I love when my readers do the footwork for me and send me links to articles that they think I will enjoy. Readers also send me articles that they suspect will enrage me. I fear that I’m most entertaining when I’m enraged. Here’s the selection from last week:
Amy sent two articles about Who Really Cares
Jeremy forwarded a link to Virginia Postrel’s article on chain stores in the Atlantic.
Thinking back to our discussion about video cameras in the classroom, Kip pointed me to this article about a teacher who got burned by YouTube.
Thanks, guys for the tips. In between prepping my lectures for an upcoming class on media and new media, I found all sorts of goodies in the blogosphere today:
Ethan Zuckerman has an excellent post on Cass Sunstein’s new book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
Where’s the line in modern traditional/on-line media? Have we crossed the line with last week’s viewings of a panty-less Britney Spears? Where is the “yuck line”?
Bloggers make a buck and lose street cred.
What motivates reporters?
Apt. 11d 
I haven’t read the Arthur Brooks book, but a few things occur to me.
1. The cost of living in “blue” areas is brutal even for households making what would elsewhere be a very tidy sum. Given housing (and perhaps educational) expenses, it’s easy to see how many families might see themselves and their families as being (financially) in a small lifeboat with no room for others.
2. One of these articles mentions that 25% of the public never, ever gives for anything. I wonder, who are these people?
3. I wonder what role being a recipient of charity plays in ones willingness to give–the pay it forward thing. My feeling is that it is important. I’m thinking of an aunt of mine whose son did a Rotary exchange. For years afterward, she hosted a series of foreign students.
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4. I’ve seen it stated that religious commitment drives giving. Some argue that this giving doesn’t count, because it is directed mainly at a particular religious body. I would argue that “religious” and “purely” charitable giving are not so clearly separated in real life, and that church attendance means that one is exposed to far more charitable appeals than one would experience otherwise. As evidence, I would like to present the parish bulletin for a large and rather liberal NW DC parish, which I harvested this evening. I will attempt to list all the charitable efforts in the bulletin! Of course, this is December, a particularly busy time.
a. special collection for retired religious (nuns get very small Social Security checks)
b. the parish raised $6,900 for Thanksgiving dinners for the needy
c. meeting for job seekers
d. the parish gave $250,000 last year in grants to DC organizations that directly serve the poor
e. the parish school sixth grade class served lunch at So Others May Eat last week
f. appeal for volunteers to help with family shelter
g. monthly appeal for non-perishables
h. Hands on Housing is looking for construction volunteers
i. appeal for book donations
j. appeal for subway cards with a few cents on them for SOME
k. giving tree Sunday
l. toy Sunday
m. appeal for Katrina volunteers to travel and help at sister parish in Mississippi
n. parish raised $10,500 for appliances for Katrina victims
o. Bibles for youth in Marshall Islands
p. meal ministry to parish families with new babies
q. olive wood carvings on sale for benefit of Holy Land Christians
r. El Salvador sister parish craft sale
s. caroling for sick and homebound
t. balsam wreaths sold by Living Wages of Washington to support adult education and training programs
u. Gift wrapping to benefit a seminary in Madagascar
Whew! My fingers are tired. And I almost ran out of letters.
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I haven’t read the Brooks book either, but have been going back over some of his earlier work that’s been published online and following the coverage of Who Really Cares pretty closely.
Brooks’s findings in this 2004 Faith & Economics paper and this 2003 Policy Review column seem to indicate that the main determiner of charitable giving is frequency of religious attendence. Not where you attend or what creed you follow, but how often you show up. A second, less important factor was intensity of political opinion, again irrespective of whether it was conservative or liberal opinion. Thus religious liberals give as much as religious conservatives, and secular conservatives are as stingy as secular liberals. A third finding is that both the rich and working poor give a larger percentage of their income than the middle class.
What irritates me about how the book has been marketed is that — if my understanding of his findings are correct — the whole thing just boils down to the “God gap.” Since fewer liberals attend religious services, they give less as a whole, and if you don’t control for religion you can paint the lot as inherently stingy. Rather than some kind of charity gap Brooks has discovered, we’re really back to the same old debate on religion in American political parties. Somehow I doubt that sells quite as well as slapping “compassionate conservatism” on the book at the last minute and jumping into the culture wars.
For more by Brooks, he’s written columns for the WSJ (among others) on low liberal birthrates, bias in academia, and the “angry” Left. They generally make me suspect he won’t mind much triumphalist conservative overgeneralizing about his book.
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Amy, from what I’ve gathered,
1) May be a reasonable objection — near as I can tell Brooks controls for income, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to what’s left after rent.
2) Moderates who never attend religious services.
3) I think I’ve read in his articles that being a recipient of charity increases the propensity to give, but being a recipient of welfare squashes it. Brooks compares welfare recipients with working poor and finds that at very low income levels, there’s a huge gap.
4) You make a good point, but it’s not necessary — Brooks anticipates this objection and finds that religious givers also give or volunteer more to purely secular charities (libraries, PTA, blood donations) than their non-religious counterparts do. (See pages 6 and 7 of his Faith & Economics paper for elaboration on this)
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