Many scientific studies, starting with this one published in the Entrepreneur magazine, attest to the power of giving. It is followed by some other studies, and then the powerful experience of a pastor.
Less poetically, the idea is this: Giving makes you rich. A lovely sentiment, to be sure, but quite backward-sounding to an economist! You obviously have to have money before you can give it away, right? Or in the pithy words of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions-he had money too.”
Emerging evidence-crunchy statistics from real data, not the mushy self-help stuff-supports the contention that giving stimulates prosperity, for both individuals and nations. Charity, it appears, can really make you rich.
The United States is a remarkably charitable nation. The Giving U.S.A. Foundation estimates that Americans donated nearly $300 billion to charity in 2006-more than the gross domestic product (the annualized value of goods and services produced within a nation) of all but 33 countries in the world. More than three-quarters of this came from private individuals. Additional research suggests that between 65 and 85 percent of Americans give to charities each year.
How does all this generosity relate to our high average levels of prosperity? Let’s begin with individuals and families. The Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, completed in 2000, is a survey of about 30,000 people in more than 40 communities across the U.S. and is the best single source of data available on the civic participation of Americans.
The S.C.C.B.S., which takes into account differences in education, age, race, religion, and other personal characteristics, shows that people who give charitably make significantly more money than those who don’t. While that seems like common sense, it turns out that the link in the data between giving and earning is not just one-way.
How do we know this? When two variables like giving and income are interrelated, economists use something called an instrumental variable to see which is pushing and which is pulling. In a nutshell, that means selecting something that’s closely related to donations but not directly to income, like volunteering.
Volunteers tend to be money givers and vice versa because of the same charitable impulse. But income doesn’t always directly affect volunteering. (While people have differing amounts of money, they all have the same amount of time.)
We start by predicting how much money people would donate based on how much they volunteer, regardless of income. This projection essentially strips out the role of income in giving. Next, see if that predicted donation level correlates with income. If it does and the correlation is positive, it means that giving pushes up income and not just vice versa.
This is precisely what is found in the S.C.C.B.S. data: More giving doesn’t just correlate with higher income; it causes higher income. And not just a little. Imagine two families that are identical in size, age, race, education, religion, and politics.
The only difference is that this year the first family gives away $100 more than the second. Based on my analysis of the S.C.C.B.S. survey, the first family will, on average, earn $375 more as a result of its generosity.
How can this be? Is it a statistical anomaly-or even a metaphysical phenomenon? While the link between giving and prosperity is not as mechanistic as returns on municipal bonds, there are some very earthbound explanations for it.
Psychologists and neuroscientists have identified several ways that giving makes us more effective and successful. For example, a research from the University of Oregon finds that charity stimulates parts of the brain associated with meeting basic needs such as food and shelter-suggesting to the researchers that our brains know that giving is good for us.
Experiments have also found that people are elevated by others into positions of leadership after they are witnessed behaving charitably.
The financial advantages of giving aren’t limited to individual givers. There is also evidence that donations push up income even more at the level of an entire nation’s economy.
As in the case of individual income, the evidence is that increases in G.D.P. and giving mutually reinforce each other: Economic growth pushes up charitable giving, and charitable giving pushes up economic growth.
This rate of social return shows that economic-multiplier effects are not limited to private investment. In short, giving plays a positive role in American economic growth. It is a good investment for our country. Some might even go so far as to say that donating to charity is a patriotic act.
Collaboration from other studies
When you give, you’re more likely to get back: Several studies, including work by sociologists Brent Simpson and Robb Wilier, have suggested that when you give to others, your generosity is likely to be rewarded by others down the line—sometimes by the person you gave to, sometimes by someone else.
Giving has also been linked to the release of oxytocin, a hormone that induces feelings of warmth, euphoria, and connection to others.
In laboratory studies, Paul Zak, the director of the Centre for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, has found that a dose of oxytocin will cause people to give more generously and to feel more empathy towards others, with “symptoms” lasting up to two hours.
Oral Roberts
The experience of the late Oral Roberts Oral founder of Oral Roberts University is another confirmation of the power of giving. In 1946, he accepted a pastorate in Enid, Oklahoma, to enable him continue his university education.
According to his account, usually when someone accepted a pastorate, they were provided with a personage or another place to live, but he was not given. Without money of his own to rent or buy a house, he was stranded after preaching on the first Sunday morning.
Finally a member of the church asked Oral’s family to stay a few days with them in their two-bedroom house. Weeks after, the benefactor was being transferred and they had to patch up somewhere. When they survived that they resorted to cultivation crops to sell to pay their bills, buy new clothes, etc.
But the practice of sowing and harvesting crops gave oral a fresh idea of giving. “Enthusiasm of giving burst out within me” and he saw giving not as a debt but as a seed.
One day when about $100 came in, he had a leading to sow it as a seed in the church, but his wife was livid over that poor investment choice, when they had a long list of needs to worry about. He went ahead all the same.
But a miracle happened that day. Late in the night, he heard a knock on his door he wasn’t sure about. When he opened the door eventually, he was handed an envelope by a stranger who introduced himself as a farmer.
Ownership of his farm was been threatened and he had been led by divine intervention to bring the contents of the envelope to Oral not as a gift or tithe, but a seed. The envelope contained seven times the amount Oral had sown earlier that day.
It was a mutually beneficial exercise – the man Art Newfield had his farm back and went on to be a prosperous farmer, while Oral, Roberts resigned his pastoral ministry with the Pentecostal Holiness Church during 1947 to found Oral Roberts Evangelistic.
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