Rooting out thinking is rooting out ESG
Cost of living and other struggles are driving thinkers away from global financial centers
In their views on ESG, Berkshire’s W. Buffett and C. Munger, have in the past shared and faced criticism over statements that any long-term value investing requires taking into account externalities. We have to admit in addition that personally both of them have avoided tobacco companies out of moral position (concerns over consumer health).
We agree and will be expanding on that thought in further publications that any ESG investing requires thinking, which needs those capable of independent deliberation. Setting aside for now professional investment services reforming around ESG focus, we first look at individual retail level: their prospective clients or self-managed investors. Neither is easy and requires own due diligence, having your pension savings in a fund with a correct label, or picking a company based on their IR page and forum discussions was never sufficient.
Why something so natural as free-thinking is all of a sudden harder to find? Here we only initiate the discussion we will be regularly getting back to: of how employers and even colleagues are driving intellectualists away with meaningless jobs [Graeber], and of more modern rooting out of “intelligentsia” with abhorrent cost of living.
As Mark Blyth mentions in his interview: decades ago a young person in Scotland was offered a free education, with which one could enter workforce more easily, and soon be able to afford a home. Neoliberalism has put an end to this, and in several paragraphs we explain how.
At first it was education costs (in the U.S. also healthcare), then housing, now broad inflation. Interestingly, a country like the UK also directly imports inequality, the affluent immigrants and low-paid workers. Media has regularly flagged how "nouveau riche" at times individuals with rather questionable source of funds arrive to displace locals actually growing up or having established horizontal connections in cities. Whether its beneficiaries of Gulf states’ or other resource rich economies, steel magnates, new crypto money, they have used services of but also created many better paid local jobs for the few, further pushing up prices. Thus, more competition for housing comes from career professionals, moving in for such work, in addition to others who are in a city like London for a job even unrelated to the location (like most of the jobs in e.g., IT). Unsurprisingly, even London (where poverty-stricken Marx found refuge and couldn’t afford the rent even back then) can now be losing its status as home for critical thinking and inspiration.
New form of neoliberal capitalism, soon on the verge of return to feudalism (we will expand on this thought later) creates desperate obedient workers. It makes jobs inherently unattractive for broadly well-educated established individuals who value meaning and development in their work. When living in thriving cities that makes them carry burden of higher cost, often hardly being able to benefit from money flowing into everything around them.
Gentrification is a widely debated phenomenon. But where are the intellectuals fleeing? Can former industrial towns be appropriate place for them to settle? With so many jobs lost to outsourced manufacturing overseas, could local pubs or saloons now welcome newcomers’ culture, white-collar voices supporting workers' rights?
Here the account is often also rather dismal. Even before pandemic, there were many articles describing what's killing the social tradition (e.g. pub or saloon/bar). Naturally, technology creates social groups and limits casual interaction among strangers. Remarkable, how the system sows discord, not just polarizing the public but simply making everyone feel estranged. Internet became a new place to form networks and engage in discussions; however, a space closely monitored by both business and government hardly is free. It's also a well-known fact that it encourages echo chambers, again not really fostering free “outside-the-box” thinking; it's a moderated community, but still a melting pot.
Globalization did offer an opportunity of arbitrage: one could always have chosen to go the least expensive cities and countries (although free-speech places are increasingly expensive) perhaps near universities (needing to find e.g. public ones, not where it’s mostly students from rich families or foreign countries with freedoms limited by visa laws and struggling with costs in pursuit of jobs). There are places welcoming free-thinkers from around the world, as well as there are those willing to abandon their day jobs to have fewer time or other restrictions on their thought-work. This is where to look for socialist investment advisors.
It's not always the economic development that is pushing up prices leaving fewer opportunities for musings in philosophy. As mentioned, example of competitive international students, made to worry more about the grades than knowledge, fight to land first job to either start and progress career early or pay down debts in rising interest rates environment or to simply please their parents. Such behaviors often diminish the freedom culture, unlike student intelligentsia of the past, today this class was made more desperate to become an obedient “wagie” and well-fitting nut or bolt in the machinery. Freedom requires hunger for freedom, but it attracts those looking for comfort and benefits of open society such as a career. It is therefore more productive nowadays to search for thinkers in places like Eastern Europe or perhaps Chile that are undergoing changes from the grassroots.