People working in finance need to become more knowledgeable about evolution, especially since they arbitrate the fractal of human expansion.
They invent investment programs like ESG hinging on sustainability when sustainability cannot exist on a planet subject to the decline of available energy called entropy. Sustainability is like theology, with different versions of ESG emulating 420 religions making extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence, hoping for an afterlife that does not exist.
The term woke nowadays carries some lousy baggage, just like an ESG score attributed to tobacco companies producing a product that kills 8 million people yearly, rated higher and better than Tesla. Even oil companies ranked higher, likely not counting the exhaust from the use of oil.
Not only is the normalization of sustainability a serious evolutionary fallacy, but the woke financiers pursuing these standards also confound cause and consequence in assessing their ratings. The depravity of reason finagling ESG scores comes, for example, from confounding merit with diversity. Diversity is a consequence, not the cause of merit.
When building a valuable company, you hire the best people, regardless of their descent, background, sexual orientation, or creed. We do the same in sports, where the merit of gameplay is the only factor that counts. Evolutionarily, the value of our differences is more important than the value of our commonalities. Whatever composite of attributes delivers unique merit matters, with or without diversity as a contributor.
Woke people often confound cause and consequence, as identified by Friedrich Nietzsche, leading to grave depravity of reason. And to people who have relinquished sound reasoning, persuading them otherwise, in the words of Thomas Paine, is like applying medicine to the dead.
By their funds deploying a crucial arbitrage of innovation for humanity, finance must toss any program hinging on sustainability and instead pursue a vector of renewal compatible with nature’s first-principles. Only then can finance tap into nature’s ever-unfolding greenfield and alpha.
