The American Spectator

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Special Report

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"Giving money to charity is thus more akin to conspicuous consumption than it is to blatant benevolence."

-- and leave some of that "Darwinian balance" as a tip for the dealer.

Like most of the pieces in this genre, the British journal trots out the latest bit of tentative research to prove that what pretends to be selflessness must really be self-interest, hypocritically dressed up as virtue. It ignores alternative explanations for the results -- such as, maybe the control group was bored? It writes off history as unrigorous -- after all, why pay attention to cases like Dr. Collins when we can look at lab results instead?

The Economist also ignores a mountain of evidence for why people choose to give money away to strangers. According to the best available research on the subject, people give to the poor because they were brought up to believe that's the right thing to do.

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