Organizations and Markets

Who Really Cares?

3 December 2006 at 7:16 am Nicolai Foss 2 comments

| Nicolai Foss |

Danish party politics is essentially all a variation on one basic theme. Thus, we have extreme left social democrats, less lefty social democrats, middle-of-the-road social democrats, and conservative social democrats.  The conservatism of the latter, currently in power, lies in their wish to keep the total tax burden at its current level (which given the recently announced Swedish tax cuts will make Denmark the World leader in income taxation). The other social democrats essentially wish to let the tax burden increase, and few see any problems with a marginal tax rate that goes into the 70s and beyond.  All in the name of equality, of course. 

Recently, the  minister of social affairs made a major faux pas that upset virtually everyone. She argued that economic equality should not be seen as an independent policy goal.  Her political life barely survived the media turmoil that immediately arose. The predictable “jungle law,” “heartless market mentality,””egoistic conservatism,” etc. labels were applied to the minister’s apostasy. The moral outrage was immense.

Enter Arthur C. Brook’s Who Really Cares? The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism which I am reading at the moment.  It amounts to a frontal, data-based attack on the ideology that underlies redistributionism, that is,”in lieu of statist redestribution, nobody would really care for the poor, and most certainly not conservatives and libertarians.”

Here is an excerpt that nicely summarizes the main themes of the book (from p.21-22):

The conventional wisdom runs like this: Liberals are charitable because they advocate government redistribution of money in the name of social justice; conservatives are uncharitable because they oppose these policies. But note the sleight of hand: Government spending, according to this logic, is a form of charity.
…
The data tell us that the conventional wisdom is dead wrong. In most ways, political conservatives are not personally less charitable than political liberals—they are more so.
…
So how do liberals and conservatives compare in their charity? When it comes to giving or not giving, conservatives and liberals look a lot alike. Conservative people are a percentage point or two more likely to give money each year than liberal people, but a percentage point or so less likely to volunteer.

But this similarity fades away when we consider average dollar amounts donated. In 2000, households headed by a conservative gave, on average, 30 percent more money to charity than households headed by a liberal ($1,600 to $1,227). This discrepancy is not simply an artifact of income differences; on the contrary, liberal families earned an average of 6 percent more per year than conservative families, and conservative families gave more than liberal families within every income class, from poor to middle class to rich.

If we look at party affiliation instead of ideology, the story remains largely the same. For example, registered Republicans were seven points more likely to give at least once in 2002 than registered Democrats (90 to 83 percent).

The differences go beyond money and time. Take blood donations, for example. In 2002, conservative Americans were more likely to donate blood each year, and did so more often, than liberals. If liberals and moderates gave blood at the same rate as conservatives, the blood supply in the United States would jump by about 45 percent.

The Volokh Conspiracy argues, however, that parts of Brooks’ data analysis is problematic:

On the whole, I think that Who Really Cares is a valuable book with much sound analysis, but it appears that some of its main conclusions are based on the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, some of whose demographics don’t appear to match national representative samples such as the GSS and ANES. And in Brooks’s book, sometimes liberals are accused of being ungenerous when it appears that they may be more generous than political moderates. Generally, his otherwise strong analysis is weakened by focusing too little on what I have called the forgotten middle: moderates.

Entry filed under: - Foss -, Cultural Conservatism.