A story (not online) in a recent issue of Liberty Magazine reports that research by Arthur C. Brooks shows that people who favor government spending on poverty programs give less to charity than those who don’t support such spending.
If that were only true for monetary donations, there would be a number of plausible questions that could be raised. But Brooks gets around those by showing that it is also true of blood donations.
Brooks’ findings should not be used to justify any particular ideology, since a willingness to act charitably doesn’t necessarily correlate with an understanding of the effects of political policies. It might be interesting to know if a willingness to act charitably correlates with more careful education concerning the effects of political policies, but that would be hard to objectively measure. Brooks’ findings should be used only to discredit people who claim that there’s a simple way to determine that advocates of a welfare state are more compassionate than advocates of smaller government.
Here is an excerpt from Brooks’ book, and other reports on his research are here and here.
One comment on “Charity and ideology”
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Might conservatives be, in general, more deontological while liberals are generally more utilitarian? Yes utilitarians should donate blood too, but mandating the donation of blood might be better from their perspective than donating one’s self.