"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?

Oprah's $40 million African school

There's been lots of commentary recently on Oprah Winfrey's funding of a $40 million prep school for girls in South Africa, in both the media and online. And online, and online, and online....it's hard to decide how to feel about what she's done, on balance. For example buried deep in most media coverage was her comment about American inner-city kids, she basically did a Cosby on them by way of explanation for building her school overseas rather than here. Was that fair? Accurate? Smart? I dunno.

Easily the most-interesting and most inspirational blog post I've seen in this context comes courtesy of a pointer from Harold Henderson ("World's First Blogger"). Cal Skinner, a former Republican state legislator in Illinois, posted a long well-illustrated account of school-building by an American Christian non-profit called RISE International. I'm not a member of their congregation either literally or politically but that's got nothing to do with forming an opinion about what they're doing and how they're doing it, as I bet a lot of desparately-poor folks in Angola would agree.