Author Archives: Sheila

On The Plus Side

Earlier this month, Axios had a very interesting article about the shifting landscape of American philanthropy and the growth of what it called “collective giving.”

The fastest-growing form of philanthropy in America is collective giving — where individuals, usually women, pool their funds and their decision-making, Felix writes.

Why it matters: This kind of structured giving provides a glimpse of what a democratic, egalitarian philanthropy looks like.

The big picture: A detailed new report from Philanthropy Together, based on extensive interviews, focus groups, and surveys, finds that the philanthropy practiced by giving circles is very different from the top-down practices of foundations funded by billionaires.

  • The leaders and members of the groups are overwhelmingly women, and often women of color. 60% of groups are entirely women.
  • The charities they support tend to be small community organizations. The giving is overwhelmingly local.
  • Rather than concentrate on metrics like “bang for the buck,” the groups tend to be more concerned with racial equity and inclusion.
  • Donations are broadly unrestricted. In the jargon, it’s “trust-based philanthropy” that isn’t tied to outcomes or specific projects.

The article noted that these commitments tended to focus on change rather than charity–grants were dispensed in ways intended to foster the growth and strength of institutions perceived as likely to create stronger communities.

The growth of this particular type of philanthropic giving has been notable; as the article reported:

By the numbers: The number of giving circles, and the number of people who are part of one, tripled between 2007 and 2016 — and then tripled again between 2016 and 2023.

  • Today, there are roughly 4,000 such groups, with 370,000 members; between them, they gave away more than $3 billion over five years ending in 2023.
  • “The movement is now on a trajectory to double again in the next five years,” finds the 2024 report.
  • Most members donate less than $1,000 per year.

As the article also reported, participants reported improvements in their physical, mental, and spiritual health as a result of joining–a consequence attributed to the creation of community at a time when America society has been described as “atomizing.” People who became involved in these philanthropic endeavors also became more likely to extend that involvement to other local civic institutions.

We might take a number of lessons from this report.

Certainly, if we focus only on the differences between what we might call “rich donor” philanthropy and these more modest and localized efforts, the distinction between charity and change seems significant. Large foundations often stress that their grants are intended to build capacity rather than simply “prop up” a given program, but the extent to which that actually works is contested. It’s likely that the emphasis on local giving allows these giving circles to make more considered evaluations of the day-to-day impacts of the organizations they support–most of which are likely to be much smaller than organizations able to employ grant writers and apply for foundation support.

What really struck me, however, was the effect membership in these giving circles had on those who participated. As the article noted, participation built community–and the experience of community in today’s America has increasingly diminished. There are a number of reasons for that, ranging from the nation’s increasing urbanization (it can be harder to establish a circle of friends in a big city, especially if you’ve recently located there) and greatly diminished church-going (the most positive outcome of regular attendance at church, synagogue or mosque has always been the social support, rather than the spiritual experience).

America’s political polarization hasn’t helped.

It is also true that classical liberalism–the philosophy that undergirds our Constitution and Bill of Rights–requires a difficult balancing act between immersion in a community and individualism. The communitarian critique of liberal democracy asserts that America’s focus on individual rights and civil liberties has eroded the comfort people derive from being “embedded” in particular communities. In my view, communitarians fail to recognize the significant downsides of the degree of “embeddedness” they extol, but there is no denying that the nation’s emphasis on and championing of rugged individualism has eroded the comfort and support provided by membership in a community of like-minded folks. (The Greeks were onto something when they advocated for a “golden mean” between extremes.)

The growth of these giving circles may be one sign that the pendulum is swinging back from isolated individualism to participation in communal activities, and from a focus on national issues to the sorts of local problems that are more amenable to local efforts geared to change and improvement.

It’s one more reminder that all the news isn’t bad…and that change, while it can be destabilizing, is often positive.

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Very Interesting…

I am aware of a number of upper-income folks who justify their continuing support of Donald Trump by asserting that–“like most Republicans”– he has been better for their portfolios. That has always struck me as a poor excuse for ignoring what another Trump Presidency would do to the country (and for that matter, the world), but I’ve chalked it up to selfishness and (misunderstood/shortsighted)  self-interest.

Evidently, I should have attributed it to ignorance, because it turns out that–when it comes to investment returns– Democratic administrations have greatly out-performed Republican ones.

