THE FINE ART OF GIVING

In the game of life, some believe, accumulated wealth is the way the score is kept. Thus it's not enough to count your blessings in multimillions of dollars and want for nothing. It matters who is ahead and who is falling behind, as calibrated by Forbes magazine's annual listing of the 400 richest Americans. Or so billionaire Ted Turner believes. Last summer he told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, "That list is destroying our country," claiming that the "ole skinflints" are so afraid of slipping down the Forbes list--"their Super Bowl"--that they hoard, rather than share, their wealth.

Turner issued a challenge: rank the biggest givers instead of the biggest getters. Last week Microsoft's online magazine Slate took him up, launching the Slate 60, a list of the largest charitable donations in the country by families or individuals gathered from publicly available sources. These are numbers, and deeds, well worth highlighting. Last year Americans gave a record $143.9 billion to charity, with more than 70% of households contributing. The richest one-half of one percent of households were responsible for 11% of all giving.

The Slate 60, which will become an annual event, is a work in progress that follows some rather arbitrary rules, and new details are coming in daily. (Slate will publish an updated version in January.) The list omits anonymous gifts, which means at least 12 very big-ticket donors are missing from its 1996 ranks. It also excludes gifts by corporate foundations rather than individuals, and any gifts less than $1 million. Judging by a single year's giving, rather than by a lifetime of charity, causes distortions too. Microsoft head Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett, for instance, have said they intend to give away most of their money in the end. And Turner, who became vice chairman of Time Warner in October, did not make the initial list, even though he has made gifts totaling $200 million in the past few years. Still, if the Slate 60 works as Turner predicts, that could be his greatest gift of all: making conspicuous giving the newest status symbol for those who have everything.

SLATE'S TOP 10

1. SAMUEL SKAGGS and ALINE SKAGGS This Utah grocery-and-drugstore magnate and his wife gave $100 million to San Diego's Scripps Research Institute to establish the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, which will study new approaches to pharmaceutical design. The Skaggs donation matches the largest gift ever made by an individual for medical research, a $100 million donation to the University of Utah made by chemical-industry executive Jon M. Huntsman in 1995.

2. GEORGE SOROS The financier, who fled Hungary in 1956, gave $50 million to create the Emma Lazarus Fund to help legal immigrants become U.S. citizens, nearly $15 million to help change the nation's drug policy and at least $35 million to charitable projects in Russia. (See also Susan Soros, No. 7, below.) Total: $100 million.

3. KLAUS G. PERLS and AMELIA PERLS These Manhattan art dealers and collectors gave at least $60 million worth of 20th century masterpieces by Picasso, Modigliani, Braque and Leger to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

4. ROBERT W. GALVIN The chairman of Motorola's executive committee pledged $60 million to the Illinois Institute of Technology.