Pessimisme en liberalisme

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Op zondag 24 juli 2016 20:20 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:

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Ik ook. Misschien zijn de private pensioenen en de huizen erbij opgeteld. Natuurlijk is dat beide slechts schijnbezit; beiden zijn onder controle van de banken, welke indien nodig tot kadaster fraude over gaan.

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Op zondag 24 juli 2016 20:25 schreef Terecht het volgende:

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Dat leek me ook, zit waarschijnlijk veel bakstenen en papieren waarde in verwerkt. Maar zelfs dan vind ik het percentage erg hoog. Tegenover een stapel bakstenen staat immers een hypotheek. Het enige wat ik kan verzinnen is dat de Nederlandse ouderen tot de rijkste ter wereld behoren (hypotheek afgelost, en genietend van een ruim pensioen).

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Putting a number on global inequality is long overdue
Branko Milanovic

This should be one of the metrics we use to gauge the state of the world, writes Branko Milanovic

In his opening speech to the G20 meeting in Hangzhou at the beginning of September, the Chinese president Xi Jinping came up with an interesting number: 0.7.
Referring to the standard measure of inequality, Mr Xi said: “The world’s Gini coefficient has reached around 0.7, higher than the recognised alarm level which stands at 0.6. This is something we must pay great attention to.”

In his speech, Mr Xi emphasised China’s massive contribution to the reduction in global poverty. Had he wanted also to highlight its role in reducing global inequality, he could have pointed out that, up to 2000, it was only China’s high growth rates that kept global inequality from rising. Since then global inequality has been in decline for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, thanks to continued high growth in Asia. And all of this has happened despite increasing inequality within China.
Focusing on this number, as Mr Xi did, is to treat the world as a single unit. While inequality measures for individual countries have been used for the past 70 years and are a frequent topic of conversation among policymakers, global numbers are hardly ever mentioned.
This is not just that they have simply been ignored. Rather, for many years there were significant obstacles in calculating them because we lacked the requisite data (household surveys and countries’ price levels). But even when such calculations became possible (the first, using household surveys alone, was done in 1999), it took a long time for them to be accepted by the economics profession and then by the public.
One reason for this is the abstract nature of such calculations. While for national statistics and inequality measures, there is at least a national government that citizens can blame for high inequality, there is no comparable body globally. There is no one to whom we can entrust the job of caring about global inequality.
Another reason why the idea of measuring global inequality might have been ignored is because it implicitly promotes a brand of cosmopolitanism in which every individual in the world counts equally.
Since reducing global inequality depends mostly on poor countries’ growth rates being higher than those of rich countries, it entails a convergence in living standards. It also implies increased aid to poor (and especially populous) nations. Finally, it calls for the reduction of internal (that is, national) inequalities in large countries such as China, the US, India, Russia and Brazil.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that such a concept has found scant resonance among the richest and most powerful countries around the globe, or among international organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Recently, however, things have begun to change. The World Bank has introduced an inequality metric, albeit at the national level. It is now committed to the promotion of “shared prosperity” and tracks income growth among the bottom 40 per cent of national populations. But the bank has yet to make the reduction of global inequality one of its formal objectives, even though this may be said to be the logical counterpart to its goal of eradicating global poverty by 2030.
With Mr Xi’s introduction of the Gini number in the international arena, one may hope that the reduction in income and wealth inequality among all citizens of the world could become not only an object of curiosity, but a genuine political goal.
It will never be, absent a global government whose emergence is not on the horizon, as significant a subject of political debate as national inequalities are and will continue to be. But it should certainly be included among the metrics we use to monitor the state of the world.
The writer is author of ‘Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization’

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"While inequality measures for individual countries have been used for the past 70 years and are a frequent topic of conversation among policymakers, global numbers are hardly ever mentioned."
Unfortunately, however, many national inequality measures and, hence, global inequality measures still are invalid and should not be trusted.
To my knowledge, the largest measurement error occurs for countries with a VAT. Measured household income includes entitlement income and taxes paid on income and wealth but not taxes paid on consumption (the VAT). It follows that measured household income inequality is smaller than real inequality. Almost surely, this error is very large.
In short, real European inequality, and hence global inequality, are far larger than they seem to be.

