trajano's Journal: Ethical investments

Although I would agree that ethical investments are a good idea in terms of the long term, I do not think it is realistic. Primarily even if in the long run they would yield a lot, a lot of them would disappear before people would really reap their benefits. There are two observations I have on this:

1) Money rules in the govenerment in general

As your guest noted, you have a the US government subsidizing the purchases of SUVs, it does not surprise me the least bit. Even after Sept 11, though they disallowed most things to be brought inside an airplane, including nail cutters, they still allowed "Bic lighters" (I mean for what? we're not allowed to smoke in the airplanes anyway).

Corporations fund the government. Whether it is during their campaign or during elections. I wonder how much funding would the "Green Party of Canada" receives in comparison to the Liberal, Conservative, or NDP parties. Heck they were not even invited to the debate. And since marketting rules in the end (sad to say), those who have the most money would always win.

Also, I think people would want to vote for someone who has a chance of winning, the usual comment I get when I say I am voting for the "Green party" is "you're wasting your vote" and I would agree to that, but I still do it anyway just because its the principle of things. But I also think it is a waste of time because I know the party won't win.

2) People want the cheapest products and services.

People still want the cheapest they can get for their products, if it wasn't then we wouldn't have these outsourcing to China, India and Mexico. Employees be damned, the customer takes priority over anything else. This is the mantra that goes through my company and Walmart. I suspect almost all companies that are sucessful in the current economy.

This will cause morale problems in companies, but this is something that won't go away because most people need jobs (whether they are happy with it or not). People will usually want the cheapest products. Whether it was done by an ethical company or not is not something that goes into most people's purchase decision.

The only way this would be solved is:

• Products from ethical corporations need to be cheap
• The govenrment need makes it more expensive to run unethical companies.
• That would require people to vote for politicians who are willing to do that.
• Those politicans have to market themselves better.
• The politicians need to get money from corporations.
• The corporations need to be ethical.
• The corporations need to have an incentive to be ethical.
• People need to buy products from ethical corporations.
• Products from ethical corporations need to be cheap (see the catch-22)?

I do hope I am wrong with my observations.