For richer or poorer...

Yesterday on my way home, I heard this:

http://www.npr.org/2013/09/03/218627288/why-being-wealthy-doesnt-lead-to-more-giving

(Transcript follows:)

Patricia Greenfield has tracked families in Chiapas, Mexico, over four decades. Many were very poor when she started her study. Slowly, over time, they grew wealthier.

Along the way, Greenfield noticed something: As the people she followed grew richer, they became more individualistic. Community ties frayed and weakened.

Greenfield expanded her findings to form a more general theory about the effects that wealth has on people: "We become more individualistic, less family and community oriented."

In a new study, the UCLA researcher makes the argument that the same thing has happened in the U.S. over a longer period.

Greenfield bases her finding on an analysis she conducted of more than 1 million books published in the U.S. between 1800 and 2000. Greenfield used the Google Ngram viewer, a tool that allows rapid keyword searches of the frequency of words in the books.

As the country grew wealthy over that 200-year period, Greenfield found, some words became more likely to be used in books, while other words became less frequent.

"The frequency of the word 'get' went up, and the frequency of the word 'give' went down," she said.

The words Americans used to describe themselves changed, too.

"Words that would show an individualistic orientation became more frequent. Examples of those words were 'individual,' 'self,' 'unique,' " she said. "Words that would represent a more communal or more family orientation went down in frequency. Some examples of those words are 'give,' 'obliged,' 'belong.' "

Greenfield's findings and theories dovetail with a variety of other studies and research projects, including Robert Putnam's 2000 book, Bowling Alone, which explores the decline in community relationships in the U.S.

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Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, said his own life reflected the changes Greenfield and Putnam observe.

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Keltner went from growing up poor in rural California to a successful career at a prominent university: "I saw open doors and barbecues in the backyard and kids playing all night," he said in an interview, about his childhood. "And also the tougher side of husbands out of work and drinking too much and, you know, the health issues that go with impoverished circumstances."

As Keltner carved out a busy professional life, his material concerns went away. But something else happened. Those open doors and endless backyard parties? They started to disappear from his life, too.

Keltner felt something inside him change, something about the way he related to others.

"I saw it personally — I feel it in myself," he said. "That somehow, when I am thinking hard about making more money and rising in wealth and enjoying materialistic benefits, I do feel personally that I am not as responsive to the needs of others."

Keltner has explored this paradox in his experiments: Social class ought to predict generosity in a straightforward manner. The rich have more, which means they have less to lose by giving away some of what they have. But that is not what Keltner's experiments find.

"In just about every way you can study it, our lower-class individuals volunteer more, they give more of their resources — they're more generous," he said.

Keltner is not claiming the poor give more than the rich in absolute terms. Wealthy philanthropists give away millions of dollars.

But Keltner thinks that's not the best way to measure generosity. A thousand dollars from a billionaire doesn't mean the same thing as $100 from someone living on the poverty line.

Keltner cites a study conducted by Independent Sector, a network of nonprofit groups that measured how much people give depending on how much they have: "The poor, say with family incomes below $30,000 and $25,000, are giving about 4.2 percent of their wealth away, whereas the wealthy are giving away 2.7 percent."

A variety of other research studies have found that religious people are more likely than secular people to be generous; nearly all religions preach the virtues of social interconnectedness. Keltner says the relationship between social class and generosity is likely amplified by religious belief, but is also independently true.

Keltner and Greenfield, working independently, have both concluded that the poor tend to value social connections because social connections are integral to survival when you can't make your way on your own.

"The wife may make the clothes for the whole family," Greenfield said of the families she tracked in the early part of her research in Mexico. "The husband grows food and builds the shelter for the whole family. Therefore giving, social obligation, belonging to a family are very important."

But slowly, as people become wealthy, they need one another less, and so they make fewer connections. Autonomy and freedom become more important than responsibility and obligation.

Greenfield points out that one "silver lining" of the recent recession in the U.S. is that community ties appeared to strengthen as the economy buckled.

Neither Keltner nor Greenfield is offering a screed against wealth. As America has become richer, lots of good things have happened. Disease has declined. Education has improved. Women and minorities have gotten more equal treatment.

But it has come at a price.

"As we rise in wealth, along with that rise in wealth comes ideas of individuality and self-expression and autonomy and freedom — and loneliness," Keltner said.

Keltner said being wealthy does not inevitably mean isolation. But it probably does mean that the bonds of connection that came easily to us 200 years ago might now need to be carefully — and deliberately — cultivated.

(End of quoted text)

This is interesting to me on many levels:

1. The poor give more than the rich. As the article points out, the rich give more in actual numbers, but in terms of percentage of income, it's very clear who gives more. And, as this sort of giving is regressive, it's even more impressive how big the difference is.

2. Even though we are the most charitable country on earth, we only give between 3-4% of our income. I don't know how that compares internationally - it's kind of irrelevant. We are the richest country on earth, in the history of the world, and yet we still only give a tiny fraction of what we earn. This is deplorable, and reflects poorly on us and our care for each other.

3. Wealth breaks down traditional family roles. I don't know for sure if I think this is a bad thing or not. Some roles are in place due to millennia of trial and error, as well as biological functions and capabilities that are irrefutable and irreversible. However, some traditions are designed to keep one sex in a particular role at the expense of exploration, growth, and really, all of society suffers as a result. Wealth may lead to greater opportunities for everyone to get education, which leads to different employment opportunities, and these opportunities are not necessarily sex or gender related.

4. Wealth leads to greater individualism, breaking familial ties. Women become less dependent on men for financial support, due in part to the aforementioned educational opportunities. Children are separated from their parents - shucks, in my own house, the kids are usually plugged into their laptops, either doing homework or playing games. We do manage to turn things off occasionally and engage one another. It's very good - I relish those times. But I wonder if we're not becoming more distant, and if the distance is good. Isolation is not inevitable, as the article points out, but isolation is not always desirable.

5. Christian ideals of giving. Charity is not singular to Christianity - it's one of the five pillars of Islam, and Buddhists give to charitable causes quite copiously. But wealth and poverty seem to be one of the the main themes of Christ's teachings. He enjoins His followers to give to those in need, to treat others like ourselves, to love our neighbors, and He decries the pride that is so often associated with wealth. He said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of an needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. His disciples knew what He meant, because they then went on to wonder who would be able to enter in... Christians nowadays seem to have forgotten this, however. We hear of things like the gospel of prosperity, and everywhere you see rich folks holding on like misers to what they have. Poor people give 1.5 times what the wealthy give. And this seems anathema to the teachings of the Carpenter. Perhaps it's the poor who realize that they need to share more, perhaps because they're surrounded by it all the time. Or perhaps it's the poor who are just that much more faithful.

The following link shows some regional trends:

http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/NCCS/extracts/CharGiv_10.pdf

The implications of this trend (these trends?) may be generational and far reaching. As the study points out, the folks in Mexico experienced the changes over several generations. It is unclear, as of yet, how this will affect their society ultimately, even though little beginning ripples are beginning to be seen.

Whatever the end result, it's clear that some things are changing as a result of our affluence and ease. We should be careful how we allow these things to affect our core values - both as individuals and as a society.