EA - Compilation of Profit for Good Redteaming and Responses by Brad West

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Compilation of Profit for Good Redteaming and Responses, published by Brad West on September 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TLDR: Document compiling redteaming on Profit for Good available, with public comments invited and appreciated. This thread further includes two argument headings against Profit for Good to be discussed in the comments.As one might suspect given that I have started a nonprofit to advance it, I believe Profit for Good, the philanthropic use of businesses with charities in vast majority shareholder position, is an immensely powerful tool. To get a sense of the scale of good that Profit for Good could do, see 14:22 of Cargill's TED Talk for what 3.5T could do, which would be about 3.5 years of 10% of global net profits. Here is a good place to start regarding why we think it is promising and here is a longer reading list.However, throughout time, many people have brought up criticisms and red-teaming. It is important to realize that Profit for Good, especially in initial stages, would likely require the use of philanthropic funds for launching, acquiring, and accelerating businesses that counterfactually could be used to directly fund extremely impactful charities that we know can do good. For this reason, it is critical that all of the potential reasons that Profit for Good might not succeed, not be the best use of funds, and/or have unintended negative consequences be considered. For this reason, I am in the process of aggregating red-teaming from wherever I can find it, organizing such redteaming, according to argument heading, verbatim where possible, and doing the same for the responses to such red-teaming. I am in the process of forming my own syntheses of the criticisms and responses. I am also continuing to compile new arguments and formulations/evidence regarding former arguments.If you are interested in supplying new arguments under existing headings, your own syntheses of existing materials, or new argument headings, you may feel free to add a comment on the existing document or email me at [email protected] and I will integrate it verbatim into the document (please indicate if you would like such argument to be anonymous for any reason, or I will credit you with the contribution.I will include in this piece the first two argument headings, and invite you to contribute to such arguments for or against in this thread (I will update the main document accordingly). I intend to do future posts evaluating later argument headings. These headings regard the criticism (1) that Profit for Good businesses will increase costs for consumers and (2) that Profit for Good businesses will be held to a higher standard than normal businesses in ways that critically impair their ability to compete. Entire Redteaming document also here.Criticism: Profit for Good businesses will increase costs for consumersBrad's Criticism Summary: A frequent version of this "criticism" is in fact a confusion of the Profit for Good model with "bundling." With "bundling", a normal firm with normal shareholders would build in a charitable donation into a purchase, increasing the product's price commensurately so as not to harm its shareholders. "Bundling" would increase consumer costs, however, it is not the Profit for Good model. The donation is not a "cost", but rather a function of the identity of the shareholder that is entitled to profit. It is not clear why a charity as shareholder would be a higher cost than a normal investor as a shareholder.There are versions of this criticism that are not products of confusion as to what Profit for Good is. One is that many businesses that are able to provide the lowest prices are multinational firms and those prices are possible due to billions of dollars of capital costs. Essentially, many kinds of ...