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Comment by daxfohl | Hacker News Reader

Middlemarch is also my favorite classic novel. So many good observations there. One of my favorite quotes, "But we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance." (I was in Kyrgyzstan at the time). I definitely fall into that category, but a bit intentionally less so than before reading this.

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I'm trying to understand what that quote means.

Is it that they feed themselves first and only give what they don't need and that amount grows as their own income/wealth grows?

I interpret it as meaning someone who goes way out of their way to feed hungry people on other continents but won't spare a penny for someone at their doorstep. Admittedly that could be way off.

Yes, the person on our doorstep is 'lazy', 'dirty', threatening, etc. For that person, we call the police or have laws passed to criminalize them.

So mathematically the relationship is actually cubic, of `d` minus a constant.

Not necessarily, it could still be a square of the distance. From the data presented you cannot tell if it's linear, square, cubic or any other relation, just that it increases with distance.

It describes someone who is generous giving to institutions acting elsewhere but miserly to those directly around them.

A recurring theme in English literature of roughly that period. A Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens's Bleak House leaves her children unwashed and malnourished while she dictates letters promoting some notionally charitable project in progress on a distant continent.

I don't know the book, but I assume the criticism is that a rich person can give money to alleviate suffering, but by the same token their wealth means they will not have to experience the suffering intimately. The richer they are, the more money they can give, and, also, the more remote the suffering.

The opposite of the quote is the proverb 'charity begins at home', if that helps.

"In his 1852–3 novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens popularised the term telescopic philanthropy." source: https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Telescopic_philanthropy

Middlemarch started serial publication in 1871. So George Elliot gets to allude to telescopic philanthropy, confident that her audience will be familiar with "the wag's definition of a philanthropist" and get her dig.

Oh that's interesting. All these years I never knew the quote was in direct reference to something else.

Well anyway there are lots of other good nuggets in Middlemarch, hopefully _some_ of them original.

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