In 2005, how to align your money with your values
(Page 3 of 3)
Harper: Let me give you a more finely balanced example. Investing in nuclear power is probably one of the greenest agendas you can pursue. But I pretty much doubt that people will do that, even though it's logical and ethical by the power of its logic. Because for these communities of so-called ethical investors, nuclear power is a bad thing.
Green: Our problem is not with the generation of nuclear power, because from a cleanliness standpoint, that's the cleanest form of energy that can be generated. The difficulty is with the waste that is produced and the fact that we have no effective long-term way to deal with it except to bury it underground.
Harper: People always say that there's a problem with storing nuclear waste, and this is not a trivial issue, of course. But this morning I got on an airplane in Philadelphia and flew to Boston. The technological challenge of flying me from Philadelphia to Boston is much more complicated and serious than the technological problem of storing nuclear waste. There's more nuclear waste in the granite of Yosemite National Park than can ever be created by US nuclear power stations.
There are more ordinary - and a little less politicized - [unethical things] than global warming and environmentalism. Gambling and Hollywood [for example] have disproportionate impacts on poor people - people at the bottom - particularly Hollywood. It gives people a vision of life, a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world, that's antithetical to their success in many ways. However you look at it - whether it's locking them into sexual license, whether it's locking them into a vision of cynicism, or whether it's locking them into a materialism where they think that's the way to be human - the way to succeed is to have all this expensive stuff that you have to buy, some sort of ticket to the rat race.
Green: Yes, the conversations have been there for quite some time, and in varying forms. There is a group of professionals engaged in corporate dialogue over the content of media. And that includes video games - violent video games - [and] movies.
Charles's comments on gambling are absolutely right. There's a fascinating study that was done on states that had enacted a lottery, and the long-term financial, or economic, impacts on those states. It's the poor people, it's the ones who can't afford it, who are taking the grocery money and using that to play the lottery. And when you look at state budgets, they're counting on this money to come in. So then they have to find ways to get people to pay more to play the lottery. Unfortunately, it's a negative spiral, and it's one that you very rarely hear about.
Robinson: There are broad categories such as healthy living, which would include natural and organic foods, the largest of which is Whole Foods. That category is a $20 billion space that is filled with relatively new companies, all of which have relatively small capitalizations and tend to be more growth-oriented than anything else. Another major category would be alternative and renewable energy. We think this is a space that has reached its point of inflection. Not only is demand rising but the technologies have become more economical.
Green: Socially responsible investors in 2005 will see increased market share. Even during the first three years of this decade, when the market was doing so terribly, the socially responsible funds saw new money coming in, and they saw that the investors that they already had stayed with them. I think that will continue. People are expressing a lot of confidence in socially responsible investments. They are long-term investors. They choose their investments carefully before they make them, and then they stick with them.
• For further discussion, tune in to the Monitor's webcast of the panel's presentation at The Mary Baker Eddy Library.
