Learning to See: Who are the most generous givers?

In the first installment of this series, I talked about my surprise that I became less generous as I made more money. In this installment, we’ll look at some of the research around giving trends – and how we can work to better see each other.

Emily Millikan

I bet most of you know the story commonly referred to as the Widow’s Mite. In this story, reported by three of the Gospel writers, Jesus and the disciples observe rich people offering large gifts at the temple, and a poor widow offering “two mites,” all the money she had. Jesus says the widow’s gift is “more than all of them.”

The Pharisees congratulated themselves on giving such obviously large sums of money. But their gifts were – proportionally – very little compared to the widow’s!

We might like to think of this as a sweet tale, encouraging us that every amount matters (and it does). But like many of Jesus’ words, this observation also teaches us something fundamental about human nature: the more money we have, the less generous we become.

Or, perhaps more accurately, the more money we have, the less likely we are to be in contact with people worse off than ourselves, especially the very poor, and as a result we don’t feel the kind of compassion that leads to giving.

Here are a handful of sources that speak to this point, all well worth reading:

This article from Berkeley describes an experiment in which students with different socio-economic backgrounds respond to a video about the family of a child with cancer. “The results suggest that it’s not that upper classes don’t care… they just aren’t as good at perceiving stress or anxiety,” says one of the authors. Those who respond with higher levels of empathy and compassion, not just sadness, have lowered heart rates, “as if the body is calming itself to take care of another person.”

Fox Business suggests that when wealthier people do give, they tend to donate more to the arts and higher education (institutions they feel a personal connection with), rather than social charities or organizations that directly alleviate human suffering.

The Atlantic offers some useful statistics: those in the top fifth of earners give, on average, 1.3% of their income to charity, while those in the bottom fifth give 3.2%. Notably, this statistic isn’t true across the board: “Wealthy people who lived in homogeneously affluent areas—areas where more than 40 percent of households earned at least $200,000 a year—were less generous than comparably wealthy people who lived in more socioeconomically diverse surroundings. It seems that insulation from people in need may dampen the charitable impulse.” (Heads-up – there’s a moment of crass language.)

NPR has a similar story about an experiment in which people are given “credits,” and can choose how many to share; for those who are eager for more detail, this 16-minute TED talk reviews several different games and studies that show similar results.

Some of these statistics and trends can be difficult to learn about. But it’s important for Jesus-followers to be honest, not just about our actual giving habits, but also about the resistance we experience when we move toward a larger vision and greater compassion. (This includes me.)

In part three we’ll talk about why we give, and how to improve our “vision” to help us give out of solidarity, not charity.

Learning to See: Am I a generous giver? (Part I)
Learning to See: Giving from Solidarity, Not Charity (Part III)