Why Giving Matters by Arthur C Brooks is a very interesting article. This article was written by a Roman Catholic economist and printed in BYU Magazine. It is especially interesting when dealing with what to do about Haiti. What people do not realize is that: 1st government aid is inefficient (only about 30 cents that enter DC actually arrive anywhere outside of DC), 2nd whether Haiti should receive aid and whether the government should do it are two completely different things, but no one is drawing the distinction between the two.
There are positive internalities, I guess you could say, to donating altruistically that cannot and will not come to pass through government financing. The author’s point of researching giving was to prove that you need to make more to give, and he threw out his results about three times without publishing them because they didn’t say what he wanted them to. Finally he realized that there really is a reason that those who give get more. He talks about the experiments that we talked of in class with the donators into a communal pot. There was a follow up experiment that isn’t as commonly known, however, where they found that afterwards the ones in the spin off experiment were told to elect leaders. Those who were elected were those who were the first to donate, and when allowed to donate between $5 and $0 they were also most likely to give most. This comes in to play as servant leadership. For every $100 donated by a family equal in other respects to another, income increases $375 and it even works for donating blood. Those who want a biological take on Economics should definitely check this out.