| sieanr said: For starters I'd say there is more to charity than simple donating money, such as volunteer work. But I digress. The big flaw with measuring money donated as the basis for how generous a nation is comes down to how wealthy that particular nation happens to be and how the super wealthy and corporations can skew that number. For example, people in zimbabwe could donate a larger percentage of their time and money to charity than the majority of american citizens. However, add in people like Bill Gates and corporations donating billions and suddenly that skews the average to be greater than Zimbabwe. Of course this is a hypothetical, but certainly you get the idea. However, I do have one very serious question; Do you think that Americans are innately predisposed to be more charitable than people in all other nations? |
obviously, not in people's DNAs. but the way the american society and culture is set up, i believe americans are indeed more charitable than most nations.
i don't know about anything else, but when i look at american university endowments, the figures are amazing. harvard and princeton both exceed oxford and cambridge, despite the latter two being hundreds of years older (all 4 are above $10 billion, i believe). and then you have schools like yale, MIT, columbia, brown all having endowments not far away from those schools. i don't have the link, but a top german research institute was complaining about european institute's lack of endownment to hire top professors.
being chinese, i know chinese people are very stingy. wealth is, because of cultural reasons, passed down from one generation to the next, with very little of it going to charity. this is a common topic in china and apparently it's changing a bit, as people actually look to america as a model these days.
on a grassroot level, i can say with certainty that americans are definitely very charitable. as a concrete example, encouragement of volunteering work starts in middle school and high school, if not earlier. i don't know about europeans, but i imagine they have a similar system as americans, since some of the awards for community and social work are actually based from england. the american red cross and organizations like united way, as bureacratic and as much bad press they've received lately, are as well run as can be expected for non-profit organizations.
i think it's also unfair to use a "hour/person" to evaluate charity. an hour for a person making $100,000 is a more valuable than the same hour for a person making $25,000. the $100,000 person would most likely make a bigger impact by donating his salary for an equivalent number of hours the $25,000 guy did charitable work for.
bill gates and warren buffet will be giving away most of their wealth before they die, not leaving too much to their children (just a few millions--out of the billions). that's just an example of the mindset of american elites. without that kind of culture among them, giving that much money away would not be so commonplace.
if you were to ask me the bolded question, and i were to give you a short answer, then i'd say, yes.
the Wii is an epidemic.
