Last week I joined millions of Americans in writing a check to help to the Haitians.  Natural disasters have a way of bringing out the best in Americans.  We open our pocketbooks and purses and we give.  If we have the means, we write large checks.  If we don’t have the means, we give small amounts.  Both wealthy and poor instinctively give, and that makes the U.S. quite different from anywhere else on earth.

Studies have documented our how exceptional is our willingness to open our wallets to charity.  One survey by CFA (the Charities Aid Foundation) noted that the U.S. gives more than double the amount given by the next closest developed country, the U.K.  Their yardstick was not simply dollars given, but dollars given as a percent of GDP.  The CFA survey study placed American giving at 1.67% of GDP.   U.K. giving amounted to .73% of GDP.  Our friends the French were dead last among the nations listed giving a miserly .14% of GDP.  By that measure, we are twelve times as charitable as the French.

Our willingness to give our hard-earned cash to others tells us a great deal about ourselves.  Academics who study charity most often point to our religious heritage.  America continues to be a very religious nation and churchgoers are generous people.  They give to their church, they give to nonprofits in their hometowns and they give to national and international charities.  Even people who are not particularly religious themselves, but who came from a religious home, will give.  They give and they give.  They give money, they give blood and they donate their time.

There is another lesson to be learned from our giving, one that helps explain the polarization that pervades modern American politics.  There is a fundamental divide in America that goes well beyond political labels.  In his book on American charity, Arthur Brooks, who at the time he wrote the book was at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, put his finger on that divide.  It seems that Americans do not uniformly share a propensity for charitable giving.  According to Brooks, “People who favor government income redistribution are significantly less likely to behave charitably than those who do not.”  There are Americans who feel we as individuals have an obligation to help the less fortunate and those who feel that helping the less fortunate is a job for government.  Clearly, that is the French attitude.  Ralph Nader best articulated this position, “A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.” 

What divides America is just that, our vision for individual responsibility vs. our vision for government.  Brooks found that 77% of self-identified liberals feel that government should do more to redistribute income.  Only 24% of conservatives agree.  As a consequence, conservatives are more likely to give more money to charity, volunteer more time and give more blood.

Therefore, at a visceral level, our attitude toward personal responsibility vs. government responsiblity – which is demonstrable in our giving – defines us.  Maybe the lesson that our political leaders are slow to grasp is that,

Americans lean toward conservative politicians because, as Brooks found, they think it is morally wrong to expropriate more resources from people, whether the people are wealthy or poor.  I have to believe that the politician who understands this, will be the politician who prevails, especially in the age of the Tea Party.

-January 21. 2010

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