As year-end nears, we hope you’ve saved time in your busy holiday schedule to pause and give thanks. At Aspire, we have so very much to be thankful for, including our relationship with you! To share our gratitude, we’d like to give you some thoughts. Thoughts on giving, that is.
Though I can’t name the original source, I remember reading; “The impulse to give, to help others if you can, is a natural human instinct.”
It’s easy for that “data point” to get buried in the barrage of news we read to the contrary. But what if we adopt the same long-term perspective for investing and personal giving alike?
If you view our global capital markets close up and colored by the heat of the moment, it’s easy to grow disheartened and lose faith in the market’s ability to prevail. That’s why, as your investment advisors, we are forever stressing how important it is to consider your investments from a comfortable distance, through the clarifying lens of empirical evidence, and in the context of patiently participating in decades of rich – and likely enriching – human enterprise.
It might help to think about charitable giving from the same vantage point. Thanks to research-oriented organizations such as World Population Review and many others, the evidence on our giving proclivities becomes clear, with much room for optimism to be found.
Myanmar, one of the world’s poorest nations, is also among the most generous.
In its annual review, World Population Review assesses “generosity”. Based on its most recent data, they found that Myanmar ranked as one of the highest in donating both time and money.
GivingPledge.org has been quietly accumulating a collection of similar pledges for years from ultra-wealthy families, both famous and unknown. As Warren Buffett described in his pledge: “Were we to use more than 1% of my claim checks (Berkshire Hathaway stock certificates) on ourselves, neither our happiness nor our well-being would be enhanced. In contrast, that remaining 99% can have a huge effect on the health and welfare of others.”
Most of the rest of us appear to be doing our bit as well.
For example, according to a June 2021 press release from USA Today, “Americans gave an estimated $485 billion to charity, surpassing the peak last seen before the Great Recession [by about $1 Billion]”. The figure represented the highest level of giving measured in the organization’s 65 years of reporting on it, with more than 70 percent of the donations coming straight from individual donors. Here’s to us regular folk!
Will our giving cure all that ails the world? The evidence tells us this might be a tall order indeed. But we’ll echo one of the lesser-known GivingPledge.org participants, Indian-American businessman and 5-Hour Energy mogul Manoj Bhargava: “We may not be able to affect human suffering on a grand scale but it will be fun trying.”
…And with that…we wish you and yours a very prosperous and fun-filled 2023!
