Who Gives More? -- Who Cares?

I hate "studies," or at least sweeping claims about what they prove. Sometimes the "studies" are so methodologically unsound, or biased, or unfocused that they don't prove anything. An example was the so-called "study" we discussed recently which allegedly proved something about why more women should be on boards, or what they would do once lots of them got there. The question of the potential impact of gender on corporate governance is an important one (though no answer is yet apparent); the complete absence of any rigorous or useful data in the study only trivialized the question. What about the Brooks study of charitable giving? I haven't read it, but it seems to produce some real data about who gives how much to what. So, I would conclude that it is not prima facie dopey. I'm even prepared to accept that the "conservatives" described in the study actually give more than "liberals," especially if we are just talking about conventional charitable giving and not the larger "generosity" that Eduardo tried to define. I don't know why that may be true, but who cares? What does that prove about anything?. The "fact" that conservatives give more to charity is largely uninteresting and irrelevant to anything important. The study doesn't prove anything beyond the fact that cons can be charitable, and apparently more than libs.  But the important question is how liberals and conservatives think about structural problems of social injustice, particularly gross and growing economic inequality. What is important is the difference in ideology, not small differences in rates of charitable giving.  Of course, I hear the argument from conservatives: "This is just an argument about means: we care about poverty etc as much as the liberals; we just think "statist" policies won't help, and will actually hurt, and only the market will work, yada, yada". Forgive me if I describe this as a rationalization that covers an enormous amount of relative indifference to the human cost of policies (or non-policies) that result in worsening the lot of the poor. Some conservatives are prepared to accept "transition costs" that involve great human suffering to a much greater degree than those on the other side of the ideological spectrum. Perhaps some conservatives make themselves feel better by throwing  a bit more money into the bottomless pit of charitable need; what they don't want to do is accept the structural changes that might actually make a bigger difference than personal charity. But, just to show that I am even-handed: my admittedly subjective experience is that conservative professionals tend to be much nicer to working class staff then many lefties I have known. The latter  have often been "lovers of humanity" who treat real working stiffs like underlings. But, what does that prove? Not much, beyond the universality of hypocrisy. In the same way, I don't think the Brooks study proves anything about the really important question of how different ideologies respond to the actual needs of the poor, and which ideology shows the greater commitment to doing something meaningful about them.

--Mark