Arthur C. Brooks: "Charity Brings Happiness, Happiness Brings Success."

Arthur C. Brooks reveals a surprising truth about success, generosity, and happiness. Backed by data and real-world evidence, he shows that giving isn’t just a result of success — it’s a driver of it. When you give more, you become happier, more fulfilled, and ultimately more successful in life. Want Ad-Free Episodes? Join QOD Club and hear zero ads inside our Circle community. Plus, book clubs, mentorship calls, weekly business trainings, and new likeminded friends. Get started for only $9. Source: Why Giving Matters | Arthur C. Brooks | 2009Hosted by Sean CroxtonFollow me on InstagramSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm going to talk to you today about something that you've probably given a lot of thought to, charity. But I want to talk about it in a way that maybe you haven't thought about it, about how you can use it in your lives and use it in the lives of others. I want to talk to you about how charity can and should prominently figure in the lives of Christian people.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  But in a way that maybe hasn't quite occurred to you before. And I want to start with a quote from the famous industrialist John D. Rockefeller from 1905. Rockefeller was famously quoted in that year as saying, "God gave me my money." Now, that's sort of troubling to Christian people like us. "God gave him his money." And it's frequently used as evidence that John D. Rockefeller was a bad man, that he believed that he deserved to be rich when other people were poor. But that's actually not what he meant. Here's the full quote. "God gave me my money. I believe the power to make money is a gift from God,

• 1:07Speaker 00

  to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind." What he meant was this. He believed that he made money because he was charged with helping others with his money. And he honestly believed, he wrote it other times, that if he stopped giving his money and giving it in the right way, that God would take his money away. Now, that still might trouble you theologically, that God would intervene in the finances, in the direct finances of John D. Rockefeller. But you have to admit, it doesn't sound so weird at that point. Now, John D. Rockefeller believed that he was rich because he gave so much. And throughout his life, before he was a rich man, he gave a lot.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  He was a charitable person. A lot of entrepreneurs believe that one of the reasons that they're rich is because they give. Entrepreneurs in this country are some of the most charitable citizens. And I've always heard this, because for years I taught in a department of entrepreneurship. So I got to know the modern John D. Rockefellers, who thought that they were rich partly because they gave.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  But you know, I never believed it. I never believed a word of it. Because I was trained as an economist. A lot of you have taken classes in economics. And when you walk into your first class in economics, here's what the professor doesn't say. You want to get rich? Give all your money away. That's not the advice. It doesn't make sense. No, no, no. You have to have money first, and then you can give it away. That's what economists like me thought, think. So I set out to test John D Rockefeller's view that he was rich because he gave. And all the other entrepreneurs that I talked to. And my goal was this. Next time I heard somebody say it, I was gonna say, no, no, no, no. I have the data. The data say no.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  You have to have it before you can give it away. Well, I'm gonna tell you what I found. And in a nutshell, what I found was that Rockefeller was right, and I was wrong. And I'm gonna show you the evidence that shows you how wrong I was, and how you can use this information in your life, and how I'm using it in mine. But first, a little background. A little background on charitable giving in America. Americans give. Americans give a lot. In 2006, American citizens privately gave about $300 billion away to charity. Now, $300 billion. That's, is that a lot? Is that a little? Who even knows these days? I mean, the president with a stroke of a pen could give away three times that

• 3:44Speaker 00

  to people who've not paid their mortgages, for all we know. It's a crazy time out there. But to put it into perspective, $300 billion is more than the entire national income of Sweden. We give away to charity more than the Swedes make in their whole country in income. That's a lot of money. Americans, 75% of Americans' families give every year. 50% volunteer their time. And many Americans give in myriad other ways that are not captured in data. Now, at one point, when I was teaching about this subject, I decided to figure out who in America Is the most charitable and I compared states.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  And you're not going to be very surprised at what I found. The most charitable state in the United States, of course, is Utah. Where people give approximately twice as much as the second leading state in charitable giving. So congratulations to you. I recommend that you be proud, but that's not right. You should be pleased about that. And keep it up. Now, given this, one often asks, how do Americans compare in charitable giving with people around the world? And there's a perception out there, if you listen to politicians, that we're stingy. So Jimmy Carter, the former president of the United States, said in a recent, relatively

• 5:12Speaker 00

  recent speech, you know, the problem with Americans, they just don't care about the less fortunate of the world. Well, the data say that President Carter is wrong. If we look at how Americans give per capita compared to citizens in other countries of the world, we will find that the average American citizen gives away three and a half times as much money each year as the average French citizen, seven times as much as the average German, 14 times as much as the average Italian. Now, as an economist, I want to know whether or not that's because we're richer. So when you correct for income differences and tax differences and all the things that that make the United States a different country, you find that the gap doesn't close.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  This is an authentic difference in culture. Once again, something I do believe we can be quite pleased with. The question then is, why does it matter? And which is pushing and which is pulling? Is the fact that we're generally speaking a richer country, the reason that we give so much, as I had always thought? Or is it true what John D Rockefeller would have said, that we give so much and guess what? That's one of the secrets to our success? That's what I set out to show. I set out to show that Rockefeller was wrong, that you have to have the money before you give it away, that we all need to go to work, that we need tax policy that puts plenty of money in our pockets and then we'll help each other. That's what I intended to show.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  And the way that I set out to show that is by gathering data on 30,000 American families from all over the country. Actually colleagues at Harvard University collected the data in the year 2000. From coast to coast, 41 communities, big and small towns, north and south. Salt Lake City was one of the communities we looked at, Washington DC. Seattle, Washington, my hometown. Lots of places were in there. 30,000 families were asked questions about how much they gave, what they gave to, how much money they made, about their education and their family life and everything in between. It was the most comprehensive look at people's service behavior and their charitable giving that we've ever had before. And I really eagerly anticipated these data because I was gonna show

