Has the willingness to help others left the building?
After a decade of severe austerity measures and cuts in spending on public services, volunteers are the ones in our country that keep the libraries open and maintain public gardens. Yet despite an ever-growing need for citizens to lend their private time to a good cause, the number of volunteers in the UK has stagnated since the turn of the century.
What really astonishes me, however, is the distributional shift in the various age groups among volunteers. Whereas the number of volunteers below the age of 45 has increased in the last years, the share of people between the ages of 55-64 has dropped by 7%. How come that particular people in their fabulous fifties have evidentially ceased to stop supporting good causes?
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