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Inequality is a real and important problem. But there are two problems with this article.
First, the relevant statistics are so deeply flawed in many developing countries that they come close to being useless for serious statistical work. (President Xi, by the way, has a nerve talking about statistics.)
Second, one can hardly take staff of the World Bank seriously on this topic. They travel endlessly in business class around the world and, after arriving in a poor country, stay in the most expensive hotels in town. Within Washington DC, they complain about their salaries and allowances despite the fact that these conditions are already very generous indeed (and for most staff, tax free).

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Two points. First, I agree with what you say -- that inequality is a crucial metric. I happen to strongly agree with this. But I was making a different point: that it is immensely hard, given existing statistics, to make much sense of the data we are getting from developing countries. Perhaps we should all try harder. But most statistics from developing countries (not just ones relating to income issues) are very weak. There are opportunity costs to focusing on inequality statistics. There is a huge measurement problem here. At the very least, we need to acknowledge it.
Second, I don't agree that my second point is irrelevant. The World Bank constantly claims to be a leader. Leaders (to be effective) should lead in deeds as well as in words. The World Bank shows no leadership at all in deeds in this area. None. In fact, it is a profoundly unequal institution. By it's own actions, it undermines some of its own key messages. This is hardly an irrelevant matter for a global insitution.

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I applaud a shift from focussing on country inequality to global. Seemingly overlooked in the article however is that one of the most powerful forces reducing global inequality has been migration. The irony is that the roughly one billion people living in a country other than where they were born are much better off than their compatriots who remained behind and yet often find themselves at the bottom of the income distribution in developed nations. This drives up the Gini coefficient of the country but drives the global Gini coefficient down. Global justice trumps local justice in my book as human dignity knows no borders. Sadly today's politics is reversing this historical trend.

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Yours is one of the most honest, coherent and defensible arguments I have read in this debate. I absolutely and completely disagree with you, but I understand and respect your argument - and I am not being sarcastic.
I think the damage done to our societies by non-Western immigration is substantial, growing and bound to end in a very ugly way. I also think it is much better to work towards fixing poor countries by growing their economies at a faster clip than ours (and the onus is on them to fix their own societies). That this can be done without huge emigration has been shown many times in history (South Korea and China as recent examples). Done correctly it takes a generation or so.
But I wish more people like you had the courage of their convictions to lay out the morally consistent argument that 'global justice trumps local justice', as you write. This is really the debate we need to have: How much harm should we inflict upon ourselves in order to help others, often from extremely hostile cultures? That's the political debate we should have rather than the 'head in the sand' debate we are currently having where immigration is by definition good. It isn't. It is good for the immigrants, and it is good for the 1% and in some cases good for businesses - but it is extremely harmful to especially our own lower social classes, and it is hugely detrimental with regard to the cohesiveness of our societies. Just look at Germany which went from peaceful and harmonious to divisive and acrimonious in less than one year. And the old Germany is never coming back
Arguing, as you do, that this is a price worth paying, is what this debate should be about.

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In the 1970s we had the lowest levels of inequality in history in the developed world.
This is what most East European, South American and Russia hoped for as the old order disappeared.
What we all got was economic liberalism that drives inequality.
Thatcher and Reagan started the revolution in the 1980s and inequality immediately started to rise.
It was bought to these other nations that were hoping for the old, gentler capitalism. The new capitalism bought massive inequality with widespread and brutal poverty.
Small state, raw capitalism is not new, it was how capitalism started in the 19th Century.
A few at the top were fabulously wealthy and the majority lived in poverty and squalor.
We used to have first world and third world nations.
The first world nations used some redistribution to improve the standard of living for those lower down the scale to create a modern civilised society.
The third world nations had very rich people and very poor people and paid no attention to creating a civilised society where there was some redistribution to improve the standard of living for those lower down the scale.
We took away the things that differentiated first world nations and third world nations and soon all the first world nations started to resemble third world nations as the middle class began to disappear.
We aimed for a system that drives inequality, I suppose inequality figures will help monitor its success.
The more inequality, the more economically liberal the country and the world.