As I was reading a recent issue of the Indianapolis Business Journal–a publication that covers local government far more thoroughly than the Indianapolis Star, by the way–I came across the regular column by Mickey Kim devoted to giving investment advice. This particular column was titled “Keep Calm and Don’t Mix Politics with your Portfolio,” and it was an effort to persuade people not to base their investment strategies on partisanship rather than performance, not to suggest that one party was better than the other for investment.

But the data was eye-opening, at least for me. (I readily admit to chosen ignorance about all things investment.)

My friend Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist for Wall Street research firm CFRA, dissected price changes for the S&P 500 going back to 1945 based on election results.

Republican administrations are generally viewed as “pro-business,” and conventional wisdom is that stocks do better with a Republican in the White House. There has, indeed, been a huge difference in returns during Democratic versus Republican administrations. However, as is often the case, conventional wisdom is wrong. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but Stovall calculated from Harry Truman’s inauguration on April 12, 1945, through March 15, 2024, the average annual return for the S&P 500 was 44% higher with Democrats in the White House (9.5% vs. 6.6% during Republican administrations).

Further, according to Invesco and Haver Analytics, hypothetically speaking, the best-performing portfolio from 1900 to 2023 was the “bipartisan” one that stayed fully invested in the Dow Jones industrial average (a price-weighted index—cannot be invested in directly—of the 30 largest, most widely held stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange) during both Democratic and Republican administrations. Again, past performance is no guarantee of future results, but starting with $10,000, this portfolio grew to almost $9.9 million.

Conversely, a “partisan” portfolio, invested only during Democratic or Republican administrations, underperformed by millions of dollars. The same $10,000 invested only during Democratic administrations grew to about $528,000. Invested only during Republican administrations, the initial $10,000 grew to a bit less than $181,000.

Kim concluded this analysis by reiterating his intended message, that “there can be a huge cost to letting a partisan political storm crash your portfolio.” His sound advice: “Develop an investment plan based on your long-term goals and stick to it. Your financial future will depend far more on how much you save and invest, not who wins the election.”

I am in no position to quibble with that advice, which strikes me as quite sound, but it certainly does raise a question about those upper-income Trump apologists. I suppose it’s possible that their portfolios grew under Trump, but given the truly excellent performance of the economy during the Biden Administration, it’s quite likely they’ve done as well or better with a Democrat in the White House. Is their purported reliance on portfolio performance an evasion intended to mask the actual reasons they support Trump (racism, misogyny, isolationism…)? Or do they actually not understand the significance of the data I’ve cited above?

Perhaps they’ve simply and unthinkingly accepted the old “country club Republican” belief that the GOP is the party looking out for the interests of the business community, while Democrats are “giving away” tax dollars via welfare and government spending. If so, someone needs to explain to them that both the short and long-term interests of the business community include such things as social stability, a well-maintained infrastructure, an educated and adequate workforce, and a population with enough disposable income to support robust consumer demand.

As investors are often admonished, past performance is no guarantee of future results. But the odds would certainly seem to be in the Democrats’ –and Biden’s–favor.

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Vouchers Again..

When we look at the growth of America’s polarization, and the reasons for it, we need to recognize the significant contribution made by voucher programs.

I have frequently written about the mythology of so-called “school choice” programs. The original argument was that they would allow poor children to escape sub-standard public schools, that children attending them would receive better educations, and that competition with “government schools” would trigger improvement in those schools. (The critics constantly complaining about the nation’s public schools for some reason never suggested putting additional fiscal or human resources into improving those schools. Instead, the “fix” was entirely punitive– siphoning off existing resources in order to generate competition.)

It is now pretty clear that the actual motivation for privatizing education was as a mechanism to evade the First Amendment’s prohibition against sending tax dollars to religious institutions (destroying teachers’ unions was the cherry on top….). Proponents successfully argued that the money was going to parents, who were then free to choose religious schools if they wished.

Of course, the vast majority of schools accepting vouchers are religious–and the vast majority of families using vouchers send their children to those religious schools. Meanwhile, those initial promises remain unfilled: voucher students have not performed better on standardized tests (often, quite the contrary); a majority of the families using vouchers are middle and upper-middle income, not poor; and far from triggering improvement in the nation’s irreplaceable public school systems, the programs have impoverished and hobbled them.

