Who Gives?

Today's Wall Street Journal had an interesting commentary by Arthur Brooks today about charitable giving in the U.S. Unfortunately a subscription is required to read it online, but here are some key points.

While 85 million American households give away money each year to nonprofit organizations, another 30 million do not. And this distinction goes beyond "formal" giving. Recent survey data reveal that people who fail to donate money to charities are only a third as likely as donors to give money to friends and strangers. Non-donors are half as likely as donors to give blood. They even are less honest: Non-donors are much less likely than donors to return change mistakenly given to them by a cashier. When it comes to charity, we are two nations.

Why does Giving America behave so differently from Non-Giving America? The answer, contrary to what you might be thinking, is not income; America's working poor give away at least as large a percentage of their incomes as the rich, and a lot more than the middle class. The charity gap is driven not by economics but by values.

Nowhere is the divide in values more on display than in religion, the frontline in our so-called "culture war." And the relationship between religion and charity is nothing short of extraordinary. The Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey indicates that Americans who weekly attend a house of worship are 25 percentage points more likely to give than people who go to church rarely or never. These religious folks also give nearly four times more dollars per year than secularists, on average, and volunteer more than twice as frequently.

It is not the case that these enormous differences are due simply to religious people giving to their churches. Religious people are more charitable with all sorts of nonreligious causes as well. They are 10 percentage points likelier than secularists to give money to explicitly nonreligious charities like the United Way, and 25 points more likely to volunteer for secular groups such as the PTA. Churchgoers were far likelier in 2001 to give to 9/11-related causes. On average, people of faith give more than 50% more money each year to non-church social welfare organizations than secularists do...

Couples, even when they earn the same amount as single people, are more likely to give to charity, and the simple act of raising children appears to stimulate giving as well -- children help us fill the collection plate even as they drain our wallets. Further, family life is the ideal transmission mechanism for charitable values: Data show that people who see their parents behave charitably are far likelier to be charitable themselves as adults.

The article also notes that attitudes about government spending are also predictive of charitable giving. Those who believe that government should spend more on welfare are LESS likely to donate to charity.

Despite this hard data, what do we always hear about? "Hard-hearted" and "compassionate" liberals.