• 7:22Speaker 00

  what I'd always thought. This was gonna give me a statistical way to show that you have to have the money first. So I charted it up, did all the statistical analysis, took me months in my darkened office and with my computer, waiting for my conclusion. And I got the conclusion. The conclusion was, sure enough, when people get richer, they tend to give more money away. But I also found the reverse, that when people give more money away, they tend to prosper. Specifically, here's what I found. If you have two families that are exactly identical, in other words, same religion, same race, same number of kids, they live in the same town,

• 8:07Speaker 00

  same level of education, everything's the same, except that one family gives $100 more to charity than the second family. The giving family will earn, on average, $375 more in income, and that's statistically attributable to the gift. Now, when I got this, I was perplexed. I was really confused because it didn't go with my theory. This is what in psychology we call cognitive dissonance, where I have two competing ideas and they're in conflict with each other. On the one hand, I had the theory that I'd always worked under. On the other hand, I had data that completely contradicted the theory. So I did what college professors always do in this case, which is I got rid of the data.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  And I said, "That can't be right. I've obviously messed something up. I got new software. I looked for new data. I re-crunched the numbers. I kept coming up with the same thing. I ran the numbers again and I looked at volunteering. Same thing. People volunteer, they do better in life. I did the same thing with blood contributions, blood donations. Think about that. Giving blood. You're not gonna get richer if you give blood, are ya? Yeah, you are. You are. So, it can't be right. So I ignored it. I didn't publish it. Didn't publish it at all. And I was kind of rolling it around in my head for a long time. And I thought, you know, I've got a better way to test this. I'm gonna look at the whole United States. I'm gonna see how charitable giving changes over a 50-year period and compare it to

• 9:38Speaker 00

  what happens with income, and then I can see which is pushing statistically and which is pulling. So here's how I got the data that looked like this. And I won't bother you with too many graphs like this. But in this graph, what you see is the top line is what's happened to income, inflation-adjusted. This is real purchasing power to the average family between 1954 and 2004. And what you see is a 150% increase in real purchasing power. This is great news. This is actually an amazing thing worldwide. You simply don't see growth like this in real purchasing power to already rich countries. It's an incredible achievement

• 10:19Speaker 00

  that the United States has undertaken. This is a testament to prosperity that comes from productivity and hard work and dedication. This is a good thing. The bottom line is the changes in charitable giving. What you find there is that the charitable giving has also increased over the same period, per family, on average, by 190%. And this is an even better story, because what this says is that we're getting more prosperous in this country, but we're getting even more generous over time. I'm pleased with this result. It tells me that what Jimmy Carter said about this country is not right. Once again, we're not a stingy country. Could we be more generous? Of course. But it's not true that at least we're getting stingier.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Okay, but the real question for me is which is pushing and which is pulling? Is income driving up donations? Or is donations driving up income or what? And the answer once again is both. You find that when our country gets richer, people do give more away. But as we give more away, that translates into better economic growth for this country. Statistically, what we find is this. If we were to increase our private charitable donations by just two, by just 1%, which is about $2 billion a year, $2 billion a year from people like you and me writing checks to our favorite causes, our churches, our favorite charities. If we just did that, that would translate into GDP of about $39 billion new dollars.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  That's a great multiplier. Now, $39 billion by today's stakes is nothing. I mean, they, the president pulls $39 billion from behind the cushions of the couch at the White House. It's laundry money. It's not, it's three months in Iraq. It's 5% of the stimulus package. It's nothing, but it's a great multiplier. If I can take your $2 billion in charity and turn it into $39 billion, then, then suddenly charitable giving is not just a great investment for you. It's a patriotic act for our country because it translates into jobs and growth and opportunity and tax revenues and all the stuff that we really like.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  If that's true, if I'm getting this crazy result and it keeps coming back with the same thing over and over and over, Rockefeller was right. Still refuse to believe it.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  So I went to a colleague, finally, in desperation, who specializes in the psychology of charitable giving. And I said, "I'm getting this result that I can't understand. It doesn't make sense. It's like the hand of God or something on the economy. And I can't believe it's true." And the first thing he said is, "Why don't you believe it's true? You're a Christian, aren't you?" And I said, "Yeah, but I'm a social scientist. We're not supposed to think those things. I need a more earthbound explanation." And he said, "Well, I'll give you one. We've known this for 30 years in the psychology profession." I said, "Well, tell me, tell me." He says, "We just haven't been talking about money. You economists, you worry about money all the time, and money's boring.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  We worry about something that people really care about, the currency by which we really spend our days, and that's happiness. And we've known for 30 years that people who give get happier as a result. Can you use that?" And I said, "Oh, yeah, because I know from teaching at a business school that the best way to run a successful business is to hire happy people. That's really where the action is. Some of you know that, too. You want to have a productive business? You want to be a productive person? Work on your happiness. Happy people show up for work more. They work longer hours. They work more joyfully. They're happier with every aspect of their productive lives. Happiness is the secret to success.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  And now, if that's true, I've got the answer. Charity brings happiness. Happiness brings success. And now I'm on to something. It turns out that the data on happiness and charitable giving are beyond dispute. People who give to charity are 43% more likely than people who don't to say they're very happy people. People who give blood are twice as likely to say they're very happy people as people who don't give blood. People who volunteer are happier. The list goes on. You simply can't find any kind of service that won't make you happier. Laboratory experiments using human subjects find that when people are asked to give to other people, they elevate their mood.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Furthermore, if you increase your level of charitable giving, you can permanently, your level of what psychologists call positive affect, which is to say, being in a good mood. You can be a happier person that way. It's the secret, basically.