Disaster Fatigue

What if they had a disaster and nobody gave?

NEW YORK — Ironically, the more bad news there is, the less likely people may be to give.

"Hearing about too many disasters makes some people not give at all, when they would have if it had been just one disaster," says Michal Ann Strahilevitz, who teaches marketing at Golden Gate University and specializes in the factors at play in charitable giving.

Compared with disasters like the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, those in China and Myanmar have generated just a trickle of aid. As of Friday, Americans had given about $12.1 million to charities for Myanmar, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. The group said on Monday that it was too soon to count contributions to China.

A number of factors may be at play in the slow American response, including a lack of sympathy for the repressive governments involved, doubts about whether aid will get through, and an inclination to save pennies because of shaky economic times at home.

But Americans may have also been influenced by the quick succession of monumental catastrophes in two distant lands. At least 130,000 people are dead or missing in the Myanmar cyclone, and more than 34,000 in China's earthquake.

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This problem came up after the 2004 Asian tsunami, an event that brought an avalanche of $1.92 billion in charity from the United States, according to the Giving USA Foundation. Hurricane Katrina eight months later generated even more, $5.3 billion.

But then fatigue seemed to set in. The earthquake in Pakistan that killed nearly 80,000 people generated just $150 million from Americans. And the Guatemala mudslide shortly thereafter that killed at least 800 was virtually forgotten.

If one disaster can be galvanizing, several in a row can be paralyzing.

"It's too much pain, too much tragedy for someone to process, and so we tend to pull ourselves away from it and either close off from it out of psychological defense, or it overwhelms us," says Cynthia Edwards, a professor of psychology at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C.

A string of tragedies can also make potential donors feel nervous about their own safety, making them less likely to give. That could be especially troubling now for Americans, many of whom are worried about their jobs and rising food and gas prices.

I think the governments on the receiving end of the disaster are as responsible as anything for the decline in giving. When Americans hear the Myanmar tinpot generals are putting their own names on U.S. aid packages to convince the people that the generals are the ones providing the food, Americans can easily walk away. In China you already have a government that doesn't get much sympathy under any circumstance from American donors, and what with all the noise about the upcoming Olympics and China's effort to control the media spin, once again Americans can easily tell them to take a hike.

The moral of the story: Have your disaster in a country that's free and friendly with America and you'll get whatever you need.