Dear Big Pile of Awesome,
We know it's only been a couple of weeks since we The Concerned last wrote, and we haven't heard back from you yet, but a new worry cropped up in the interim. Sorry to complicate what has already been a rather busy off-season for you.
In recent days after dividend checks were cut to Alaskans, you got a new chief investment officer, and a glitch was discovered to have resulted in a failure to garnish some 5,500 checks, and people have been celebrating the apparent success of your "Pick. Click. Give." donation system. Despite all the celebration, which seems rather polite, we're concerned about that last one.
The Pick. Click. Give. program distributed more money to local and statewide charities and non-profit organizations this year than it ever has in its three-year history. The giving was so great this year, its third, that it totaled $100,000 more than the first two years combined. About 19,000 Alaskans sent a total of $1.57 million in an unprecedented flurry of online dividend benevolence, the lion's share going to entities that heavily advertised the system.
Despite the elated statements of grateful non-profits following the news of this year's record-setting totals, many of The Concerned found cause to worry. There were about 648,000 Alaska residents who qualified for dividend checks, and a measly 3.4 percent of Alaskans took the opportunity to donate a portion of their free money through the program.
For residents of a state that often prides itself in rallying together and giving money to good causes, plus one that has a long tradition of corporate giving, it's a sickeningly small number of individual donations, made even ickier by the fact that the money comes from an oil bounty they didn't exactly earn.
Some of The Concerned weren't surprised by the still-small amount of participation in the program. They recall a report from 2009 recounting analyses saying being stingy is basically par for Alaska's philanthropic course. Alaskans, apparently, are good at volunteering their time, but their wallets are pretty tight.
Some others of The Concerned, however, don't see a problem with all that or the low numbers. Not everyone applies for a dividend check online, after all, which is the only way one can become a pick-click-giver. They also reminded the rest of us that once money hits the ground, whether it was a gift or earned, it had better start running -- whether to the store or the bank. Everybody's chasing it. It might not seem very efficient to some of The Concerned, but your yearly gifts go to all residents, and people are free to choose what to do with the cash, which this year amounted to $1,174. As in most sectors of society, people don't often make so-called "right" choices.
But plenty more of The Concerned are worried what the relatively low number of people who donate could mean besides supporting a conclusion that Alaskans are living up to the stereotype that they're all so ruggedly individual they make libertarians look like Chairman Mao. If they're such individualists, why don't they go against the grain and donate more of their PFDs to a wider variety of organizations, or give nothing at all? Or even give the whole thing away? Talk about individualistic!
The cost of living in the state is generally higher than most parts of the Lower 48. And Alaskans tend to pay more for essential services than other Americans. Medical costs and housing to name two. In some places, it's like paying for San Francisco but getting, well, not San Francisco.
Many Alaskans have gotten used to living where "free shipping is not available," "price may vary" and "offer may not apply," and while grocery prices have gotten closer to the rest of the country in many Railbelt cities, they're still higher. Energy needs and prices remain high, even in cities, and crushingly high in many locales.
Wages are higher in Alaska, but so many people say they count on you to help with energy and consumer bills that we wonder how well it all balances out. Professor Scott Goldsmith of the University of Alaska's Institute of Social and Economic Research told The Concerned in an email that cost of living roughly negates higher average wages in urban areas like Anchorage. But in the rest of the state, with often dramatically higher costs of living, high wages probably don't compensate.
Unfortunately for us, he noted that he couldn't be more specific because determining relative cost of living must be done from one point to another, not in isolation town-by-town. And he wrote that even though income distribution appears flattering in Alaska compared to other states, and it appears that you put a floor under people at the end of the spectrum, your effect in that regard hasn't been calculated.
So it might seem selfish when Alaskans use you to pay off their own bills, buy new electronic gizmos and recreational vehicles, visit loved ones Outside or take booze cruises in Cancun, or even sock it away to pay for a dwindling portion of their kids' future schooling, rather than immediately donate part of it. But to most of The Concerned it makes forlorn sense that they'd use you to improve their own standard of living.
Which is why as concerned as we are that some 97 percent of Alaskans didn't choose to give from your bounty this year through very simple means, we can understand.
It could be that all of your annual payout is already being donated, in a way, to needy Alaskans: All of them.