Maxwell School of Syracuse University

Last fall, ABC News producers were working on a special edition of the newsmagazine 20/20. The hour-long program would explore American selfishness. As it happens, Arthur Brooks, a professor of public administration at the Maxwell School who specializes in nonprofit studies, had written a just-published book about charity in America, challenging some basic assumptions about who gives and why. ABC planned to make Brooks one of the central authorities of the program.

The book that Brooks wrote is titled Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, published in November by Basic Books. (Other subtitles on the cover include “America’s Charity Divide” and “Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”) The book has been a minor sensation, selling more than 30,000 copies and establishing Brooks as a leading scholar in the area of charitable giving.

In his research, Brooks applies quantitative tools to available demographic data on donors, but in ways and with goals apart from previous studies. He targets the values—the attitudes behind the behaviors—of donors.

“There was this notion that we are the sum of our economic incentives,” Brooks says, “or that demographics are destiny. Both of those ideas are not right.” Brooks was certain that Americans don’t give just because of the tax breaks. And he also believed previous studies—which broke giving behaviors into categories such as age, sex and marital status—revealed little about the reasons people give.

He believed that attitudes drive giving, and so he used existing data to explore the personal values of those who give. By analyzing the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey of 2000-2001, Brooks found a direct link between charitable giving and religious participation—not just stated religious affiliation, but actual attendance at a house of worship. He also looked at those surveys that allow respondents to identify themselves as “spiritual,” and found an even stronger correlation: People who claim to be serious about their spirituality are much, much more likely to give to charitable causes than those who don’t.

Brooks’s work will serve the nonprofit sector for years. (The prominent political scientist James Q. Wilson called Who Really Cares the best study of charitable giving he’s ever read.) And, while the book informs professionals in the trade, it also holds implications for a national outlook on charity and nonprofit institutions. It demonstrates how government policy can depress or elevate personal giving. Brooks’s work will fuel the debate about how nonprofits and government should interact and how tax policy might maximize charitable giving.

National media have responded to the book’s implications about human nature. Beyond 20/20, Brooks’s work has received attention in newspapers across the country, from the San Jose Mercury News to the Boston Globe. The Christian Science Monitor and Scientific American have cited his research in articles as well. “This is supposed to be the start of a conversation,” Brooks told the Christian Science Monitor. “It’s the first word, not the last word. We need more people thinking about the study of charitable giving in a serious way.”

Alongside this general interest, though, was attention of a different kind, paid to Brooks by conservative pundits and media associated with the political right. Among Brooks’s 100-plus interviews about the book have been appearances on religious and conservative talk radio. He’s been seen on The O’Reilly Factor and The 700 Club and heard on the Rush Limbaugh Show.

Not universally, but often the conservative media seem intent on drawing only one lesson from the book: Conservatives, they are proud to tell, are America’s big givers. They like to conclude that Brooks has slain the stereotype that liberals are socially conscientious while conservatives are callous and selfish.

As conservatives rallied around his book, Brooks worried its message may have become distorted.

“This book has been interpreted as a political argument, and I go out of my way to say that it is not, because these differences are not because of politics,” Brooks says. (Admittedly, the book’s subtitle and some of its marketing contributed to the misperception. “You have a publisher who wants to sell books,” Brooks notes wryly.)

The spin that Brooks’s research has received—that political conservatives as a group are more generous than liberals—is true, but just the stuff of sound bites. The real story here is about the values that underlie giving. This is not a book about why conservatives give, but about all of the values that motivate or suppress giving. The apt comparison is not conversative versus liberal; it’s religiously affiliated versus unaffiliated (which Brooks terms secular).

In fact, says Brooks, “the religious left is every bit as charitable as the religious right.” There are just a lot fewer of them. “There are three times as many religious conservatives as there are religious liberals,” Brooks says. To further sort out the distinction between political and religious affiliation, look at secular conservatives; as a group, they are the least generous of all (although, again, there are relatively few of them). What is pivotal is not political orientation; it’s religious involvement and sensibilities.

“Attitudes and behaviors go deeper than politics,” Brooks says. “They merely correlate with politics.”

When first encountering Brooks’s results, some people assume that much of the charity done by religious people is directed toward religious institutions, and, of

course, a percentage of it is. But Brooks shows that those who attend religious institutions are also 10 percentage points more likely to give money to “explicitly secular causes” (e.g., the environment, the arts). They are far more likely to volunteer. They are more likely to give money to family and friends, more likely to give change to a homeless person, more likely to donate blood.

