Somehow . . .

Somehow in my gut I always knew this sort of thing was true. Now we have verification. A recent article in The Atlantic made this statement up near the beginning:

 One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.

The article, which isn't really very long, goes on to probe the obvious question: why should this be so? The long and the short of it is, the more exposed you are to need, the more likely you are to be generous. And if you live in a really rich neighborhood, as opposed to one more heterogeneous, the more likely you are to be a stingy donor. And then there's this

Last year, Paul Piff, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, published research that correlated wealth with an increase in unethical behavior: “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff later told New York magazine, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people.” They are, he continued, “more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”  

Somehow, although I readily admit this to be a generalization with many exceptions, in my gut I always knew this was true too.