WHY ARE WE British so ungenerous about generosity, especially when it’s American? “Let’s hope that African nations will opt for cheaper software than Microsoft,” read one letter to a British paper this week, commenting on Bill Gates’s decision to spend more time with his charitable foundation. “And that Gates will find that he is stymied by NGOs who don’t operate to any known business model.”

No matter that the scourges of Aids and malaria cry out for a revolution in the development, pricing and distribution of vaccines, the creation of an entirely new market for drug companies and a scaling-up of production way beyond the dreams of most NGOs. It’s easier to snipe at Microsoft for having slipped Internet Explorer on to our PCs than to admit that its inventor might create a breakthrough on poverty. We’ve spent years calling Gates a sinner, but we’re damned if we’re going to give him a chance at redemption.

The sulk deepened with this week’s announcement that Sandy Weill, the Wall Street titan, had done a “deal with God” to give away his $1.4 billion fortune. Mr Weill may indeed feel the need to make some peace with higher authorities, since escaping the clutches of Eliot Spitzer, then the Attorney-General of New York State, over allegations that he bribed an analyst into talking up stock by getting the analyst’s two children into an exclusive New York pre-school. So entertaining was the story that Woody Allen wrote a parody in The New Yorker about the world being rigged from pre-school for a wealthy elite. But in America they also remember that Weill built the Citigroup empire. Across the Atlantic, we only hear the bits that fit our prejudices. So we gleefully deny the man any credit for his principled decision.

When confronted with American largesse, the British tend to fall back on three face-savers: they’re richer than us; they get more generous tax breaks; and they’re social climbing. There is some truth in all of these, but they don’t go the whole way to explaining why Americans give about three times more to charity, as a proportion of GDP, than we do. That the personal wealth of some individuals is greater than the economy of Tanzania does not mean that a lot of perfectly average people are not also delving regularly into their wallets.

It is true that the UK tax regime for giving is more complex than America’s. But it is also quite generous. Charities can claim back tax at the basic rate, and higher-rate donors can claim back additional tax on top of that, although the paperwork does create a dispiriting psychological barrier. I know: I once spent a week trying to figure out how a large corporation I worked for could explain Gift Aid to our staff without switching them off at the first sentence. Perhaps my failure to do so helps to explain why nearly 35 per cent of US employees give to charity through their company payroll, as opposed to 2 per cent in Britain. But that gap is explained as much by culture as by complexity.

The British also tend to overemphasise the extent to which “new money” achieves social acceptance through conspicuous giving, because we have been so dominated by old money for so long. Outside a few waspish New England enclaves, where preppies strive to be as buttoned-down as their shirts, America has never echoed the British distaste for the nouveaux. It has never winced at the thought that money might have been made — horrors — in trade. Weill started as a runner on the trading floor. He and Gates don’t need to prove anything to anybody, except possibly to themselves, and in Weill’s case apparently to God, who seems pretty shrewd at maximising returns on guilt.

What we often overlook is America’s strong sense of moral purpose. Sir Peter Lampl, the philanthropist who finances education initiatives in England through his Sutton Trust, puts his charitable instincts down to “having spent most of my adult life in America”. That has left him with the feeling that he has been lucky enough to be successful, so he should give something back. This feeling is widespread. Every year I am stunned and shamed to see that the vast majority of those I studied with at Harvard have given something — $50, $100, $1,000 — to the university. I excuse my own stinginess by telling myself that my allegiance is to Oxford, where I did my first degree. That my Oxford college never asks me for money is a great relief, of course. If it did, I would probably mutter something about not wanting to subsidise a state institution. Yet a fifth of all graduates of state universities in America donate to their college every year, with no apparent concern about the public-private divide. And most are on average salaries.

Fortunately, there is a new generation emerging in London who seem to be more comfortable with America-style giving. Sir Peter, who now works full-time on his projects, is one of a new breed of entrepreneurial philanthropists who have got rich quite young and who work almost as hard at making their money work for charity (rather than turning it over to charity “professionals”) as they did at making it in the first place. And the capital is filling up with charity galas and dinners of a brashness and exuberance that makes old snobs wince. At a hedge-fund dinner recently ARK — Absolute Return for Kids — raised £18 million in a single night. We must hope that these hard-nosed business people will now judge their giving as they do their investing: does it deliver?

“Maybe the lesson of Bill Gates’s example,” Leonard Pitts Jr wrote in the Houston Chronicle this week, “for hundredaires and thousandaires at least, lies . . . in this maxim: do what you can, where you are, now.” That is the correct American take on it: give credit where credit is due and stop beefing about why other people can do it and you can’t. Stop resenting others for being rich, or flash, or capitalist, or American. We could all do with a bit of redemption.

camilla.cavendish@thetimes.co.uk

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