And everyone’s response should be “so?”. Setting aside for a moment the methodology of how one would arrive at that representation it matters not if its not compared to the charitable impulses of moderates. If the giving patterns of moderates are not VASTLY different from their politically more rabid counterparts then not only do you not have causation you don’t even have correlation. In which case we could just as easily be talking about people who prefer chunky to smooth peanut butter. For the record put me down for chunky.

“So, in the end, I think that liberals are actually the selfish ones.”

Yes, yes I know. But the point here is that Brooks’ book really doesn’t back that assumption regardless of how much one would like it to be so.

Again if giving patterns “clearly” made that case then gays and religious liberals would not be making contributions at or above the levels of conservatives. Finally I think Brooks makes some moderately interesting points. They just aren’t the ones breathlessly represented here and elsewhere.

Regards

The mirror tactic, which you claim to be adopting, is unlikely to succeed if the object of your attentions sees any distortions in the reflection. Thus, moves such as substituting “leftist” for “liberal” in your first sentence (in this column Kristof uses the word “left” once, and “leftist” not at all) and contrasting religious conservatives with secular leftists while ignoring the cases of religious liberals and secular conservatives, as you do in the penultimate paragraph of the parent, will be counterproductive.

On the other hand, such moves work extremely well to rally the troops. But even well-written polemics hold no appeal for me.

Happy New Year.

Since most of the citizenry does not self define as either liberal or conservative I really don’t see how any sort of judgment can be drawn without comparing giving patterns among moderate

Brooks used the 1/3 extreme on both the left and right of people who self-identified as either liberal or conservative.

Once again factual nuance proves to be the natural enemy of dogmatic posturing

I couldn’t have put it better myself. The dogmatic posture of the left has always been that they represent the compassionate and caring individuals while conservatives represent the cruel and indifferent. Clearly, based on giving patterns, this is not true.

Instead conservative oppose liberal policies because they have a nuanced understanding of the complex interactions in human affairs. Liberals choose to address some problem and not others and they chose some solutions over others, based on how those solutions to those specific problems benefit liberals as a population.

So, in the end, I think that liberals are actually the selfish ones.

My final (maybe) thoughts are these:

If the Chicago Boi perspective here held any water then gays and religious liberals would not be as generous as religious conservatives or MORE inclined to give than secular conservatives. In fact they could not be as you’re making a mutually exclusive argument. Brooks is really just demonstrating that to the extent that people are members of a defined community they’re inclined to support the activities of that community. Once again factual nuance proves to be the natural enemy of dogmatic posturing.

Where’s the middle here?? Since most of the citizenry does not self define as either liberal or conservative I really don’t see how any sort of judgment can be drawn without comparing giving patterns among moderates. And if the difference aint substantial then this is all just silliness.

Regards

Aaaah, so it’s mindreading.

As much as any other attempt to explain human behavior is.

Given the left’s long history of attempting to reduce the behavior of non-leftist to that of economic robots, to explain military policy in terms of freudian phallicism or, more recently, to pathologize non-leftist political beliefs, I feel more own efforts to hold the mirror up to them rather modest.

It’s not really pertinent to this conversation. The real question in the parent was whether leftist chose the policies they do out of true compassion or whether they do so out some other motive.

A more informative review of Brooks’s book is this one at Amazon by a former Heritage Foundation fellow.

Brooks is doing no such cheeky thing, he did the think I thought he was being cheeky against: he did the study because his hypothesis was that liberals were more generous. Haha. I guess those kinds of hypothesis are just fine!

And this differs from the norm for ‘Liberal’ how?

*Sorry, and this the day after Christmas, too! I really should know better. I live in a very lefty neighborhood and am constantly surrounded by the superiority and goodness said lefties. I’m sure if I lived in a very righty area I’d feel the same about smug righties, although, I’d probably nod in agreement a lot more about stuff.

*You can’t tell from a person’s politics if they are good are not in their personal life. I don’t think there is such a correlation because people don’t always think as hard about their political beliefs as they do about their own personal lives. Well, that’s what I think anyway.

