MOLI VIEW™

Charity can make you rich. That's the good news from Conde Nast's posh new Portfolio magazine, as proclaimed by contributor Arthur C. Brooks, head of the nonprofit studies program at Syracuse University and author of Who Really Cares: America's Charity Divide, Who Gives, Who Doesn't, and Why It Matters (Basic Books, 2006).

Brooks crunches numbers from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey and finds that "people who give to charity make significantly more money than those who don't."

That's not just because rich people have more money to give, Brooks insists. His calculations suggest that "more giving doesn't just correlate to a higher income; it causes higher income." (He figures this out using something he says economists call an "instrumental variable." If you're not an economist, I guess you just kind of have to trust him).

To figure out why altruism can be self-serving, Brooks looks to experts on the brain. He cites a study from the University of Oregon that shows that making charitable donations stimulates our basic needs centers — suggesting that giving is as essential as food or shelter.

Hmm. Whatever the science behind this phenomenon, Brooks is confident enough to include a handy calculator as an online companion to his article. The calculator asks for your annual income and total charitable donations in 2006, then gives you an estimate of how much of your income was "stimulated" by charitable giving (he estimated mine at a whopping 55 percent) and how much the US economy would grow if everybody gave the same amount I did (by 232 percent).

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