November 24, 2005 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Fed up with the way Massachusetts residents were portrayed in the news media as Yankee skinflints every year when
the Catalogue for Philanthropy released its Generosity Index ranking the states on charitable giving, the Boston Foundation commissioned a study by the Boston College Center on Wealth and Philanthropy that it hoped would debunk the notion.
The center’s new report does just that, placing Massachusetts citizens among the more generous in the nation. The researchers who conducted the study — Paul G. Schervish, director of the center, and John J. Havens, a senior research associate at the center — have not assigned ranks to each state, but the data in the report show that only 10 states fared better than Massachusetts when they examined donations in 2002. The Generosity Index for that year ranked the state 49th. In the Generosity Index, Mississippi ranks the highest, while in the Boston study, Utah came out at the top. North Dakota ranks 50th in the Boston study, while New Hampshire is at the bottom of the Generosity Index.
Cost-of-Living Adjustments
The main difference between the two analyses is that the new study adjusts income levels in the states by variations in the cost of living. In Massachusetts, and particularly in Boston, the costs of housing, transportation, and other basic needs are considerably higher than in the South or the Midwest, for example.
“If you have the same income and the cost of living in your state is 25 percent lower, that in effect makes you 25 percent richer,” said Mr. Schervish. “If you’re 25 percent richer, that’s going to affect your charitable giving.”
Mr. Havens said that the Generosity Index’s failure to account for differences in costs of living results in a bias that favors states in the South and West, which tend to have fewer metropolitan areas. He noted that using that methodology, even if Massachusetts residents increased their charitable giving a thousandfold, the state would still rank only 23rd in the index. And if no one in Mississippi gave a penny to charity, it could not fall below 26th.
The president of the Catalogue for Philanthropy, George McCully, said the authors of the new report “badly misunderstood” the Generosity Index. “The Generosity Index simply presents the data from federal reports,” he said. “It makes no assertions about people or their generosity. You have to distinguish between what the Generosity Index says and what the media says about it.”
Mr. Havens, however, questioned whether such rankings are useful. “I don’t think any ranking or report can capture the notion of the generosity of a group of people,” he said. Mr. Schervish added that a second section of the study, to be conducted over the next year, will focus on what he considers the more relevant issues: “What are the factors that affect charitable giving at the individual level? If the disposition to be charitably inclined is not explained by geography, what is it explained by?”
Why then did the center start by re-evaluating the state rankings of generosity?
“We happen to be in Massachusetts, and it is embarrassing to have this come out every year and say people here aren’t generous,” he said. “It was a statement about the quality of the people of Massachusetts, and it didn’t make sense to us and it didn’t make sense to the people at the Boston Foundation.”
“Observers of the philanthropic scene in Massachusetts always scratched their heads over the ranking,” said Paul S. Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation, “especially when we have the largest share of our work force employed by nonprofits of any state; 13.7 percent of the work force in Massachusetts is employed by the sector.”
Secular Causes
In its study, the center also found that residents of New England give a higher percentage of their income to secular charities than do those in most other regions and a lower percentage of their donations go to religious groups than do those of people in the rest of the country. The findings resemble the key conclusions of a Chronicle study, which also used cost-of-living adjustments to analyze charitable giving, done two years ago (The Chronicle, May 1, 2003).
Mr. Havens attributed those differences to variations in the religious makeup of the regions. New England, he noted, has a high percentage of Catholics, who, surveys have shown, give less to their parishes because the church itself has more resources and tends to cover costs that are generally supported by donations at other types of religious congregations.
“People in one region don’t have different hearts than people in another,” said Mr. Schervish. “They don’t have different inherent generosity.”
The report is available free at the Boston Foundation’s Web site (http://www.tbf.org/uploadedFiles/GenerosityReport_10-30-05.pdf).