Since you bring it up Ginny, one has to think that, however distant Obama is intellectually from the mainstream of conservative thought, he is apparently not the vacuous empty suit that Kerry and Gore are. He’ll appease the boobs in his party to greater or lesser extent for the sake of party unity and support but there may be moments during the next four years when we will be glad to have an individual who, at least, seems to bring some intellect to bear, focus, and work through a problem. Let’s hope such moments come later in his term rather than sooner.

Secondly, we always want further research when other’s conclusions make us uncomfortable, that’s why I’d like more about global warming (and it is true, more research has undercut some of those assumptions – perhaps they would this. But then this isn’t the product of projections but of facts).

But asking others to do research is not the same as disproving their argument. Sure, more studies would be interesting, more analysis would be, too. But a higher level of honesty and introspection might lead to less knee-jerk responses from those who appear to be less generous. Or perhaps more generousity.

Correlation is not causation. And just how many studies of this are there?

This should be seen, not as an opportunity for patting oneself on the back, but for framing further research.

If you are concerned about minimizing administrative costs in favor of delivered services, I recommend AmeriCares. They are 98% efficient and get into some of the most urgent situations around the world (Darfur, the Burma typhoon, the Indonesian tsunami, etc.). Never heard of them? That’s a good thing – they spend almost nothing on advertising and fundraising.

BWAAAAAAAAAhahahhahahhahahhahahahahahhaaaaaaa….

Don’t refute it, revel in it!!

Use it as an excuse to claim that conservatives feel the world is “crumbling”….

Project, much?

You idiots have been whining and apoplectic for eight friggin’ years, and after 8 years of acid-bathed vitriol, anything which points out how uncharitable the Left is despite its supposed “high airs” and “concern for the downtrodden” is somehow equally vitriolic.

a) This is far from the first time it’s been noticed. I recall reading comments about it at least 2 years ago.
b) We don’t think our world is crumbling. We’re accepting that we’ve let the wrong people get in charge of the GOP and are in the process of fixing that. It’s unfortunate that Obama’s going to get to screw things up for four years, but then, one of the concerns was that McCain would not have done any different, really — he was never a conservative and barely qualified as a Republican.

Brooks own hand notes that liberals are more likely to donate their time than conservatives which jibes nicely with my point. Further as I note Brooks’ “research” on supposed income variables is just flat bogus. He only sites the one source that reinforces his point and ignores at least two other sources which do not though he does see fit to make use of the disagreeable sources later in his work. You’ll agree I trust that falls well short of rigorous?

As for the $373… You aren’t buying into a generalized argument of averages, you’re talking about matters of individual action and on that level you’ve got $373 dollars to make that “point”. In other words you’re willing, on the basis of THAT figure, to assume that I have a much darker heart than you. Isn’t that what it all boils down too? It goes without saying that it does. And in any event this kind of thing hardly begins to justify the conclusions you fellas draw from it. You bring that baggage to the discussion.

Regards

Yeah, cause it was *only* the GOP who voted for that crap. Uh-huh.

I refrain from making insulting observations about your reasoning capacity.

> that is simply because they realize that a goodly percentage of just about any and every charity goes to “administrative costs,” and a lot of money never gets to where it is meant to go.

1) Almost all, if not all, charities, I believe, are REQUIRED to indicate these numbers and make them available for public consideration. It’s not hard to pick charities which are fairly good about this. If you’d ever given enough to actually care about such, in reality, as opposed to making excuses, you’d know this.
2) As someone else notes, “As opposed to using the government to hand out largess, with ITS overhead?” If I wasn’t laughing so hard at the sheer absurdity of this claim, I’d take the time to include an appropriate snide comment.
3) Note that the government, unlike the charity, is excluded from giving you actual numbers about its overhead expenses. There’s often ways to estimate, however, and it’s not a small percentage by any means.

Well, yeah. Socialist policies encourage individual and social weaknesses (ie: broad welfare schemes, identification politics and economics); they capitalize on ignorance on one hand and greed on the other (as evidenced in the last election when naive young people and Philistine-like union members helped put a socialist in the White House). So yeah, willful, emotional, ignorant, and selfish are people morally bad.

Of course I may be judgmental and may be becoming a misanthrope because my fellow citizens would have been “bad” enough to put the Republican candidate into office – only a slight improvement.