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If only China had discovered Keynesian Capitalism rather than this rather silly new version that doesn’t create any demand.
Chinese consumption is impacted by high inequality, low wages and no welfare state.
Western savings rates have approached zero due to the welfare state safety net.
Western consumers can spend nearly everything they earn.
China has high savings rates because there is almost no welfare state and they need to save for a rainy day.
The wealthy Chinese are out blowing top end property bubbles in major cities around the world, leaving a legacy of dark towers of unoccupied, investment property.
This does nothing for China.
Using the old economics .......
High taxes on the wealthy to provide a welfare state for those lower down the scale would have boosted China's economy.
Re-distribution would have kept the wealth within China and boosted consumption.
Free public services to maximise spending into the economy.
Higher wages and lower profits following Adam Smith’s observation:
"But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin."
The nation’s hard work generated wealth, that was fed to the few, that then took it abroad.
Great!
With the new economics, the prosperity of China’s boom has been passed onto the global elite outside China.
It has further inflated global asset bubbles in top end property, fine art and classic cars.
As the boom fades the Chinese workers return to their farms and the world has some more oligarchs looking for new places to feed.

It was the welfare state safety net that allowed people to spend nearly all their income.
As it disappears people need to save more and policy makers worry about the global saving glut.
Policy makers never get the hang of joined up thinking.

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A good and timely piece that coheres with the world-wide growing interest in the need for a new mode of growth. That would be a mode that does more than just further enrich and empower already rich and powerful elites (at the cost of the many others). I would offer just one qualification. This article is predicated on global inequality. If we are to get the managers of the 'advanced' economies to take the precepts of 'inclusive growth' seriously that requires them to also address the gross (and deepening) inequalities within their own economies. That's why I and a number of Fellows in the Scottish region of the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) have established a network on the theme of inclusive growth. Within the UK we need to better understand and address the complexity of the many stands of the 'inclusive' in inclusive growth - for example: regional economy disparities; inter-generational fairness; effectively progressive and redistributive taxation; an education system that enforces and even celebrates elitism and social divisiveness... etc. etc.

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Why the Economy Doesn’t Roar Anymore
The long boom after World War II left Americans with unrealistic expectations, but there’s no going back to that unusual Golden Age

By MARC LEVINSON
Updated Oct. 14, 2016 12:40 p.m. ET

The U.S. presidential candidates have made the usual pile of promises, none more predictable than their pledge to make the U.S. economy grow faster. With the economy struggling to expand at 2% a year, they would have us believe that 3%, 4% or even 5% growth is within reach.

But of all the promises uttered by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton over the course of this disheartening campaign, none will be tougher to keep. Whoever sits in the Oval Office next year will swiftly find that faster productivity growth—the key to faster economic growth—isn’t something a president can decree. It might be wiser to accept the truth: The U.S. economy isn’t behaving badly. It is just being ordinary.

Historically, boom times are the exception, not the norm. That isn’t true just in America. Over the past two centuries, per capita incomes in all advanced economies, from Sweden to Japan, have grown at compound rates of around 1.5% to 2% a year. Some memorable years were much better, of course, and many forgettable years were much worse. But these distinctly non-euphoric averages mean that most of the time, over the long sweep of history, people’s incomes typically take about 40 years to double.

That is still significant progress. Looking back over an 80-year lifespan, a typical person in a wealthy country would have seen his or her annual income quadruple. But looking from one year to the next, the improvements in living standards that come from higher incomes are glacial. The data may show that life is getting better, but average families feel no reason to break out the champagne.

Today, that is no longer good enough. Americans expect the economy to be buoyant, not boring. Yet this expectation is shaped not by prosaic economic realities but by a most unusual period in history: the quarter-century that began in the ashes of World War II, when the world economy performed better than at any time before or since.