Most people who are familiar with the performance of voucher programs know all this. What is less well understood is how educational vouchers have deepened American divisions. A recent report from In The Public Interest focuses on how and why.

The report looks at what voucher schools do with the public dollars being bled from public schools.

They preach—and practice—discrimination. Education Voters of Pennsylvania has pulled together a list of the ways voucher schools have discriminated in that state, and Illinois Families for Public Schools has done the same for Illinois—both make for bracing reading.  But what’s true for Illinois and Pennsylvania is true across the country.

The study documents discrimination against LGBTQ+ students, discrimination on the basis of religion, and discrimination against students requiring special education attention. A large number of religious schools also teach that women should not have the same rights as men. In Wisconsin, Lutheran schools receiving public money hold to the following beliefs:

Since God appointed the husband to be the head of the wife (Eph 5:23), the husband will love and care for his God-given wife (1 Pe 3:7). A wife will gladly accept the leadership of her husband as her God-appointed head (Eph 5:22-24).

In church assemblies the headship principle means that only men will cast votes when such votes exercise authority over men. Only men will do work that involves authority over men (1 Co 11:3-10; 14:33-35; 1 Ti 2:11,12).

 Women are encouraged to participate in offices and activities of the public ministry except where the work involves authority over men.

The Arizona Lutheran Academy website includes the following text:

Many families are surprised to learn about the options and come to realize a private, Christian education can be a reality. It is rewarding to walk families through the tuition assistance process and see how God provides in ways that some never knew existed.

As the Executive Director of In The Public Interest wryly commented, “Well, not God, exactly. All of us are paying for it with money intended for public schools.”

Discrimination paid for with public money is bad enough, but what is worse is that voucher schools– especially but not exclusively religious voucher schools–can teach (or omit teaching) pretty much anything they want. A colleague and I looked at Indiana’s voucher schools a few years back, and found few of them bothering with civics.

More to the point, historians tell us that public schools were intended to be constitutive of a public. In other words, America’s public schools were established to do more than teach subject matter, important as that task is. They were meant to undergird e pluribus unum–to create an over-arching unity from our diversity. Residential segregation has always made that goal difficult, but even in neighborhoods where the children come from similar socio-economic households, they bring other differences to the classroom, where they should learn that the American Idea respects those differences but also welcomes all of them to a common civic table.

Enormous amounts of our tax dollars are being spent to avoid those lessons. Vouchers are contributing to America’s polarization and to the growth of Christian Nationalism–and they are doing so without producing any of the educational benefits originally promised.

They’re a very expensive scam.

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Words And Deeds

Among the hackneyed adages we all exchange from time to time is the one that admonishes us to Ignore what people say; instead, we’re told to look at what they do. These sorts of standard sayings persist in the culture because they point to a central truth, and this one is no different. Actions really do speak louder than words.

Which brings me to Arizona.

As everyone who reads or listens to the news now knows, the Arizona Supreme Court recently struck down a 15-week limit on abortion, and instead revived an 1864 law banning the procedure–a law so old, it preceded Arizona statehood. The law they revived reads:

“A person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two years nor more than five years.”

Arizona only became a state in 1912.

Given the toxic politics of abortion bans in the wake of Dobbs, Republicans in the state publicly decried the ruling. Even those who had previously supported total bans issued more “moderate” criticisms of the court’s decision. But then–as another hoary phrase might have it–the rubber hit the road. Democrats in the Arizona legislature proposed to repeal the law–and Republicans refused to allow that repeal to go forward.

As the AP reported:

The Arizona Legislature devolved into shouts of “Shame! Shame!” on Wednesday as Republican lawmakers quickly shut down discussion on a proposed repeal of the state’s newly revived 1864 law that criminalizes abortion throughout pregnancy unless a woman’s life is at risk.

The state Supreme Court cleared the way on Tuesday for enforcement of the pre-statehood law. Arizona abortion providers vowed Wednesday to continue service until they’re forced to stop, possibly within weeks.

State legislators convened as pressure mounted from Democrats and some Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, for them to intervene.

House Democrats and at least one Republican tried to open discussion on a repeal of the 1864 abortion ban, which holds no exceptions for rape or incest. GOP leaders, who command the majority, cut it off twice and quickly adjourned for the week. Outraged Democrats erupted in finger-waving chants of “Shame! Shame!”

