But people can also achieve status by giving away their incomes. I would call it conspicuous philanthropy. They give money to build hospitals and schools and university libraries, all with their names on them. They can also give away money directly to people they know, offering to pay personally for a neighborhood tree planting or cleanup. In many cases, even though the donor’s name isn’t displayed, the neighbors know who it is. To the mature mind, that kind of recognition can be even better than conspicuous consumption.

Gift-giving has a long history. Marcel Mauss, in “The Gift” in 1924, and Karl Polanyi, in “The Great Transformation” in 1944, argue that reciprocal gift-giving — giving with some hope of recognition or response — has pervaded healthy human society from its Neolithic beginnings. Using experiments involving brain imaging, recent research by Tania Singer of the Functional Imaging Laboratory of University College London and Professor Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich has shown that reciprocity is supported by fundamental structures in the brain. We need to interpret our principles for society around these insights.

Undoubtedly, charitable giving can substitute for a good part of the things that the government would otherwise be doing itself, a factor that is rarely introduced into budget calculations. Indeed, in many cases, individual philanthropy may be more effective than government expenditures.

People with strong local knowledge, for example, may be better able to direct money to worthy recipients. And such giving eliminates the common resentment that government is taking one’s money and distributing it in ways that don’t correspond to our individual values.

SOME of the greatest moments in American history have been acts of charity — whether public or private. One huge example was the Marshall Plan of aid to Europe after World War II. In 1947, George C. Marshall, then the secretary of state, challenged Americans to “face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country.” This and other programs from 1948 to 1953 involved outright grants to Europe and other countries around the world, amounting to a net $33 billion, or 2 percent of total gross domestic product for that period. Those grants are still widely remembered today.

Instead of curtailing the charitable deduction, we should be aiming to make it an even bigger part of our culture. Charitable giving in the United States, although healthier than in other countries, is still not all that high. Using data from Giving USA, we see that total individual giving in the United States — including giving by those who don’t declare it on their tax returns — was only 1.9 percent of disposable personal income in 2011. Compare that with the traditional Christian, Jewish and Islamic standards of 10 percent!