Costs of Conscience
My first attempt at an honest-to-God full time job after I graduated from college was at a public relations firm in Manhattan. It was my job to coordinate a lot of the logistics of our efforts to get our clients better press, and I don’t think I’m being immodest when I say that I was absolutely terrible at my job. A large part of the job was keeping track of various pieces of paper, and one look at my office will tell you what a poor match that was. My real downfall, however, was that I had to photocopy a lot of articles from magazines and newspapers and whatnot. A smart person would have made the photocopies quickly and then gotten back to keeping track of the pieces of paper. Not me. I stopped to read all of the darned things. I was single-handedly responsible for at least a tenth of a point reduction in the national productivity statistics. But while my three months in PR are not exactly the high point of my resume, all that reading did have a payoff. Since the main client I was responsible to was a maker of personal-finance software, a lot of the stuff I read taught me things about the financial world that I probably never would have had a clue about otherwise.
So after I left, I read books and subscribed to financial magazines. I added stock discussion boards to my bookmark list, and started to at least think about retirement planning, how I could achieve at least some level of financial security, and all the other little things that you need to know in order to be a functional adult in the American economy but that the school system never seems to get across. Part of it was natural curiosity, part of it was fascination with the psychology of the decisions that millions of investors around the world make every day, and of course part of it was a very practical desire to “do well.” But that desire raised another question. As you can probably tell from some of my other writings, I am critical of the decisions that many wealthy individuals and corporations make in order to protect and increase that wealth, because I think those decisions are often unfair and inflect great harm on a large number of people. How, in good conscience, could I then try to profit from those decisions through investments?
After all, the Standard & Poor 500 Index, which is the basis for at least a part of the stock components of many 401(k) and retirement plans, includes any number of tobacco and oil companies, companies with poor environmental or labor records, and so on. Right now there any number of mutual fund managers plowing into energy stocks, inspired by the power shortfall in California and the Bush Administration’s “Conservation? How’s that spelled again?” energy policy. There are a number of mutual fund companies that have tried to screen out the worst of these offenders. The Domini Social Equity Fund, for example, is based on the Domini 400 Social Index, a collection of companies that excludes tobacco and oil companies, weapons manufacturers, and other corporations judged to have poor records. The Fund has done pretty well; until technology stocks took a nose dive in 2000 , it matched or exceeded the performance of the S&P 500. And it’s not the only “socially responsible” fund; leading fund company Vanguard has one that tracks the Calvert Group‘s own social index, and there are plenty of others out there. But even these socially conscious funds may not give you a clear conscience. If Kathie Lee Gifford’s sweatshop activities with Wal-Mart gave you pause, Domini would have been a bad place for your money until very recently — Wal-Mart was part of the Domini 400 until February of this year. If you think Microsoft has behaved unethically, stay away from Domini and Calvert — it’s a principal holding. You can try to pick individual companies that you think behave well — but you can never be sure that somewhere along the line, they’re not outsourcing their manufacturing to some small country with absurdly cheap labor.
I’m not sure how proud I am of the way I resolved this potential crisis of conscience. But I realized that there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy I have to accept in myself. I am not a wealthy person by any stretch, but I can afford to buy steaks and wasteful prepackaged foods. I run my air conditioner almost full time during the summer months. I sit in an office surrounded by CD players, PCs, DVDs, full bookcases, dozens of plastic toys and action figures, comic books and other knickknacks. I’m afraid to even look at the label of most of my clothes. So my hands are far from spotless; I’m no Mother Theresa. I like to say I do what I can, but really, I do what I’m comfortable with, and if that’s more than many people who are better off than me are comfortable with, does that even reach the level of damning with faint praise? But my consumeristic choices do keep other people employed, even if it’s not as many as I’d like, and I like to think I’m using the technology and tools at my disposal to improve the situation. If the articles I’ve written about education funding and taxation help spark a dialogue, and that dialogue contributes to new ways of addressing these problems, isn’t that a better result than if I just took a vow of poverty and no one ever knew why? If renting The Matrix gives me material I can use to be a more effective teacher, is my VCR a waste? The only way I can stay sane is to not let the good that I have not done blind me from seeing the good that I have done. I think the same holds true for would-be socially-conscious investors — if you somehow make money from an enterprise that you’re not one hundred percent comfortable with, that gives you a responsibility to use some of that money to benefit others, and turn a negative into a positive. I realize this principle can be taken too far, and justify doing some pretty crummy things and then trying to buy your way to redemption — but hey, I’m a pragmatist. Rough guidelines and judgment calls are my stock in trade. And in a world where nobody’s perfect, I don’t think they can be avoided.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.