[Opinion]Culture of Sharing

American media once surveyed 70 lottery winners’ happiness rate who had won more than 10 million dollars over five years ago. 56 people, 80 percent of participants, answered that they became unhappier. Only 8 people answered that they became happier after winning the lottery. It means that those who had replaced their cars, bought new homes, and tried to replace their spouses after winning the lottery ended up with broken families but, those who had maintained the same life styles or donated their money to nonprofit organizations were happier.

As Tolstoy, the great Russian writer, once said, ``Wealth is like manure that emits a bad smell when it remains accumulated but when it is sprinkled, it makes the soil rich``. Shared money makes our society more fertile and gives its constituents courage.

Among many countries in the world, America is the leading country in donations. Carnegie, the king of steel industry, built more than 2.000 libraries in U.S. spending a great deal of his fortune. The Rockefeller Foundation helped more than ten thousand students study and produced 60 Nobel Prize winners. Bill Gates has donated average of ten million dollars everyday to this global village.

Americans especially love to donate their money to universities. The names of universities like Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Cornell Universities were all derived from contributors of an enormous sum of money. Contributions cover about 15 percent of American universities’ budget. In case of Harvard, about 15 billion dollars has been composed by contributions. We envy them because that amount is greater than the combined funds of all 96 Korean private universities. Due to this kind of donating culture, the level of American intellectual is continuously escalating.

Several days ago, Chung Moon-Sul, the president of the Mirae Industry Co., decided to contribute a 30 billion won to KAIST and about 170 residents of Jungsandong in Ulsan also donated their joint properties worth of 10 billion won to establish a university. Lee Yeon-Hee, an elderly woman who had escaped North Korea with empty hands during the Korean War, passed away after donating 2 billion won to Yonsei University, her oldest son’s alma mater. Once the sharing culture is deeply rooted in our society, our intellectual thirst will be quenched.

Lee Kyu-Min kyumlee@donga.com