That development relies on the commitment of Americans to the pursuit of happiness—their own personal happiness, tax deductions, for instance, and the happiness of their fellow citizens.

These two fundamental factors define our success as a nation some two hundred and thirty years after our founding. These inseparable drivers of personal and collective growth distinguish our economic, social and political ambitions from those of other nations and can serve, in my judgment, as the best guides for our economic and social health going forward. Each is tied to generosity and must be understood if our democracy and our brand of capitalism are to endure successfully for the next century. To achieve that longevity, our society will have to deal imaginatively with the economic and social problems that face our nation in the first decades of the twenty-first century. 

Most people who have yet to experience the chance to pursue happiness have not done so because their life situations have blocked them.  Often financial support could change their situation for the better—often not a hand out, but matching funds for the pursuit of happiness is at the core of change, which is, of course, imbedded in the power of the individual to see the world in a particular way.

But we have also seen, time and again, people who have turned to helping others as the ultimate pathway to the pursuit of happiness. In so doing, they have invested in the upward mobility of their fellow citizens by making donation that, carefully advised, also helped them care for their own families across generations as well.