What's the alternative to the profit motive? Suppose the goal is to get fluorescent dye to every person who can make good use of fluorescent dye. Selling dye in the usual way depends on the Profit Motive. I'll use the label "Good Intentions Motive" to describe giving dye at no cost to anyone who requests it.

I support the Good Intentions Motive. I mentioned charity several times in an earlier conversation as a way to reduce the gaps left by the Profit Motive. The two motives can work together.

But if "the goal isn't profit" is it true that "everyone can benefit" under Good Intentions alone?

I notice a problem right at the beginning:

The problem? This was the fifth request of the week, and it was only Tuesday.

Under Good Intentions, success is a problem. There are costs to make and distribute dyes, and increasing success means increasing costs, without any corresponding increase in the resources used to make and distribute dyes.

Hence the Janelia Research Campus did not promote their Good Intentions.

We didn’t formally advertise our decision, but over the following months our willingness to share became an open secret.

Under the Profit Motive, a firm will face growing pains as business scales up, but this is the most desirable sign of success. Every additional order brings revenue which supports satisfying more orders. The goal of getting dyes to everyone who can use them is supported by spending money on advertising. The goal of reaching every potential customer is so important that a promotion in which only 1% of the audience responds is worthwhile.

A simple search for "fluorescent dye" online produces a number of invitations to acquire dye via the Profit Motive, some from firms that have made great efforts to establish a reputation for reliability and convenience. I had 300 μg of PA Janelia Fluor® 549, SE in my shopping cart in minutes.

It's not easy to find the Good Intentions site. If you can find it, you have to register before you can request a product. After I registered, a senior scientist contacted me to ask if I am affiliated with an organization (information "important for us to meet our legal obligations"). I confessed I was just snooping around and didn't need any dye.

It's great that Janelia is performing this service to whatever extent their budget allows. Probably they enable some work to be done that would not have happened because of financial limitations. Probably there is also some waste when people use free Janelia dyes on projects that might not have seemed worthwhile at $138 per 300 μg.

I think the challenge is in scaling, so everyone can benefit. With Good Intentions, additional demand reduces the available supply and makes it harder to satisfy the next request. With the Profit Motive, additional demand stimulates the creation of new supply, welcoming further demand. There is no need to screen customers; even if people buy the dye for useless projects, in the long term they will promote greater availability for everyone else.

The Use of Knowledge in Society explains how the price mechanism promotes coordination among different people without requiring planning or oversight.

Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all his without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.—brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process.

mentioned to am_Unition