A man of many lifetimes.

There are many sides to Andrew Carnegie.

There was the son of the Scottish peasant, who had been forced off the land to America when the landlords wanted to replace peasant farmers with grazing sheep and when the coming of the power loom to Britain had destroyed the livelihood of the perhaps 4% of the British population who wove thread into cloth by hand in their cottages--the so-called "handloom weavers."

There was the extremely energetic and intelligent young-man-in-a-hurry in the U.S. telegraph and railroad industries, trying to impress his supervisor Thomas Scott, a high Pennsylvania Railroad executive, with his diligence and foresight.

There was the iron master who had the best grasp in America of what the best technologies for making iron and steel were going to be--and who had the (rare) sensibility to recognize where potential economies of scale were so large that the best business strategy was to build up capacity well ahead of demand and then use it by underselling all your competitors.

There was the union-buster who unleashed his lieutenant Henry Clay Frick to destroy the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers union's control over the Homestead, Pennsylvania steel plant: one of the bloodiest episodes in the already-bloody nineteenth century history of American labor relations.

There was the senior industrialist who threatened the financial capitalist J.P. Morgan with an extended price war that would cost Carnegie perhaps $100 million (a large sum, at that time: think of it as the equivalent of perhaps $8 billion today) but that would in all likelihood bankrupt the sprawling, less-efficient steel firms that Morgan had assembled--who threatened Morgan with this unless Morgan were to raise the money on Wall Street to buy Carnegie out.

Morgan did so, and claimed that he had made Carnegie the richest man in the world.

And there was the philanthropist trying to figure out what to do with all his money--and deciding that the thing to do was to establish the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and to subsidize the building of libraries all across the United States. He was a man of great powers, of great flaws, of great benevolence, and great ruthlessness.

I am Andrew Carnegie.

http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/carnegie/DeLong_Moscow_paper2.html