The victory of the Allies in 1945 was followed by economic chaos. In 1946, France’s farms could produce only 60% as much as they did before the war; many of Germany’s remaining factories were carted off to the Soviet Union as wartime reparations; and anger over price and wage controls—imposed during the war to stanch inflation and channel resources into critical industries—brought strikes across Europe, North America and Japan. Japan and most European countries couldn’t import coal for power plants and grain to feed their people. The future looked bleak.



And then, in the first half of 1948, the fever broke. In January, U.S. officials administering occupied Japan announced a new policy, the “reverse course,” which emphasized rebuilding the economy rather than exacting reparations. In April, President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan. In June, U.S., British and French military authorities in occupied Germany proclaimed a new currency, the deutsche mark, ending the Soviet Union’s efforts to cripple the German economy.

During the same months, the Soviets lowered the Iron Curtain across Europe, destroying democracy in Czechoslovakia and risking nuclear war by blocking road access from western Germany to Berlin. By literally fencing themselves off and thereby limiting their ability to interfere with the Western economies’ resurgence, the Soviets and their captive allies made it easier for the rest of the world to grow.

It did more than just grow. It leapt. The quarter-century from 1948 to 1973 was the most striking stretch of economic advance in human history. In the span of a single generation, hundreds of millions of people were lifted from penury to unimagined riches.

At the start of this extraordinary time, 2 million mules still plowed furrows on U.S. farms, Spanish homemakers needed ration books to buy olive oil, and in Tokyo, an average of three people had to cook, eat, relax and sleep in an area the size of a parking space. Within a few years, tens of millions of families had bought their own homes, high-school education had become universal, and a raft of government social programs had created an unprecedented sense of financial security.

People who had thought themselves condemned to be sharecroppers in the Alabama Cotton Belt or day laborers in the boot heel of Italy found opportunities they could never have imagined. The French called this period les trente glorieuses, the 30 glorious years. Germans spoke of the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, while the Japanese, more modestly, referred to “the era of high economic growth.” In the English-speaking countries, it has more commonly been called the Golden Age.

The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.

Many factors played a role in this achievement. The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated. As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value. New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost. Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.

Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs. To take but one example: In the late 1940s, telephones were still rare and costly in Europe and Japan, but by the early 1970s, they were ubiquitous.

Economic performances that at first seemed miraculous were soon seen as normal. The boom went on year after year. Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Sweden—all enjoyed a quarter-century with only the briefest of economic doldrums.

Unemployment, for all practical purposes, was nonexistent. Economic volatility seemed to have been consigned to the dustbin of history. And with experts such as Walter Heller, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and Karl Schiller, the West German economy minister from 1966 to 1972, telling the public that wise government management had made recession a thing of the past, there was every reason to expect the good times to continue.

And then, on Oct. 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, setting off the Yom Kippur War. Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries showed their support by doubling the price of oil and cutting off exports to the Netherlands, Portugal, the U.S. and others.

The 1973 oil crisis meant more than just gasoline lines and lowered thermostats. It shocked the world economy. Politicians everywhere responded by putting energy high on their agendas. In the U.S., the crusade for “energy independence” led to energy efficiency standards, the creation of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, large government investments in solar power and nuclear fusion, and price deregulation. But it wasn’t the price of gasoline that brought the long run of global prosperity to an end. It just diverted attention from a more fundamental problem: Productivity growth had slowed sharply.

The consequences of the productivity bust were severe. Full employment vanished. It would be 24 years before the U.S. unemployment rate would again reach the low levels of late 1973, and the infinitesimal unemployment rates in France, Germany and Japan would never be reached again. Through the rest of the 20th century, the jobless rate in 28 wealthy economies would average nearly 7%.

According to the late British economist Angus Maddison, the world’s overall economic growth rate dropped from 4.9% a year from 1951 through 1973 to an average of just 3.1% for the balance of the century. Economic growth slowed even more swiftly in the wealthy economies. Incomes merely crept ahead, and families’ sense of stability vanished as weak economic growth undermined the financial underpinnings of the welfare state.

Government leaders in the 1970s knew, or thought they knew, how to use traditional methods of economic management—adjusting interest rates, taxes and government spending—to restore an economy to health. But when it came to finding a fix for declining productivity growth, their toolbox was embarrassingly empty.

