Study Shows Rich Are More Unethical and LESS Generous Percentage-Wise… BUT WHY? Posted on June 4, 2013 By Micah David Naziri In an article for The Atlantic, entitled “Why the Rich Don’t Give to Charity,” Ken Stern explains that the wealthiest Americans donate only 1.3 percent of their income, while the poorest give 3.2 percent. This flies in the face of the Limbaughist mantra that “the rich give more than the rest of…” well, more or less, the rest of EVERYONE else combined. Stern explains the discrepancy between what the pundits claim, and what the research shows, as follows: When Mort Zuckerman, the New York City real-estate and media mogul, lavished $200 million on Columbia University in December to endow the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, he did so with fanfare suitable to the occasion: the press conference was attended by two Nobel laureates, the president of the university, the mayor, and journalists from some of New York’s major media outlets. Many of the 12 other individual charitable gifts that topped $100 million in the U.S. last year were showered with similar attention: $150 million from Carl Icahn to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, $125 million from Phil Knight to the Oregon Health & Science University, and $300 million from Paul Allen to the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, among them. If you scanned the press releases, or drove past the many university buildings, symphony halls, institutes, and stadiums named for their benefactors, or for that matter read the histories of grand giving by the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Stanfords, and Dukes, you would be forgiven for thinking that the story of charity in this country is a story of epic generosity on the part of the American rich. It is not. One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns. The question this leaves us with is why? Paul Piff, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, published research last year that correlated wealth with an increase in unethical behavior: “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff later told New York magazine, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people.” Piff explained further that they are, “more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.” The good doctor’s colorful statements aside, Piff’s research on the giving habits of different social classes suggests that other, more complex factors are at work. In a series of controlled experiments, lower-income people and people who identified themselves as being on a relatively low social rung were consistently more generous with limited goods than upper-class participants were. Notably, though, when both groups were exposed to a sympathy-eliciting video on child poverty, the compassion of the wealthier group began to rise, and the groups’ willingness to help others became almost identical. This might lead us to a conclusion beyond the scope of Piff’s research, that WEALTH ITSELF is an INSULATOR from reality. Those at the poorer levels of socio-economic strata do not have the luxury of looking away so easily. Thus, when the wealthy have the reality of poverty thrown in their faces, when they cannot look away, then they tend to become… well, more like normal human beings. When Rush Limbaugh and other self-appointed pundits of the “Greed Is Good” Neo-Right speak of the rich paying more in charitable donations than everyone else combined, they are neglecting one small, inconvenient reality… Those “charities” are in almost no cases actually charities that assist the poor in any direct way. Last year, not one of the top 50 individual charitable gifts went to a social-service organization or to a charity that principally serves the poor and the dispossessed. Wealth affects not only how much money is given but to whom it is given. The poor tend to give to religious organizations and social-service charities, while the wealthy prefer to support colleges and universities, arts organizations, and museums. Of the 50 largest individual gifts to public charities in 2012, 34 went to educational institutions, the vast majority of them colleges and universities, like Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley, that cater to the nation’s and the world’s elite. Museums and arts organizations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art received nine of these major gifts, with the remaining donations spread among medical facilities and fashionable charities like the Central Park Conservancy. While that is lovely, the arts do need supported, Universities do need funded – because of course the sky-rocketing cost of tuition and the increasing exploitation of the eternal-adjunct class of professors must not be doing it for them – more gifts in this group went to elite prep schools (one, to the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York) than to any of our nation’s largest social-service organizations, including United Way, the Salvation Army, and Feeding America (which got, among them, zero). Michael Bloomberg once said, “there’s a connection between being generous and being successful.” While this is no doubt true, Mayor Bloomberg seems more interested in giving hundreds of millions in the increasingly polarized “Gun Culture Wars” than he is in helping the nearly 50,000 homeless, as well as the poor and working poor in his city. In that, he is hardly unique for his class of ultra-rich and out-of-touch billionaires.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 15:40:07 +0000
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