Wealth: the Published-Figure Rule

The leg's discipline · applies to every article below

The rule: Every figure in this section is a figure somebody published — an estate valuation, a directory capitalization, a sale price, a foundation tax filing, a newspaper's reported total. Where no figure was ever published, the leg says so rather than guessing: the fortune is printed unsized, at the size of the acreage, the payroll or the office that the record does carry. No net worth is estimated for any person, living or dead, from acreage alone, and no acreage is converted into dollars by a rate the record does not itself supply.

Why the rule binds here, in particular: This ground's early record is a biographical record — Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907) sketched its settlers in acres, stock and improvements, not in dollars — and its modern record is a corporate and foundation record, in which the published figures belong to transactions and filings, not to households. A section that converted the first into money or the second into personal wealth would be inventing both. The figures that do print below each carry their publisher with them: the $77.5 million Microsoft purchase (the Tribune's sequence, carried in the Businesses leg), the Parseghian foundation's more than $45 million raised (the University of Notre Dame's own release), and the acreages of Chapman and the Notre Dame Archives. Everything else is printed at the strength the record gives it — no more.

Sources:

2. Businesses leg (banked) — the Microsoft purchase figure and its publisher; People leg (banked) — the Parseghian foundation figure and its publisher.