Arthur C. Brooks’s “Who Really Cares” certainly has a provocative thesis: Conservatives donate more to charity than liberals, even after taking factors like income and age into account. It’s a clear and well argued book for the most part, backed by numbers galore.

After a rather unnecessary forward from James Q. Wilson, hardly a page goes by without a noteworthy observation, statistic or assertion.

Importantly, Brooks contends ideology itself doesn’t create the difference; certain lifestyles and values associated with conservatism do. Religion, opposition to government income redistribution, stable two-parent families and entrepreneurship all increase a person’s likelihood of giving time, blood or money to someone else.

When otherwise liberal people possess these traits, they give, too — the effect of religion is particularly striking. Religious liberals give nearly as much as religious conservatives do, and secular conservatives actually surpass secular liberals in stinginess.

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Also, it will surprise many that anti-government welfare beliefs make a person more likely to donate to charity. In one survey, people who disagreed with the statement, “The government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality,” donated four times as much money as those who agreed. Brooks argues that, for many American liberals, left-wing political attitudes replace actual help for the poor.

Another of the work’s most interesting observations concerns tax deductions. Brooks points out that the government actually discriminates against the poor.

For example, say someone donates $100. If that person is well off enough to pay 36 percent of his income in taxes, he’ll save $36 for an actual sacrifice of $64. A poorer person with a 15 percent tax rate will only get $15 back, going without $85 when all is said and done.

There is plenty to criticize, however, in “Who Really Cares.” Brooks uses a statistical method to show donating increases a person’s future income (through charities’ social networks and healthy psychological effects), but he describes said method incomprehensibly. That’s a major problem in a book aimed at the general public.

And several bloggers have called Brooks out for neglecting cost of living in his calculations. If a big-city liberal and a small-town conservative both make $50,000, the urban dweller will have a lot less to give away after housing, transportation, utilities, groceries and other necessities take their toll.

These critics are especially concerned about Brooks’s comparison between South Dakotans and San Franciscans. On average the two groups donate the same amount to charity each year, $1,300 — even though San Franciscans make a lot more money. Proportionally, South Dakotans give 75 percent more.

In a phone interview, Brooks defended his thesis.

“Using disposable income might make a difference between some states, but it does not between South Dakota and San Francisco,” he said. “When you factor in disposable income, the gap changes from 75 percent to 50 percent.”

It’s also important to note that the conservative-liberal gap reaches beyond money to time and blood donations.

Still, top-notch works of nonfiction answer the most obvious questions they raise. Brooks said he left cost of living out because it’s a controversial measurement — organizations that rank states by charity, taking cost of living into account, come to very different conclusions.

Finally, Brooks positions himself as a former liberal, a “skeptical political independent” forced to change his views by overwhelming evidence. Yet he works in some standard-issue conservative talking points, clearly aiming for a right-of-center audience.

The 1996 welfare reform was a change “for the better” to a system that was “expensive, unwieldy, dependency-creating and wildly unpopular with the American public.” A “lack of fathers with honest jobs who live at home with their children and wives” causes delinquency. Right or wrong, these arguments aren’t likely to provoke liberal charity.

In the end, one can hardly blame the guy for wanting to sell books. And the vast majority of the work is empirical, insightful and reasoned enough that even liberals — and secular conservatives — will have to take notice.

Robert VerBruggen (www.therationale.com) is an apprentice editor at The National Interest.