"Who Really Cares" | Charity starts at home — and on the right

"Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism"
by Arthur C. Brooks
Basic Books, 256 pp., $26

Arthur Brooks asserts with calculated provocation that conservatives are more compassionate than liberals. Liberals talk more about giving, he says, but they give less. In "Who Really Cares," he writes, "One of the greatest political hypocrisies of our time is the pious sloganeering about liberals in America being more compassionate than conservatives."

Brooks, a Seattle native and professor of public administration at Syracuse University, backs up his case with poll data, much of it convincing. He also uses catchy comparisons. One is that the average family in conservative South Dakota and in liberal San Francisco gives about the same amount of money to charity — $1,300 a year — though the South Dakota family earns $45,000 and the San Francisco family earns $80,000. Another is a comparison of the states with higher rates of giving with the states President Bush carried in 2004. They are mostly the same states.

Brooks finds correlations other than religion and politics. Couples with kids give more than people without kids. Low-income people who earn their money are surprisingly generous, but people on welfare are not. A picture emerges of the archetypical giver and nongiver — and the giver looks like a member of the traditional American family.

Ideology does appear to matter. Those on the left who believe government's task is to create social justice tend to be less enthusiastic about private charity, an institution that assumes that people can give or not give, as they decide. Private charity, Brooks writes, "requires gratitude and can be withdrawn at the discretion of the giver." The people who question this tend to give less.

The strongest explanation for charity, though, is religion. Religious people, whether Christian or Jewish, regardless of race, donate far more than the nonreligious. This includes religious liberals, but there are fewer of them. Nonreligious conservatives tend to watch their nickels.

Many of the arguments over this book will not be about facts, but interpretations.

Opponents of Brooks' conclusions will say religious giving should be discounted because the religious give only to church-related causes (not true, says Brooks) or out of guilt. Brooks walls off such arguments. "Charity is a behavior, not a motive," he says. All dollars count for a dollar.

Likewise, he refuses to give points to the liberal for favoring government aid. Talk isn't cash, and anyway, he says, "Government spending is not charity."

Brooks also does not consider the skinflint's argument that charity can damage the recipient. In the book, all charity is assumed to be good.

Brooks says he started his research on charity with the usual prejudice of a liberal who believed conservatives were cheap, and that the data forced him to change his mind. His conversion does not appear to have been recent. If his book did not have a political point at the start, it has one now, and already it is delighting conservatives.

And that is just the first half of the book. Brooks goes on to argue that charity, being strongest in religious, self-reliant and intact families who tell pollsters they are happy, is itself a cause of human happiness and success. As he titles one chapter, "Charity makes you healthy, happy and rich."

He asserts, for example, that people who give to charity are 43 percent more likely to say they are "very happy" than those who don't. But does generosity make you happy, or does happiness make you generous? Brooks argues that mainly it's generosity that makes you happy. Give, and you shall live. Here he is at his closest to making a faith-based argument.

This is a book that will be cited by pundits for a long time.

Bruce Ramsey is a Seattle Times editorial writer.