Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Rich People + More Rich People = Less Giving

Charitable America

Here's another way the rich are different from you and me: they give proportionately less to charity. Especially when they live in neighborhoods full of other rich people. That's just one of the diverting fiscal facts laid out in an engrossing online project by The Chronicle of Philanthropy on giving in America. As the authors put it, "The Chronicle’s study found that when wealthy people are heavily clustered in a neighborhood—meaning that when households making more than $200,000 a year account for more than 40 percent of the taxpayers—the affluent households give an average of only ... Read More

Humanitarian Aid: Moving the Dialogue Toward Prevention

This past year, as with the years before, the international news has been replete with stories of humanitarian disasters. War, drought, flood, earthquake, disease — there are constantly populations in crisis, constantly people for whom the difference between life and death lies in the response of the outside world. Perhaps it has always been this way. One thing that has changed, however, is who is doing the responding. Where disaster relief had once been overwhelmingly funded and provided by nations, increasingly we have seen that response to humanitarian disasters has been coming from ... Read More

One Laptop Per Child Redux

The New York Times called it,  “The Laptop That Will Save the World,” while the renowned Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University  referred to it as “a monumental feat of engineering and design.” Dressed up like a toy in a Kermit-the-Frog green and white plastic shell, this durable little computer was the progeny of the nonprofit organization, One Laptop Per Child. When the laptops went into mass production in November 2007, OLPC’s ambitious plan aimed to place a free computer into the hands of the world's 1 billion impoverished children. Education is the exit ramp ... Read More

Childhood Memories Provoke Charitable Behavior

Remember your first bicycle? How about your first pet? If such inquiries conjure up images from your formative years, be grateful: Briefly reliving moments from childhood may make you a better person. According to a Harvard Business School Working Paper, triggering childhood memories stimulates people to behave more helpfully and charitably. Researchers Francesca Gino and Sreedhari Desai report these early memories activate feelings of moral purity linked in our minds with the innocence of youth. Surprisingly, the results of their experiments suggest it doesn’t matter if a childhood ... Read More

Jewish Americans Win Alms Race

Giving money to the poor is a doctrine of pretty much every religion, but a new study suggests some faiths are better than others at inspiring their followers to actually open their wallets. Specifically, Jewish families in the U.S. are more likely than their Christian counterparts to contribute to charities focusing on providing basic necessities. That’s the conclusion of a study by economist Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, just published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. After controlling for various factors that influence giving, such as income, education and family size, he ... Read More

The Geography of Giving

Northrop Grumman announced Jan. 4 that it would be relocating its corporate headquarters from Los Angeles to somewhere near the United States' Capitol by 2011. The defense giant follows in the footsteps of Hilton Hotels and fellow defense contractor Science Applications International Corporation, which transferred their headquarters from the Golden State to the D.C. area in 2009. Wes Bush, Northrop's chief executive and president, said the company is looking at tax incentive packages in the region to determine its relocation destination. Such packages have spurred a number of companies ... Read More

Letting Your Good Intentions Backfill My Budget

Donors in the world's richest nations send tens of billions in aid to developing countries every year, and it's no secret that corruption and malfeasance hinder those efforts. But there's another, less well-known predicament that affects aid to poor nations: fungibility. Instead of supplementing the money that a government spends for a particular purpose — like fighting HIV/AIDS — donor dollars may just replace local outlays. Donations intended to boost the amount of money devoted to a worthy cause might actually reduce it. Development economists and experts disagree on how common ... Read More

Computer Error?

There's no question that the idea of One Laptop per Child is appealing. It has whiz-bang technology, support from the glitterati of Silicon Valley and the World Economic Forum, and emotional resonance — giving poor children something we all know and value — on its side. And for quite a while, progress looked good. If the project hadn't hit the threshold it aspired to — a $100 laptop computer that would work in Third World countries without comprehensive electrical grids — it had produced a widely praised first model and received orders for several hundred thousand laptops from ... Read More