> If Bruce Wayne truly wanted to use his money to reduce crime, he would be donating it to preschools and after-school sports programs.
To be fair, Bruce Wayne does, in most versions of the Batman stories, incredibly vast amounts of local charity of that type (and others), as well as personally going after criminals one by one, and there's probably limited capacity to productively absorb those funds (Wayne's pump-priming charity would probably also be increasing that capacity and enabling Wayne to shift more money into those approaches productively, were it not for the fact that it is somewhat counteracted by the rather extraordinary frequency of supervillian-initiated civic destruction in Gotham, which probably has a negative impact on capacity-development efforts.)
So we could say that Bruce Wayne knows well how to purchase fuzzies and utilons separately [0]. He spends a lot of his resources to help effectively by donating to local charities, and he gets the fun and good feelings from helping people by chasing criminals himself as Batman.
I wouldn't say that. After a certain amount of charity work is done, the Batman work gets to be as effective on a per-dollar basis by reducing crime through the method of intimidation.
To be fair, Bruce Wayne does, in most versions of the Batman stories, incredibly vast amounts of local charity of that type (and others), as well as personally going after criminals one by one, and there's probably limited capacity to productively absorb those funds (Wayne's pump-priming charity would probably also be increasing that capacity and enabling Wayne to shift more money into those approaches productively, were it not for the fact that it is somewhat counteracted by the rather extraordinary frequency of supervillian-initiated civic destruction in Gotham, which probably has a negative impact on capacity-development efforts.)