Putting the Grift in ESG

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On the whole, I would prefer to live in a society run by cynics rather than saints—cynics tend to be less intrusive. However, when cynics pretend to be saints, they are playing a dangerous game, as many of those on Wall Street now peddling “socially responsible” investment (SRI) may soon discover. To be clear, I have no doubt that some of those pushing for more SRI (or the closely related concept of stakeholder capitalism) are true believers. Others, perhaps the smartest, are jockeying for positions of power — and the perks that come with it — under a corporatist regime (stakeholder capitalism is essentially an expression of corporatism). Still others are simply following the ancient Wall Street practice of repackaging nonsense and selling it at a profit…

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Woke Capitalism — The Next Generation

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The stakeholder capitalism advocated by the Business Roundtable, the World Economic Forum (“Davos”), and other groupings of oligarchs on the make, is, at heart, an expression of corporatism, an ideology based around the idea that society should be run in a way that recognizes the importance of interest groups rather than individuals. Thus, when it comes to determining what a company is for, shareholders are just one group of “stakeholders” who have to compete for management’s attention.

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The Truth is out There

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In the age of QAnon, it is of little comfort to learn in Michael Butter’s “The Nature of Conspiracy Theories” that such malevolent fables have been around for some time. Cicero devised one. Winston Churchill, at least once, passed along another. What’s different now, claims Mr. Butter, is who believes them, who spreads them and how they are disseminated. Once common among the elites, conspiracy theories were stigmatized, in the West anyway, during the postwar years. “We used to be afraid of conspiracies,” the author relates. “We are now more afraid of conspiracy theories,” a fear that helps account for the attention they attract.

But only partly: Ideas that might once have been confined to a pamphlet are now easily available on the internet, a space where anyone can be an expert and where conspiracy theories can provide a splendid living for those who peddle them. The internet has “largely nullified” the media’s “traditional watchdog role,” a change that Mr. Butter, who writes from a leftish-establishment point of view, mourns more than is entirely healthy.

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As GameStop Stalls, Will Regulators Start?

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Bloomberg’s Matt Levine continues to be a tremendous source of insight into the GameStop saga, but one possible response to what has happened, which is set out in one of his must-read articles on this stock’s excellent adventure/bogus journey (take your pick) and buried within the following not-to-be-taken-literally passage, should be treated with caution:

We have discussed before the sort of creaky U.S. rules around who can buy what sorts of risky investments, and I have proposed a simple standard. I call it the “Certificate of Dumb Investment.” Under this standard, anyone can buy diversified low-fee mutual funds to their heart’s content, but to buy dumb stuff—private placements but sure let’s say also volatile meme stocks—you have to go down to the local office of the Securities and Exchange Commission and sign a form saying that you know that what you’re doing is dumb, you know you will probably lose all your money, and you forfeit forever any right to complain. Then you can do whatever dumb thing you want.

Click on the link embedded in Levine’s text to see where he expands (in an article written in 2018) on how his Certificate of Dumb Investment regime would work. Some of this, I reckon (I cannot imagine why) contains just a touch, well, perhaps more than a touch, of hyperbole: “Then you take the form to an SEC employee, who slaps you hard across the face and says ‘really???’ And if you reply ‘yes really’ then she gives you the certificate.”

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Fascist means, green ends

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In ‘What is Fascism?’ (1944), George Orwell complained that the word ‘fascist’ had been applied to so many groups, (including conservatives, socialists, communists and Catholics), beliefs and even species (dogs!) that it had been reduced to something close to meaninglessness. And yet, he observed:

‘Fascism is…a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it?… To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any color, are willing to make.’

That was true then, and it’s true in 2021 — except that we should now add some of today’s harder-edged greens to Orwell’s list. A good number of their precursors in interwar Europe would not have been so diffident.