With economic planners and central bankers unable to steady their economies, voters turned sharply to the right. After elections in 1976, Sweden’s Social Democrats found themselves out of office for the first time since the Great Depression. Conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Helmut Kohl in West Germany swept into power, promising that freer markets and smaller government would reverse the decline, spur productivity and restore rapid growth.

But these leaders’ policies—deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy—proved no more successful at boosting productivity than the statist policies that had preceded them. Some insist that the conservative revolution stimulated an economic renaissance, but the facts say otherwise: Great Britain’s productivity grew far more slowly under Thatcher’s rule than during the miserable 1970s, and Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts brought no productivity improvement at all. Even the few countries that seemed to buck the trend of sluggish productivity growth in the 1970s and 1980s, notably Japan, did so only temporarily. A few years later, they found themselves mired in the same productivity slump as everyone else.

What explains the global downshift in productivity growth? Some of the factors are obvious. Once tens of millions of workers had moved from the farm to the city, they could not do so again. After the drive for universal education in the 1950s and ’60s made it possible for almost everyone in wealthy countries to attend high school and for many to go to university, further improvements in education levels were marginal. Projects to widen and extend expressways didn’t deliver nearly the productivity pop of the initial construction of those roads.

But there is more to the story. Productivity, in historical context, grows in fits and starts. Innovation surely has something to do with it, but we have precious little idea how to stimulate innovation—and no way at all to predict which innovations will lead to higher productivity.

Moreover, the timetable cannot be foreseen. Thomas Edison began wiring lower Manhattan for electric light in 1882, but electrification didn’t have a notable effect on productivity in U.S. factories until the 1920s. Computers were developed during World War II and widely used in business by the 1970s, but as late as 1987, the economist Robert Solow could quip, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

It is tempting to think that we know how to do better, that there is some secret sauce that governments can ladle out to make economies grow faster than the norm. But despite glib talk about “pro-growth” economic policies, productivity growth is something over which governments have very little control. Rapid productivity growth has occurred in countries with low tax rates but also in nations where tax rates were sky-high. Slashing government regulations has unleashed productivity growth at some times and places but undermined it at others. The claim that freer markets and smaller governments are always better for productivity than a larger, more powerful state is not one that can be verified by the data.

Here is the lesson: What some economists now call “secular stagnation” might better be termed “ordinary performance.” Most of the time, in most economies, incomes increase slowly, and living standards rise bit by bit. The extraordinary experience of the Golden Age left us with the unfortunate legacy of unrealistic expectations about our governments’ ability to deliver jobs, pay raises and steady growth.

Ever since the Golden Age vanished amid the gasoline lines of 1973, political leaders in every wealthy country have insisted that the right policies will bring back those heady days. Voters who have been trained to expect that their leaders can deliver something more than ordinary are likely to find reality disappointing.

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Op zondag 16 oktober 2016 10:33 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:
Heerlijk artikel in de Neoliberal Street Journal!

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http://www.wsj.com/articl(...)r-anymore-1476458742

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Op zondag 16 oktober 2016 11:13 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:
Over het industriebeleid van de Britten, en de accentveranderingen:

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http://www.prospectmagazi(...)l-policy-thatcherite

Ik heb zo maar het gevoel dat ze daar een stuk professioneler zijn dan het gestuntel en naive amateurisme in Nederland (bijv. het afschermen tegen afluisterpraktijken en beveiligen van kritieke kennis). Maar dat is slechts een gevoel.

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Op zondag 16 oktober 2016 14:10 schreef Terecht het volgende:

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Mooi artikel idd. Is in lijn met Piketty's stelling dat de periode in de 20e eeuw waarin economische groei hoger was dan rendement op vermogen een afwijking van de historische norm is geweest. Daar heeft de WSJ zich met hand en tand tegen verzet.

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Op zondag 16 oktober 2016 16:32 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:

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Wat is de oorzaak van de hogere vermogensgroei als de economische groei stil staat?

