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English Lessons

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mwkruse
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Wall Street Journal: English Lessons

A surge of new wealth in Britain is changing the face of charitable giving.

Traditionally, charitable giving in the U.K. has often followed the "spray and pray" principle: Write checks to a clutch of the best-known charities and hope for the best.

But a new generation of self-made millionaires is changing all that — and breaking from the clubby world of British philanthropy.

These donors are importing U.S.-style tactics to giving money and applying businesslike methods to ensure their money is well spent. Many are demanding detailed business plans from charities, are tying future donations to reaching specific targets and are offering their own professional skills to help charities grow. Some are even hiring companies to help them decide how to best give away that money. …

Phaa096a_brita_20071207125813 This is an interesting article about giving in the U.K., but I particularly wanted to highlight the chart about charitable giving as a percent of GDP by nation. Americans give more than twice as much as the U.K., the next closest nation. In July, I reviewed Arthur Brooks' Who Really Cares?, about charitable giving. I wrote then:

Brooks also compares the United States to other nations. He notes the frequent criticisms from Europe and elsewhere about American stinginess, giving only .1% of GDP to foreign aid (about $10 bil.). Most nations give between .1-.2%. The United Nations set a goal in 1992 that Western nations should give .7% of GDP for aid. However, when you add up aid in other types of government assistance ($13 bil.) and contributions from foundations, religious congregations, voluntary organizations, universities, corporations, individuals and other private sources ($50 bil) you get about .5%. (119) European giving of this kind is negligible by comparison. Brooks points to the fact that Europe is decidedly more secularized than America. When he examines stats in Europe he finds that regular church attendees are more charitable than non-attendees, just as in the United States. There are just relatively fewer of them. Survey’s also consistently show that higher percentages of Americans report they are happy with life than do most people in European nations.

Comments

3 responses to “English Lessons”

  1. Brad Cooper Avatar
    Brad Cooper

    Michael,
    Very interesting and insightful on at least 3 fronts. Thanks!

    Reply
  2. steve Avatar
    steve

    Does the chart count the dollars spent in the US on church buildings and staff as charity? If so, it may be comparing apples to oranges.

    Reply
  3. Michael W. Kruse Avatar
    Michael W. Kruse

    Steve you raise an interesting question. (I wondered if someone was going to raise this. 🙂 ) As I understand it this would include all charitable giving but it is notoriously hard to separate out what goes for church facilities. For instance, is a gift to the Salvation Army a gift to church functions or to the poor? The amount spent on church facilities is certainly well less than half.
    Also, since the many of European nations have state churches responsible for the upkeep of facilities, shouldn’t this free up even more money for contributions? Do Europeans give money to local clubs and organizations they belong to that largely serve their own needs? I’m not sure the apples and oranges are all that far apart. Brooks writes:
    “First, imagine two people: One goes to church every week and strongly rejects the idea that it is government’s responsibility to redistribute income between people who have a lot of money and people who don’t. The other person never attends a house of worship, and strongly believes that the government should reduce income differences. Knowing only these things, the data tell us that the first person will be roughly twice as likely as the second to give money to charities in a given year, and will give away more than one hundred times as much money per year (as well as fifty times more to explicitly nonreligious causes).” (10)
    Later he goes on to point out that people who do believe in redistribution but attend church weekly give almost at the same levels as those who don’t believe in redistribution. That means, the church attendance is the single strongest predictor of all types of giving. The giving to churches seems to be an extension of a mindset of giving of all kinds not an unhealthy competitor to giving to the poor.

    Reply

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