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Still Free and Alive

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Never judge a book by its cover. And never, probably, begin a review by quoting that line. But I think it’s appropriate here. For as I gazed at the cover of Francesco Boldizzoni’s “Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures Since Karl Marx ” and noticed the presence of the Grim Reaper, I prepared myself for a detailed discussion of the millenarianism that has characterized leftist thinking, not only since Marx but indeed long before him.

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Counting the Shareholder Out: When the Ruling Class Changes the Rules

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It comes as no surprise that Bloomberg News, which includes a section called Bloomberg Green, also features another called Good Business — a venue dedicated to “sustainable finance and leadership for a changing world.” His presidential campaign aside, Mike Bloomberg tends to get what he pays for.

It’s also not a surprise that Bloomberg journalist, Saijel Kishan, has written a piece for Good Business headlined “How Wrong Was Milton Friedman? Harvard Team Quantifies the Ways.” In this context, the target of the Harvard correction squad is, above all, Friedman’s 1970 article for The New York Times Magazine on shareholder primacy, the one in which, Kishan relates:

Friedman . . . declared that a corporation choosing social responsibility over maximizing profits was practicing socialism — a “fundamentally subversive doctrine,” he called it in 1970. In a free society, Friedman said, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Kishan gives herself only a few lines to describe that piece, which may explain why it is unclear whether Friedman was labeling socialism or a “corporation choosing social responsibility” as “fundamentally subversive.” Friedman had no fondness for socialism (#understatement), but in this case, he was referring to “social responsibility,” a notion he thought had implications far beyond the corporate sphere, none of them good.

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The Great Reset: If Only It Were Just a Conspiracy

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Writing for The Spectator US, Ben Sixsmith gets to grips with “the Great Reset” now being proposed by the World Economic Forum (“Davos”).

And yes, despite a name that sounds as if it were conjured up in some of conspiracism’s danker fever swamps, the Great Reset really exists:

“The World Economic Forum, which organizes the annual conference Davos, has launched an initiative called, yes, ‘the Great Reset’. It has its own website.”

Indeed it does.

But, after noting the involvement of “partners” such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, IKEA, Lockheed Martin, Ericsson and Deloitte, Sixsmith doubts whether the Great Reset can be seen, as some like to suggest (even allowing for a bit of hype) as “socialist Left Marxist” or a “global communist takeover plan.”

Fair enough, not least because the Great Reset is, in essence, corporatist, not communist. The participation of companies of the type that Sixsmith mentions is, in reality, the participation of certain members of their senior management, using shareholder funds for purposes that have nothing to do with the bottom line and everything to do with the wielding of power within a system akin to a concert, with the state — if not necessarily the government — acting as the conductor.

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The Slow & the Dead & Other Authors

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There’s something suitable, in this year gone awry, that the best novel I have read in 2020 purports to be an autobiography written from beyond the grave (“I am not exactly an author recently deceased, but a deceased man recently an author”) and that it was first published in 1881 (after appearing in installments in the Revista Brazileira). With 2020 being 2020, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas) has been rendered from Portuguese into English not once, but twice, even if it has been read by me not twice, but once.1The New Criterion arranged for me to be sent a copy of the Penguin Classics version, which has been translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux and boasts a perceptive foreword by Dave Eggers. That this is a paperback, and a rival (translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson) was only available in hardback was, I am sure, merely a coincidence.

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A Useful Pandemic: Davos Launches New ‘Reset,’ this Time on the Back of COVID

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COVID-19 is a bad disease that has been used to breathe new life into bad ideas. And so it comes as no surprise that the World Economic Forum (“Davos”) is deploying the pandemic as an argument for what it labels, with characteristic modesty, “The Great Reset” initiative:

There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.

Even if we pass over the presumption of the reset’s name, this is a small classic of the prose of soft authoritarianism. There is an “urgent need” that must be met. There is to be cooperation and management, the world is to be “improved,” and all of this is to be put in place by “global stakeholders,” — a conveniently vague phrase, with more than a suggestion of democracy bypassed about it.

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