"Who Really Cares" review, part 2 of 2

Buried within Arthur C. Brooks' rambling rumination about philanthropy and politics in the U.S. are some points that are firmly rooted in meaningful data and which are worth thinking about.

(a) it's pretty clear now that tax deductibility is not a major factor in the ongoing boom of individual giving in this country. We know this because in 1986 the top federal income-tax rate was sharply cut, and in 2001 so was the inheritance tax; neither of those changes slowed down the rise in giving. About the non-rich this was predictable given that two-thirds of all taxpayers don't itemize and hence have never gotten any benefit from deducting charitable gifts. The surprise perhaps is that giving by the wealthy is also apparently not directly influenced by tax considerations. (Brooks also asserts that both wealthy and poor households donate higher fractions of their incomes than do middle-class ones, but unfortunately he doesn't provide specific data supporting that but just cites a different author's claim on it.)

(b) Brooks convincingly shows that religious people are more generous across the board: people of all faiths give more to non-religious causes than do people who aren't religious. [They also, naturally, give much more to churches and church-affiliated non-profits than do secular folks.] The pattern holds whether religious folks are politically liberal or conservative. The data supporting those statements is surveys, of which I am generally dubious as noted yesterday, but on this point there are too many surveys all pointing the same way to allow for reasonable doubt.

(c) Brooks also convincingly shows that in this country conservative voters are more generous than liberals. This conclusion is partly driven by surveys but also shows up in hard data, such as that the states which voted for John Kerry in 2004 mostly ranked below average in charitable giving per income dollar. (Meaning, obviously, that the states which went for Bush generally ranked higher in giving as a percentage of household incomes.) A more-sophisticated analysis of state data which found the same breakdown can be found here. And survey data consistently finds similar splits for non-monetary philanthropy such as volunteerism and giving blood.

However Brooks is much less persuasive in arguing that liberal households' lower philanthropy is driven heavily by political beliefs: that favoring income redistribution makes people less philanthropic. I certainly have no truck with the brainless cliche about how "a society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity," but the factual case for such an attitude being a cause of less giving is thin. The core causation seems simpler to understand: as Brooks himself points out, secular conservatives give a bit less than secular liberals while religious conservatives give more than religious liberals, but religious people of all political stripes give much more than do non-religious people.

If that is correct then it has troubling implications for non-profit fundraising going forward, because the percentage of Americans who are non-religious is now rapidly increasing. (Different surveys all identifying that trend can be read here, here and here.) Will it turn out that the steady increase in individual philanthropy that's occurred throughout my lifetime is unsustainable? Or can the non-profit sector in the 21st century convince secular citizens to participate in civic giving and volunteering as enthusiastically as their churchgoing 20th-century parents and grandparents did?

"Who Really Cares" review, part 1 of 2

A couple months ago I ordered a copy of Arthur C. Brooks' new book "Who Really Cares", which made a bit of a media splash. I said I'd read it and post a review. Finally finished it, took some time to ponder, and here we go.

This will require two posts, and today will be the actual book review: it's not a great piece of work. Nonetheless I'll suggest that everyone working in this sector should read it.

I should also confess up front to some empathy for Brooks’ worldview: like me he is a born-and-raised progressive now bewildered by the intellectual/philosophical decomposition of U.S. liberalism. But that issue is not particularly germane to the specific questions raised by his book, and certainly doesn’t grant Brooks any special exemptions from basic standards of logic and critical thinking. “Who Really Cares” falls well short of those standards in several ways.

The biggest logic problem I have is that Brooks treats survey data and behavioral data as equally significant. He keeps citing surveys (“57 percent of Americans said they volunteered”) as if they had the same significance as actual documented activity (e.g. how different states compare on the amount of charitable giving reported on tax returns). That’s just silly -- people aren’t always completely honest on surveys, and survey responses can be heavily influenced by how the question is phrased. The strongest use of survey data for analysis is when a variety of surveys all point the same way and Brooks at times seems to get that, but at a lot of points he just quotes a single survey as if it could prove some point or other all by itself.

Also Brooks frequently confuses correlation with causation, hardly an uncommon problem of course but he does it persistently. Another problem is that while Brooks says that he set out to just analyze and report the true facts about philanthropy in America not to “promote some broad-based political agenda”, that is obviously untrue. He goes off on extended tangential riffs about things like the welfare system and tax policy and other issues. On some issues I tend to agree with him on other things not, but that’s really not the point. Moreover his arguments on those subjects are no more compelling than are the cliches about charity which his book is ostensibly aimed at (that is, nobody who doesn’t already see economic politics his way is going to be persuaded by anything he’s written).

All of that tends to undermine his credibility about the immediate subject, charitable giving. So overall I’d have to say that this book, as a book, is kind of a mess. It doesn’t really deserve to be called a “study” of charitable giving in the U.S. -- “study” sounds like something empirical and coldly analytical, the scientific method at work. Brooks’ book is at least as much a philosophical essay or rumination; I didn’t personally find it to be a terribly coherent or persuasive one but of course your mileage may vary.

With all that said…mixed in there is a lot of interesting actual data about individual philanthropy in the U.S., and Brooks earns kudos for providing a full appendix listing and describing all his data sources. So over the weekend I’ll summarize what folks in the non-profit sector might want to think about, which can be extracted from the interesting and well-sourced facts buried within this flabby book.

Who's more generous?

The hot topic of the moment in the philanthropic media (including blogs) is a new book by an economist named Arthur Brooks, entitled "Who Really Cares: America's Charity Divide". His thesis, based on a variety of survey data, is actually three-fold (and to some degree overlapping):

(a) religious households both liberal and conservative give more to charity than secular households do, even without counting giving to their churches;
(b) politically-conservative people give more to charity than do politically-liberal folks; and
(c) the wealthy and the working poor give about the same fractions of their income to charity, while the middle class gives much less.

So to sum up (in my words not his): "middle-class secular people who usually vote Democratic are stingy hypocrites". That would be, um...me, and most of my friends and family, and at least 75% of my colleagues in the non-profit sector. No let's be honest, more like 90%. And a similar fraction of my former colleagues in newspaper journalism.

Coverage of the book, and of Brooks' various recent op-ed pieces promoting it, has centered on whichever of those arguments causes the most outrage with the particular writer. I did get into a brief online debate that's tangentially about this, over at White Courtesy Telephone, but before saying anything further about Brooks' facts I'll read the thing. All I've done thus far is to confirm at a surface level that at least a couple of the surveys that Brooks cite do support at least some of his claims, and locate an unrelated survey that supports at least one of his points. More than that will have to await reading the book and checking its listed sources.