Dividend investing is! sustainable investing

Dividend investing was “sustainable” decades ahead of the current frisson of ESG-based sustainability. Think about it. The attraction of an income stream—whether of a publicly traded or closely held asset—is its value over time. Whereas a “price only” asset can be bought or sold tomorrow with the intention of profiting from a change in price a week or month from now, an income stream-based asset delivers its worth over many years. Investors might agree or disagree as to the current value of that income stream—and put a changing, daily price on it—but the NPV of the income stream is measured …

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NBN Interview with William Nordhaus

Can classical economics help figure out climate change and support policies that slow global warming?  Yale Sterling Professor of Economics William Nordhaus thinks so. In his new book, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World (Princeton UP, 2021), Nordhaus tackles the “externality” that is pollution and carbon emissions. By making several adjustments to how we treat this externality in economic terms, it can be brought back into the “system” whereby sensible regulation, market relations, and innovation can lead to markedly lower levels of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The most important of those adjustments is getting the price of …

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What if we counted differently……

Saijel Kishan’s recent Bloomberg article, provocatively titled, How Wrong was Milton Friedman is intriguing on many levels. It summarizes the work of George Serafeim, an HBS professor who wants to change how we measure company success and failure. Specifically, he wants to reward and punish companies on the income statement based on ESG impacts. That is, he proposes to put a dollar value on diversity or lack thereof, on polluting or not, etc. And then have those companies report profit and loss after consideration of their social impact. It’s an ambitious plan, and some would say just a natural extension …

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A thoughtful dissent from the ruling investing orthodoxy…..

Aswath Damodaran’s recent Musing on Markets blogpost (from Sept 21) offers a thoughtful dissent from the ruling orthodoxy on ESG investing. He highlights how the current “hype” (his word) leaves critical analytical questions “unanswered or answered sloppily.” For example, he asks,  “Do companies perform better because they are socially conscious (good) companies, or do companies that are doing well find it easier to do good?” If the latter, “researchers will find that ESG and performance move together, but it is not ESG that is causing good performance, but good performance which is allowing companies to be socially good.” He points …

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Same problem–global warming–but very different answers.

Is there a consensus on the best response to global warming? Not even close. Left and right both bring their own tools, math, and, most notably, agendas–climate related and non-climate related–to their policy prescriptions. From the economic right, Bjorn Lomborg offers economic growth to increase adaptation to a warming planet, as well as market-based innovation to mitigate carbon generation. From the left, Robert Pollin (and his co-author Noam Chomsky) put forth an Eco-Socialist New Green Deal. Listen to the NBN interview with the former here, and with the latter here.

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NBN Interview with Robert Pollin: Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal

Economist Robert Pollin has teamed up with Noam Chomsky to produce a manifesto for the New Green Deal in Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso). Their plan attempts to keep the planet from heating up too much while simultaneously redressing the economic wrongs that they blame substantially on unfettered capitalism. Not everyone will agree that eco-socialism is the answer to global warming, but all participants in the debate will want to understand the wide range of policy proposals that are being brought to the table. Listen to the NBN interview here.

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NBN Interview with Bjorn Lomborg: The economics of climate policy.

Should climate change policy be subject to a cost-benefit analysis leading to a variety of policy choices? Or is it so critical that the only “proper” path is immediate and extreme carbon reduction, regardless of the costs and the impact of those measures on the welfare of the population? Bjorn Lomborg’s new and controversial work, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (Basic Books, 2020) leans strongly in the direction of the former. Conducting that analysis, he comes to some shocking conclusions, notably that the “optimal” mix of global warming and …

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