Sustainable investment, Dickens, Malthus and Marx

Abstract

The essay which you are contemplating reading at this moment winds a tortuous path from Dickens to Malthus to Marx to today. It weaves like a drunk from an ‘empty signifier’, through an oxymoron and finally settles on a paradox. And with a boldness indicating a certain degree of psychosis it contemplates the coming of the ‘triangle’.

Keywords:

• Investment
• strong sustainability
• weak sustainability
• sustainable investment
• Jevons’ Paradox
• human development index
• ecological footprint

Notes

1. ‘Imbecile’ is a legacy term for a people with moderate-to-severe mental retardation, but who are also imbued with a certain criminal character. The term was chosen very carefully.

2. It is necessary to be up front in this regard. The judgement of papers as being grounded on a concrete discussion of sustainability was a distinctly subjective exercise. The inclusion of some discussion of strong and weak sustainability was used as a minimum sort of requirement for inclusion. Beyond this subjectivity, real qualitative research guru's would no doubt cringe at my shameless lack of any attempt to solidify reliability by getting multiple coders.

3. Environment, Social and Governance.

4. 2007 data sourced from http://hdr.undp.org (Accessed 4/2/2013). Although more current data for this variable are available, the most recent freely available Ecological Footprint data was for 2007.

5. 2007 data sourced from www.footprintnetwork.org (Accessed 4/2/2013).

6. There are of course many other factors that might be taken into consideration. For one, there is more to waste assimilation than just the assimilation of carbon. And it seems credible that fossil fuels (which are only renewable over geological time frames) will someday need to be substituted with some energy source which will actually take up productive land area. This has been the basis for several critiques of the Ecological Footprint (e.g. Fiala 2008).

7. 2007 data sourced from www.footprintnetwork.org (Accessed 4/2/2013).

8. 2007 data sourced from http://hdr.undp.org (Accessed 4/2/2013). Although more current data for this variable are available, the most recent freely available Ecological Footprint data was for 2007.

9. See Stark (2002), Sen (2006, 2010), Valentini (2010) for further discussion on this matter.

10. Indeed in the extreme, finding a new planet for between 2 and 5 billion people would technically fall within this technological solution set.

11. Actually the overwhelming dream would be that they would astoundingly compensate.

12. Those illustrating the finance definition of investment.