Does This Investment Make Me Look Good?

One of the trendiest ideas in finance is something called “social impact investing,” which is the idea that people should put more money into socially beneficial companies and products, and less into socially harmful ones. That hardly sounds objectionable, but I am skeptical about how much good social impact investing can do.

The first risk is that social impact investing will be used to “whitewash” various harmful policies. By divesting from a particular set of companies, an investment fund loses at most a very small benefit from an additional degree of broader market diversification. The fund still is likely to earn the market rate of return on its other investments, and in the meantime it can claim virtuousness. At the same time, the funds can pursue socially harmful policies elsewhere: investing in companies that lobby for tariff protection, say, or emit less visible forms of pollution, or how about refined sugar?