My Fair Share

Peter's Book

A while ago I wrote about Peter Singer’s new book, where he talks about a fair share being an irrelevant notion.

I agree with Peter, as long as a fair share is seen a benchmark within a community.

Take my own community.  According to a recent study by some clever people at Queensland University of Technology, the average donation of people who share my postcode is the princely sum of 0.12%.

Crikey!

That seems fairly paultry to me.

Now, if we accept that Peter Singer was onto something when he said that the more you get the more you ought to give, then we can use the little gizmo to work out what the average amount ideally is for this town of mine.

Doing some maths on the QUT results, we can work out that the average taxable income for this postcode is about $500.

According to the gizmo, that means that each taxpayer ought give $5.

Now, that is a might less than the average $180 given by each person who does give.

So, what does that mean?

I think it means that if all 4000 taxpayers gave their “fair share” of $5, then it would be about $200 000 in donations.  As it is, the 1200 taxpayers gave a total of $240 000 in donations.

What does that mean for the fair share?

For me, it means that Peter is right – focusing on a fair share is pointless because it doesn’t account for those who do not give their fair share.  Focusing instead of what we are able to give as a benchmark – instead of some mathematical notion of what we each should give – then we may well have fewer people giving more.

Suddenly, 0.12%  doesn’t seem so bad – especially not in comparison to what it could be.

By the way, this is not at all what I had planned to write about today.