Less Well-Off Donate Bigger Income Percentage @sciam 60-Second Science Podcast by @cagraber

Wealthier people on average gave a lower percentage to charity in 2012 than they did in 2006, while the less affluent increased their giving. Cynthia Graber reports. October 13, 2014 | |

America’s slowly crawling out of the . On average, we're earning more. Researchers wondered how the increased income affected . So they dove into IRS data from 2006 to 2012. They broke the data down by state, county, metropolitan area, and zip code. The results—180 billion philanthropic dollars in 2012—covered about 80 percent of individual donations to charity.

The investigators found that even though wealthier Americans, defined as those making more than $200,000 a year, were making more in 2012 than they did in 2006, they actually decreased their donations by an average of almost five percent.

Middle- and lower-income Americans, defined as people making less than $100,000 a year, increased their charitable giving by almost the same nearly five percent. This increase came despite the fact that that group was earning less, on average, than they had in 2006. The findings are in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Even though the wealthiest Americans have decreased their donations by percentage, they still gave more than four a half billion dollars more in 2012 than they did in 2006. That’s because the wealthiest Americans captured nearly all of the recession recovery. They’re doing more than a trillion dollars better than they did six years earlier, in a rare case of a rising tide lifting only some boats.

—Cynthia Graber