It is interesting, however, that–despite the candidates’ frequent allusions to their (Christian) religiosity and Right-wing bona fides, none of the ads talk about abortion. And as the media has reported, rather than repeating his frequent previous boasts about being the President who named the Justices who gutted Roe v. Wade, even Trump has tried to “moderate” his position by coming out for a Dobbs-like “states’ rights” position.
What has happened in Arizona should serve as a lesson to voters who might be tempted to believe these GOP efforts to downplay their efforts to end reproductive freedom for America’s women. Once in office, that new not-so-moderate “moderation” will evaporate.
Ignore what they say–and take note of what they do.
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P.S.

After I wrote yesterday’s post about White Rural Rage, I re-read my description of the Niskanen Center’s far more careful 2019 analysis, and decided that it bears re-posting. So here it is:

The Density Divide is the title of a very important paper issued in June by Will Wilkinson, Vice President for Research of the Niskanen Center. It looks in depth at the phenomenon that I usually refer to as the “urban/rural divide”–delving into the attributes that make individuals more or less likely to move into cities, and examining the consequences of those differences and the steady urbanization of the American polity.

The paper is lengthy–some 70 pages–but well worth the time to read in its entirety. It is meticulously sourced, and replete with graphs and other supporting data.

Wilkinson confirms what others have reported: a substantial majority of Americans now dwell in the nation’s cities and generate the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth. But he goes beneath those numbers, referencing a body of research demonstrating that people who are drawn to urban environments differ in significant ways from those who prefer to remain in rural precincts. He focuses especially on ethnicity, personality and education as attributes that make individuals more or less responsive to the lure of city life.

He goes on to describe how this “self-selected” migration has segregated Americans. It has not only concentrated economic production in a handful of “megacities”–it has driven a “polarizing wedge” between America’s dense and diverse urban populations and the sparse White populations remaining in rural areas. That “wedge” is what he dubs the “Density Divide.” (Wilkinson is careful to define “urban” to include dense areas of small towns–the divisions he traces aren’t a function of jurisdictional city limits. They are a function of residential density.)

Wilkinson finds that the “sorting mechanism of urbanization” has produced a rural America that is lower-density, predominantly White, and “increasingly uniform in socially conservative personality, aversion to diversity, relative disinclination to migrate and seek higher education, and Republican Party loyalty.”

That sorting has also left much of rural America in economic distress, which has activated a “zero-sum, ethnocentric mindset.” (That mindset is reflected in the angry rhetoric spouted by rural MAGA hat wearers about “un-American” immigrants and minorities, and disdain for “liberal elites”–all groups that are thought to reside in those multi-cultural cities.)

The density divide–together with America’s outdated electoral structures– explains the 2016 election. The “low-density bias” of our electoral system allowed Trump to win the Presidency by prevailing in areas that produce 1/3 of GDP and contain fewer than half of the population. That low-density bias continues to empower Republicans far out of proportion to their numbers.

Wilkinson reminds us that there are currently no Republican cities. None.

As he points out, the increase in return to human capital and density has acted to amplify the polarizing nature of selective urbanization. Temperamentally liberal people self-select into higher education and big cities, where the people they encounter exert a further influence on their political attitudes. They  leave behind a lower-density population that is “relatively uniform in white ethnicity, conservative disposition and lower economic productivity.” Economic growth has been shown to liberalize culture; stagnant or declining economic prospects generate a sense of anxiety and threat. (In that sense, the political scientists who attributed Trump votes to economic distress were correct, but the distress wasn’t a function of individual financial straits–it was a reaction to the steadily declining prospects of rural environments.)

Wilkinson argues that there are no red states or blue states–not even red or blue counties. Rather, there is compact blue urban density (even in small cities in rural states) and sprawling red sparseness.

This spatial segregation of people with very different values and world-views is radicalizing; Wilkinson reminds us that a lack of exposure to intellectual diversity and broadly different points of view breeds extremism. Because urban populations are far more intellectually diverse, more homogeneous rural populations have shifted much farther to the right than urban Americans have shifted left.

The United States population is projected to be 90% urbanized by 2050–not too many years after we are projected to become “majority-minority.” Those projections suggest we will see increasing radicalization of already-resentful rural inhabitants.

The prospects for returning to rational politics and a truly representative governance will depend entirely upon reforming an outdated and pernicious electoral framework that dramatically favors rural Americans. Whether those reforms can pass our very unrepresentative Senate is an open question.

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