A couple of different articles got me thinking about the act of giving and society’s take on the actual act of charity. This is not an overly serious take, so let’s be a bit light and airy, just get a couple ideas out there.

The first of which is the hype surrounding Bono and Oprah and Apple’s ‘Red’ iPod. If you missed it (and I don’t know how you could have, with the fawning and the media-inpsired love in) Bono et al. is helping to launch a line of products ‘Red’ which will have a portion of the proceeds go towards buying and distributing antiretroviral medicine to AIDS patients in Africa.

Read more about it here in the venerable Washington Post

This is the celeb cause du jour (well this and adopting children in Afria, but that is another blog post). Oprah, Bono, Penelope Cruz, Christy Turlington, Chris Rock, Mary J Blige… basically all jumping on the “Sounds Good. Does Good” Apple marketing pitch. On the surface it sounds great. I’m going to buy an iPod, I will choose to buy a ‘Red’ iPod in which $10US will go to this AIDS charity. Fantastic.

Problem is, of course, is this idea is insane. The whole concept of the ‘Red’ line is to assuage consumer guilt. Buy a device that is overpriced and that you don’t really need and feel GOOD about your purchase in that you’re giving back to the world. People are saying to themselves – ‘well I don’t donate to charity, or I do, but not enough so I’m going to buy this Red Razr or Converse shoes, or Gap shirt and I’ll feel better about myself’. Some activists have jumped on this bandwagon – “Bono turns shopping into a funding stream to fight AIDS” raves ‘The Advocate’. Somehow I am unconvinced. How about I buy an MP3 player which can be had at 50% of the cost of an iPod and donate the remaining $100 to an AIDS charity? Wouldn’t that be better?

Then I found this article: on Slate.com which takes an economic look at the act of giving. It summarizes the findings of a recent experiment by John List, an economist at the University of Chicago.(here is the link if you want to read the paper directly) Essentially they approached 5000 people with different charity fund-raising techniques to see which are the most successful. I don’t think anyone would be surprised to see that A) lottery charities raised more money than voluntary contributions and B) in the words of the paper, it found that a “one standard deviation increase in female solicitor physical attractiveness is similar to that of the lottery incentive”, translation: If you have a hot girl collecting money, people are more likely to give.

Summary: People are not entirely altruistic in their charitable giving. They’ll donate more money if they can see there is something to gain (cars from a lottery, impressing a hot girl).

Which brings me back to the ‘Red’ Bono campaign, and indeed Bono himself. You may not have caught an interesting article recently (didn’t get much press, I wonder why) which detailed how U2′s music publishing company recently moved its head office from Ireland to the Netherlands when Ireland got rid of a law that allowed artists to not pay tax on their royalty cheques. Check it out here in the also venerable International Herald Tribune. U2 wrote off the move as “tax effective”, which it is. I’m 100% for tax effectiveness. I’m 0% for preachy millionaire rockers saying one thing and doing another. Remaining in Ireland would have exposed U2′s yearly $110M royalty cheques to a 42% tax, versus a 5% tax in the Netherlands. Now that money could have gone towards social services in Ireland, or even been part of Ireland’s contribution to the vaunted “Make Poverty History” campaign. Maybe U2 should make the move and then donate the remaining 37% to the campaign…

Why is Bono avoiding taxes which go to pay for social services and foriegn aid? Why are we encouraged to spend more money on technological gadgets to “give” to charity rather than giving directly to a charity itself, thereby avoiding a level of administrative costs? Why do people have a tendency to donate proportionally more money to charity when we have some sort of stake in the outcome?

I’m not going to answer those questions, because I can’t, but it raises some interesting points. I for one would not be caught dead with a ‘Red’ product. I’ll donate directy to AIDS charities thank you, I don’t need commercialism disguised as altruism dictating to me.