So my question is: Let's assume I'm a sophisticated enough leftist to know i'm not gonna be making any great contribution to world by putting my money into social responsible funds. I probably have as much apathy as you do to the self-congratulatory, "you can have your cake and eat it too" marketing of these funds. And assume I'm a sophisticated enough invester to know that my best and easiest long-term option is to invest in a balanced portfolio of indexed funds.
But at the margins, why not include social responsible funds in the mix? It's better than nothing.
An argument against this is: insofar as they strive to out-perform the market they'll gonna end up looking like any other fund; alternatively, if they don't single-mindedly make investment decisions based on maximizing their returns, they'll under-perform and you'd do more for world if you just invested conventionally and contributed the difference in the returns to a good cause.
however, consider this reductio ad absurdum counter: you could have a bundle over the last couple of years investing in private security firms that contract out mercenaries and torturers to the Pentagon. Could you really be assured that you could give away that windfall well enough to counter-act the suffering your investment contributed to? So even if the only thing a "social responsible" fund did was avoid investments like that, it's still marginally better, no?
-- adam
On 4/14/05, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >I have no money to "invest," but if I did have, and excluding companies
> >against which there is an organized boycott, I would not consider any
> >factors other than safety and return.
>
> I agree. When people ask me about socially responsible investment, I
> always say it's mostly a crock. They should invest conventionally and
> do the right thing with the rest of their lives.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>