Did you donate to charity in the past, but no longer do so? If the answer is yes, you’re not alone. For the second year in a row, the philanthropy research foundation Giving USA reported that fewer Americans are donating to nonprofits than they used to, and the total amount of giving is declining once inflation is taken into account. Some in the philanthropy world are calling it a generosity crisis — fewer than half of American households now give cash to charity.

Twenty million fewer households donated in 2016 than in 2000. And the money that is being given is increasingly coming from a small number of super-wealthy people. The only surprising thing about these findings, to me, though, is that anyone would be surprised by the generosity crisis.

The Generosity Crisis and the State of the Economy

One big, and rather intuitive, reason for the generosity crisis and why fewer people are donating money to registered nonprofits these days is the general state of the economy. The number of donors started sharply declining right around the tail end of the Great Recession in 2010. Of households that stopped donating money to nonprofits between 2000 and 2016, most earned less than $50,000 per year.

Young people are also less likely to donate to registered charities than older people. The relationship between age and willingness to give away money makes sense — the younger you are, the fewer years you’ve had to earn money.

But the age gap has grown over the past few years. In part, this can be explained by high costs of living, student loan debt, and inflation. “Younger donors simply don’t have money right now,” said Rasheeda Childress, a senior editor at the Chronicle of Philanthropy, regarding the generosity crisis.

But we can’t blame the economy for everything. The decline in organized religion might be the biggest factor in the decline in charitable giving.

Religious institutions are major hubs of philanthropy — highly religious adults volunteer nearly twice as much as other adults in the US, and roughly half of them volunteer through a religious organization. A report by the Do Good Institute, which conducts philanthropy research at the University of Maryland, found that people who belong to community groups, religious or otherwise, are more likely than others to volunteer and donate money.

Read the full article about the generosity crisis by Celia Ford at Vox.