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Op zondag 16 oktober 2016 17:41 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Schulden.

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Op zondag 16 oktober 2016 17:47 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:

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Ja, het geld bijprinten en QE betekent aan de andere kant van de balans een schuld voor de gewone man.

Of zie ik wat over het hoofd?

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Op zondag 16 oktober 2016 17:47 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:

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Ja, het geld bijprinten en QE betekent aan de andere kant van de balans een schuld voor de gewone man.

Of zie ik wat over het hoofd?

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Op zondag 16 oktober 2016 18:12 schreef deelnemer het volgende:

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Ze kopen waardepapieren op, die ze daarmee uit de markt halen. Daardoor komt er meer geld in de economie.

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Op zondag 16 oktober 2016 16:32 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:

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Wat is de oorzaak van de hogere vermogensgroei als de economische groei stil staat?

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Op zondag 16 oktober 2016 17:57 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Als er geen productie tegenover staat ontstaat het geld uit niets. Dat is dan een hypotheek op een mogelijke toekomst. Valt die toekomst anders uit, krijg je een crisis.

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Op zondag 16 oktober 2016 18:29 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:

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En wie wordt daar beter van vraag je je af...

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Op woensdag 19 oktober 2016 11:47 schreef deelnemer het volgende:

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Het is een soort 'trickle down economics'.

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In economic terminology, charitable giving is pro-cyclical, not counter-cyclical, unlike programs such as unemployment insurance and food stamps, which expand to meet rising needs.

The trend from the Great Recession is evident in data from Giving USA, a clearinghouse for information on philanthropy. U.S. philanthropic giving fell from $344.5 billion in 2007 to $293.7 billion in 2009; then rose back to $316.2 billion in 2012 (the figures are adjusted for inflation).

But the total still hasn't returned to inflation-adjusted levels seen in 2004. Reductions were seen in all categories of donors — corporations, foundations, bequests and individuals — and also fell as percentages of personal income and gross domestic product.

Nor was that a new phenomenon. Part of the mythology of the Great Depression is that charitable giving rose during those hard times, but the truth is exactly the opposite. Overall giving fell by more than a fifth from 1929 through 1933, adjusted for inflation, before starting to recover. Among the wealthy, it fell an inflation-adjusted 70% in 1931-35 — about the magnitude of the stock market drop that had devastated wealth in the capital-owning class.

As the Depression took hold in the 1930s, the cost of caring for the unemployed and elderly quickly wiped out the resources of community and church groups, and then of state relief programs that had stepped in to fill the gap. The federal government responded with a series of relief programs, the most far-reaching of which, of course, was Social Security, which provided for not only old-age pensions but federalized unemployment insurance to relieve the states' burden.

Another issue is that philanthropic giving is not synonymous — at all — with helping the needy. Quite the contrary.

As charitable giving is structured in the United States today, it too often plays out not as the rich helping out the poor, but as the rich increasing the gap between themselves and the poor.

A 2007 study by Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy found that only 30% of individual giving in the benchmark year of 2005 was aimed at the needs of the poor — including contributions for basic needs, donations to healthcare institutions, for scholarships and allocations from religious groups. (The study was commissioned by Google.)

The smallest allocation of philanthropic giving to basic needs of the poor was made by the wealthiest donors, those with income of $1 million of more, who directed 3.8% of their giving directly to the poor. For the $100,000-$200,000 income group, that allocation was 12.4%.

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The degree of religious contribution is important, because a 2007 study by Indiana University found that only 10% to 25% of church donations end up being spent on social welfare purposes, of which assistance to the poor is only a subset. In other words, if you think of "giving" as "giving to the poor," a lot of the money donated by conservatives may be missing the target.

An extreme case may have been that of Mitt Romney, whose tax disclosures during his 2012 presidential campaign indicated that he gave a higher percentage of his income away than his Democratic opponent, President Obama, 29.4% to 21.8%. Of course he was richer, so he gave away a lot more dollars. But fully 80% of Romney's donations went to the Mormon church; and a large further chunk went to a family foundation that also funneled much of it to the church.