Illustration: Chris Sharp

If charity begins at home, does it make a difference where home is?

For the past nine years, the Boston-based Catalogue for Philanthropy has used IRS data to measure state-by-state charitable giving against income, creating an annual Generosity Index that repeatedly ranks some states (such as Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama) among the most generous and others (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) as, well, “careful with money.”

But a November 2005 study by the Boston College Center on Wealth and Philanthropy (CWP), commissioned by the Boston Foundation, takes issue with the Generosity Index and the idea that the will to give changes according to state lines. The Boston College study focused on Massachusetts, ranked 49th in the 2005 Generosity Index and a state whose tightfisted showings (49th in 2004, 47th in 2003) have led to collective soul-searching worthy of Cotton Mather.

“New England wasn’t always so miserly,” lamented a Boston Globe columnist in 2003. “In 1630, John Winthrop urged his flock of pioneers to make the new settlement . . . a ‘model of Christian charity.’”

“Grinch state” was how the Boston Herald characterized Massachusetts later that same year, before pondering, “Why are we so cheap?”

The Generosity Index ranked Massachusetts and each state by subtracting its “giving rank” (average itemized charitable contributions) from its “having rank” (average adjusted gross income). The difference, or “ranks relation,” determined a state’s place on the index.

However, the CWP researchers found this method to be “severely biased” against wealthier states. Consider the rankings in 2004, a year that found Mississippi at the top of the generosity list. Massachusetts had a high “having rank” of 3 that year. Even if its citizens had given 10,000 times more to charity than did any other state, their “giving rank” could have gone no higher than 1, meaning a “ranks relation” of 2 and, in comparison with other states, a generosity rank of 23. Meanwhile, if everyone in Mississippi had donated nothing to charity, its “having rank” of 50 would have yielded a “ranks relation” of 0—enough to keep it from sliding any lower than 26 in generosity.

This quirk, in addition to the index’s failure to take into account the impacts on income of state taxes and costs of living, led Sociology Professor Paul Schervish, CWP director, and John Havens, the center’s senior research associate, to label the Catalogue for Philanthropy’s index “flawed.”

To Martin Cohn, spokesperson for the Catalogue for Philanthropy, the criticism is misguided. “From the very beginning, the purpose [of the index] has been to promote philanthropy by stimulating discussion,” says Cohn. “We never purported it to be a scientific study.”

As an alternative measure to the Generosity Index, Schervish and Havens calculated each state’s share of total national charitable contributions (from IRS data and estimations of nonitemized donations by the Illinois-based Giving USA, a philanthropy research and education foundation) relative to the state’s share of total national income (using IRS, Census Bureau, and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and adjusted for varying tax burdens and costs of living). Using numbers from the same year as the 2004 Generosity Index, for example, they ranked Massachusetts 11th. The highest- ranked states were Utah, New York, Maryland, Connecticut, and California and the lowest ranked were South Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, West Virginia, and North Dakota.

Still, the issue of geography and generosity isn’t exactly settled. In November 2005, Giving USA (on whose board Schervish sits) released “Analysis of Regional Variations in Charitable Giving,” using data from the IRS and a national survey. Out of nine regions, the study found that New England donors gave the lowest percentage of their income (1.6 percent, versus the national average of 3.1 percent).

According to Schervish, it’s time “to change the conversation,” to stop “shaming” people in a state or region and “focus on what generates generosity. . . . If generosity is not a function of geography . . . then what is it a function of?” Along with Havens, he will be looking into factors such as marital status, age, religion, and education in the second year of the Boston Foundation study.

Chris Berdik is a writer based in Boston.

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