It happens every year about this time.
The people of New England, and more specifically New Hampshire, get bashed.
The word most commonly used is stingy.
These insults stem from news reports of an annual index that claims to measure how much people across the country give to charitable organizations.
And according to this index, New Hampshire usually falls to the bottom.
But as NHPR's Mark Bevis reports, new research has found that this image of the parsimonious New Englander is old, tired, and wrong.
The cause of all this bad mouthing of New Englanders is a report called the Generosity Index.
A publication called the Catalogue for Philanthropy has compiled the index since 1997.
Its brainchild is CFP's President George McCully.
tape: the numbers come from the IRS which publishes annually a summary of the nation's tax returns. our role is simply to make sure that the numbers that are relevant to charitable giving get out and are circulated.
Here's how it works.
McCully's group ranks each state using its per capita gross income.
The latest index ranks New Hampshire as the 9th wealthiest.
Then the index determines the average charitable contribution reported to the IRS and again ranks the states.
And New Hampshire came in 48th.
McCully then subtracts the second number from the first and comes up with the Generosity Index.
New Hampshire usually lags at the back of the pack.….this year dead last.
One reason given for the low ranking is that New Englanders supposedly don't give as much money to religious institutions.
Mississippi, as usual, comes in as the number 1 most generous state in the nation.
Despite the comparisons, however, McCully says he does not mean to imply any state is less generous.
tape: basically all the generosity index has ever said is that New England is distinctive as a region because we have the largest disparity between our high income rank and our low giving and that's all we've ever said. The media of course translates this into the Generosity index reports that New England is the stingiest in the country.
McCully says he compiles the index only to prompt talk about charitable giving.
Talking about giving is all fine and good, says Paul Grogan, as long as the people talking have the facts.
Grogan heads the Boston Foundation.
Earlier this month it released its own study on charitable giving in New England.
Grogan calls the Generosity Index bogus and says no one should pay any attention to it.
tape: it's methodologically very very flawed. In other words they don't do the math properly and that generates a highly distorted comparative picture of charitable giving state by state.
For example says Grogan, under the Generosity Index, if Massachusetts gave a thousands times what it does now, it would still rank only 26th.
And if Mississippi gave nothing, it would also still rank in the middle of the pack.
tape: any real comparative study would have to take into account factors that aren't even considered in the Generosity Index apart from its flawed methodology which is differences in cost of living, differences in tax burden, and the very important difference between secular and religious charitable giving that varies enormously region by region.
The Boston Foundation has done its own statistical analysis of the IRS data and finds that New England states show up in the top 12.
tape: I do hope we can get past this idea that mass and the other new England states are miserly and ungenerous. It never seemed plausible that that was the case and I think we've finally showed why.
Melissa Brown has discovered similar results.
But she's gone at the research differently.
Brown works for the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
And she's used survey data.
In fact she uses the largest compilation of survey data on this subject.
It asks people what they give and to whom.
And the study cross checks the answers with tax reports.
Tape: and we added up what they told us that they gave and we find some really interesting things. In New England, in particular, the percentage of households that are giving is really high, it's above 90%. IN the rest of the country its 2/3 roughly of the households that give. Nobody is talking about that . You can't see that in the tax data.
On average, New England households contribute about 1200 dollars a year to secular causes.
That's nearly 40 % more than the rest of the country on average.
The report was paid for by half a dozen charitable foundations from across New England.
But Brown says the data was already collected.
The sponsors just paid for the compilation.
And that notion that New Englanders don't give to religious institutions.
Not true, says Brown.
Tape: The percentage of people giving to religion is just under 50% and nationally it's just under 45%, a higher percentage of households in New England are giving to religious organizations than is true nationally.
On average New Englanders give less to those institutions, but with more people giving, she speculates, it balances out.
Brown's report also points out that in other regions of the country, factors like education, wealth, and marital status are associated with charitable giving.
That's not the case in New England where people are likely to be donors regardless of other factors in their lives.
For NHPR news, this is Mark Bevis in Concord.
