Yes, There Are Two Americas

Review from the WSJ:
WHO REALLY CARES
By Arthur C. Brooks
(Basic, 250 pages, $26) The book's thesis is offered not as a sermon or platitude -- telling people what they ought to be doing -- but as a work of skillful and intensive empirical research, revealing what people are doing already. Our most pervasive cultural assumptions about the generosity of liberals and the stinginess of conservatives turn out to be almost completely wrong.
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If Mr. Brooks is right, our era's common sense of the matter -- that the political left is more compassionate than the political right, and that America is a remarkably ungenerous nation by world standards -- is demonstrably inaccurate. In fact, Sen. John Edwards's repeated claim that there are "two Americas" turns out to be correct but misstated: The line of separation runs most saliently not between the haves and have-nots but between the gives and the give-nots, between those Americans who respond to social needs with their own money and time and those who do not.

Mr. Brooks speaks here with the authority of a liberal who has been mugged by the data. "These are not the sorts of conclusions I ever thought I would reach,"...
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By consulting a wide range of metrics, ranging from rates of charitable giving to hours of volunteer work donated, Mr. Brooks concludes that four distinct forces appear to have primary responsibility for making people behave charitably: religion, skepticism about the government's role in economic life, strong families and personal entrepreneurship. Those Americans who have all four, or at least three, are much more likely to behave charitably than those who do not...