In his talk last week, Robin Hanson mentioned an apparently suboptimal level of charitable donations to for-profit companies.
My impression is that some of the money raised on Kickstarter and Indiegogo is motivated by charity.
Venture capitalists occasionally bias their investments towards more “worthy” causes.
I wonder whether there’s also some charitable component to people accepting lower salaries in order to work at jobs that sound like they produce positive externalities.
Charity for profitable companies isn’t likely to become a popular concept anytime soon, but that doesn’t keep subsets of it from becoming acceptable if framed differently.