“Religious people are, inarguably, more charitable in every measurable way,” Brooks writes.

Part of this can be attributed generally to a spiritual lifestyle—a sort of fundamental worldview. But there’s more: specific training and conditioning, built into religious affiliation, which serve charitability. In Who Really Cares, Brooks writes about tithing, the church teaching of contributing ten percent of income to charitable causes. He describes tithing as an ingrained habit and fundamental reason why churchgoers, and even atheists raised in church-going families, are more charitable than those who never attended church regularly. (Virtually all religions, even if they do not teach tithing, inculcate similar charitable traditions.)

How hot are nonprofitss? Nearly 40 percent of incoming M.P.A. students hope to work in the nonprofit sector. Last year, nearly 20 percent of M.P.A. graduates took jobs in these areas.

They benefit from Maxwell’s Nonprofit Studies Program, directed by Arthur Brooks, and the public and nonprofit management study concentration within the M.P.A..

According to Brooks, the heart of Nonprofit Studies is an annual, multi-week training program for nonprofit executives—important because it maintains an organic connection between Maxwell and local nonprofits. “It’s a priority to use our community as a training ground and a living laboratory,” says Brooks. Since the program’s inception in 2003, more than 100 executives have trained in the program.

Future nonprofit executives, meanwhile, can emphasize public and nonprofit management as part of their M.P.A.—a Maxwell concentration ranked number one in U.S.News & World Report listings, even though the program is quite new. "For years, our graduates have often found jobs in the nonprofit sector,” says David Van Slyke, associate professor of public administration, who teaches in the program. “However, only recently have we begun meeting that demand with curriculum, integrated in the M.P.A., that explicitly addresses the special challenges of managing a nonprofit."

The sudden demand for such curriculum is not surprising. Today, nonprofits play an increasingly instrumental role in funding and delivering social services, says Van Slyke. Students in the program learn the nuts and bolts of service delivery and evaluation, he says, and also “about the role that nonprofits play in the policy process from advocacy to policy formulation.”

M.P.A. candidate Michelle Bernier is a fairly typical nonprofit-management student, having worked for nonprofits in the past. Bernier worked with the Franciscan Collaborative Ministries in Syracuse, managing their food pantry, helping in their medical clinic, and providing administrative support. With her M.P.A., she wants to go back to a similar organization, but in a more influential, managerial role. “It’s my personality to want to think about creative ways to approach problems,” she says.

She sees some fellow students entering nonprofits, while others will join social-welfare units within the private sector.“There’s a growing trend that companies are developing departments for corporate social responsibility or developing foundations, finding ways to put aside a certain amount of profits to benefit the community,” Bernier says. “Many of my classmates are thinking about entering that field, sort of bridging [the private sector] with community benefits.” —R.P.

There are ways to teach this kind of behavior outside of religious affiliation. The New York City nonprofit Common Cents, for example, organizes a project in which classes of students collect pennies, filling 25 sacks (about $1,000 total). Then together the students decide where the money should be allocated in their community. After the exercise, classroom teachers reported that 96 percent of those students had an increased awareness of community needs and 84 percent had a reinforced sense of generosity, Brooks writes.

The lesson: Whether through religion or some other organization, people who are taught to give, when asked to give, give.

This past February, Arthur Brooks was invited to the White House to brief the President, First Lady, and the heads of federal agencies that rely on volunteerism. (The other guest expert was Harvard’s Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone.) The briefing was allotted 25 minutes, but stretched instead to an hour and 15 minutes, as Brooks and Putnam were “peppered” with questions on volunteerism and charity.

Brooks’s work will continue to intrigue policymakers, because America runs on charity. Charitable giving is a flourishing tradition in America. Today, private charitable donations add up to roughly a quarter-trillion dollars a year. The giving-per-household average has almost tripled in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last 50 years.

Charity is important at the level of national policy. Government relies on the nonprofit sector to fund and deliver services to citizens.

This has always been true, not only during the post-Reagan, smaller-government era, but practically from the beginning of the nation. Alexis de Tocqueville noted social spirit and volunteerism when he wrote his famed commentary on American culture almost two centuries ago. Brooks quotes him in Who Really Cares: “The Americans make association to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns. . . . In this manner they found hospitals, prisons and schools.”

