More Fallacious Comparisons with Europe

There is a rash of bad reasoning over at the New York Times editorial page lately. This time Carol Adelman asserts that America, despite its low level of state-sponsored international charity, is pretty generous after all. She argues that the while official government contributions as a share of GDP are low for the U.S. in comparison with other industrialized nations, these statistics are misleading. Charity, Adelman argues, is becoming privatized. To accurately guage the level of U.S. charity, you need to include private giving as well. If you do so, the U.S. gives a total of over 51 billion a year. Wow!

Adelman leads her readers to believe that she is not going to make the ridiculous argument that the U.S. is generous because it gives a far larger total than other nations. This is a very bad argument because the U.S. economy is also far larger, so Americans might be giving pennies on the dollar. Let's say that Japan gives 10 billion and we give 12 billion. The U.S. is more generous, right? Not really, because our economy is twice as big as theirs. Per person, the U.S. is nearly half as generous. Unfortunately, after not making this false comparison early in her op-ed, she then makes it near the end, when she says that Norway, while giving a high .92% of its GDP to charity, still gives far less than many American corporations. This is silly, since Norway is a very small country of 5 million people. Lots of companies dwarf Norway in size. Sigh.

But the biggest fly in Adelman's ointment is that while including America's private giving in U.S. totals, she doesn't mention the level of private giving in Europe. She just assumes that it is less, probably because conservatives have bought into the crowding-out theory (that government charity just displaces public charity, for no net increase). Adelman doesn't give us a shred of data on private giving in Europe. For all we know, Europeans are more generous both at the public AND the private level. So we have yet another invalid conservative syllogism. This is becoming a habit. Now I don't think that Adelman is a stupid person, so I can only assume she is trying to deceive her readers.

Once again, Adelman demonstrates that liars sure can figure.