With donating money, there’s also a disconnect between donating the money and the resulting action. If you fly to Haiti yourself and build houses, you immediately see the results and get to signal to all of your friends that you are the type of person that donates your college spring break to helping the less fortunate. If you instead donated $1500 to Direct Relief International, your friends would pat you on the back but you would likely gain more status by doing it yourself.
So I think there are significant issues of status here—a lawyer volunteering at the soup kitchen gets to signal that they have compassion for the poor. A lawyer donating $1000 to issues of local poverty really does have compassion for the poor, but isn’t signalling it as strongly as doing the work themselves.
With donating money, there’s also a disconnect between donating the money and the resulting action. If you fly to Haiti yourself and build houses, you immediately see the results and get to signal to all of your friends that you are the type of person that donates your college spring break to helping the less fortunate. If you instead donated $1500 to Direct Relief International, your friends would pat you on the back but you would likely gain more status by doing it yourself.
So I think there are significant issues of status here—a lawyer volunteering at the soup kitchen gets to signal that they have compassion for the poor. A lawyer donating $1000 to issues of local poverty really does have compassion for the poor, but isn’t signalling it as strongly as doing the work themselves.