Brooks draws a comparison with Europe, where the drive to create a secular welfare state coincides with an almost complete lack of charity. If government will provide, why bother lending a hand? There is so little private charity in Europe that it is difficult to find information on the subject, Brooks writes.

America relies on charitable giving to make the social welfare system function, and, based on the data, Brooks thinks this might be the healthiest system. He is no fan of relying on big government to serve social needs because he believes large, government-administered welfare programs ultimately deflate the spirit and traditions of charity. To liberals like Ralph Nader who say, “A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity,” Brooks issues a warning. Data show that reliance on a social welfare state dampens charitability.

You can see it, for example, in the giving performance of the nation’s poor: The working poor are among the nation’s most generous givers, but those who receive welfare, even when they have equivalent incomes, give far less. Conversely, private charity has a positive, compounding psychological effect—toward mutual support, and away from complacency.

For the first part of his life, it seemed fairly unlikely that Arthur Brooks would end up either a professor of public administration or a darling of the religious right.

From the age of four he played piano and violin. At 19, he dropped out of college to play French horn with the Annapolis Brass Quintet. He spent six years on the road, much of it in a van, visiting all 50 states and 15 foreign countries. While on tour in France, Brooks met his future wife Ester, who is from Barcelona. Eventually, he took a job with the Barcelona Symphony so they could be together.

When they moved back to the United States, Brooks thought he would train to become a soloist and composer. He went back to college with the intention of studying composition and, while there, fell in love with mathematics, economics, and public policy. “What I learned was creativity is entirely fungible,” he says.

He went on to get a Ph.D. in public policy analysis from the prestigious Frederick S. Pardee Rand Graduate School. His first appointment, at Georgia State, combined economics and public administration. He joined the Maxwell School faculty in 2001, beefing up course offerings in the nonprofit concentration (one of the P.A. department’s hottest) and directing Maxwell’s Nonprofit Studies Program. (See related story.)

His emergence as a media figure last fall had some foretelling in his frequent op-ed essays for the Wall Street Journal (many of which are online at faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/ acbrooks). In them, he seizes upon recent studies and reports, from varied sources, and makes pithy, often counterintuitive insights about American society. He has observed, for example, that political conservatives have more children than their liberal counterparts—a possible indicator of contentment, and predictor that their numbers are likely to grow. He has correlated self-reported happiness with political orientation—conservatives are “happier,” whatever that means—and traced childhood behavior forward to eventual political orientation.

Arthur Brooks has a message not just for policy makers and nonprofit managers, but for everyone: Joining the “culture of giving” has big rewards.

Fund-raisers need to understand donors in this light, and find ways to maximize the nontangible rewards donors instinctively seek. Witness the Future Fund, started by the Central New York Community Foundation about three years ago. Through this program, young professionals in the Syracuse community contribute $100 each (to which a group of major donors adds matching funds). They thereby join a sort of small governing board, which meets to make funding decisions.

“They take part in the decision making,” says Peggy Ogden, president and CEO of the foundation. “They get to determine where the money will make the greatest impact.”

She adds, “They see the payback to themselves and others in the group. It’s not a ‘me alone’ kind of exercise.”

Not surprisingly, this drives greater giving. It’s a key lesson for nonprofit managers. Giving should make donors happy, and the right process nurtures the feeling.

Understanding a donor’s personal and religious values, and channeling them toward charity, serves both donor and recipient. It makes everyone happy.

In Who Really Cares, Brooks affirms the tie between happiness and giving. In one survey, people who gave money charitably were 43 percent more likely to say they were “very happy” than those who didn’t give. Better health and increased wealth—for both the individual giver and the nation as a whole—are also linked to charitable giving.

Happiness, and the notion that it can be analyzed, may be Brooks’s next great frontier. In his next commercial book, The Happiness Gap: The Values that Make Some Americans So Much Happier than Others, due next spring, Brooks examines this topic.

“One of the big lessons I learned when writing Who Really Cares was that charity is, for most Americans, fundamentally more than just an exchange of money or time. It’s an expression of core values,” Brooks says. “And those values are what bring people the happiness and prosperity I identify.”

“The big story that’s emerging is that happiness must be earned—that we earn it by living our values,” Brooks says. “The government can make the pursuit of happiness easier, but cannot directly give us any happiness at all. Many modern public policies are actually pushing us in the wrong direction, if happiness is our goal. I’m learning a lot from this project, and like the charity book, it’s changing my own life, my research, and the way I teach my students.”