Is Investing Ethical? How to Invest Without Compromising Your Values

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2:27Mindy Jensen:We put out a call to our audience for their burning questions, and two listeners essentially asked the same thing. How do you invest ethically? So today, Scott and I are sharing how we think about ethical investing, not to tell you what to do, but to help you think through how to build a portfolio that aligns with your own values and supports your path to financial independence.

2:52Mindy Jensen:Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPocketsMoney podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my highly ethical co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy. I'm excited to do a good job answering these questions today on BiggerPocketsMoney. So very excited to get into this. This is a really important question. I think it hangs up a lot of people. I've gotten this question at least 10 times over the years from various BiggerPocketsMoney listeners, either themselves uncomfortable with participation in an economy that has some bad actors, some businesses that they believe have questionable practices, or some businesses that just are doing things that are not aligned with their values.

3:28I've gotten this question from folks who are asking about, hey, my friend told me that I'm evil for investing and participating in the evils of capitalism. They throw in words like slave labor and these other things that capitalism has enabled. How do I respond to that and justify what I'm doing here? I don't have a framework for doing that. And I feel bad about it. Parts of those arguments resonated with me. And so I think that's the question we're gonna attempt to tackle today. And Mindy, has that ever come up in your world to you as well?

3:57Mindy Jensen:That hasn't come up quite so directly and strongly as saying that you're evil for investing. But honestly, a good mental shift is you're never gonna change that person's mind don't ever talk about investing with that person again, because they are clearly not going to listen to what you have to say. They have made up their mind and they're not going to change it. So Mindy, what is your view on whether investing in a general sense, including in publicly traded companies or index funds that own aggregations of publicly traded companies, whether it's ethical or not? So Scott, the term ethical means behaviors that align with accepted moral principles.

4:36Mindy Jensen:I want to provide for my family. So I am going to invest to grow my net worth. So in that case, yes, it is ethical to invest in the stock market. Now, there are some companies that I choose not to invest in. There are companies that I choose to invest in on purpose because of what they're doing for environmental issues. Like, is investing in the stock market ethical? Based on that description, yes. How about you? Do you think it's ethical to invest in the stock market? Yes, I think it is ethical to invest in the stock market. I think it's ethical to invest in a variety of assets, including real estate.

5:13And I believe that because I'm a big proponent of capitalism. I believe that the cruelty of society is that resources are finite and scarce and that they need to be allocated more efficiently. And capitalism as a market economy, we do a reasonable job better than many alternatives at allocating those resources efficiently. Now, I won't go out of my way to invest in a company that I don't think is behaving responsibly, like a tobacco company, for example. But I'm also not going to avoid an S &P 500 index fund specifically to make sure that a small percentage of that allocation is not going to the tobacco company, for example.

5:51I'll get into this philosophy in a little bit here, but I think it's very hard to pull out the good guys versus the bad guys in a basket of companies. You may love Costco, for example, and love how they treat their employees and the worldview that they espouse. I certainly love Costco. I'm a big Costco guy. But then their chickens do not have a good existence, and that's why you have cheap chickens and why you have cheap eggs from Costco. And that's a real point of consideration. So I don't think that there's a pure way to participate in a capitalist economy. There are only tradeoffs, but I'm comfortable with the tradeoffs that come with capitalism.

6:25I wish I could change some things about the version of capitalism we live in today. but I'm comfortable with it as a broad concept. I don't feel it's morally incompatible to participate in that system via a variety of investments.

6:36Mindy Jensen:I absolutely agree. And it's funny that you said the tobacco company because that was the one that I specifically do not invest in on purpose, even though they're having record profits every year. And I looked them up. They are on the S &P 500 and they are approximately 0.17 % of the S &P 500. I am okay with making that trade-off, like you said, because they're a small percentage of the S &P 500. We specifically started investing in Tesla in 2012 because they were making electric cars. They have produced about 9 million cars. So that's 9 million non-internal combustion engines on the road because of this company.

7:20Mindy Jensen:We thought it would be an interesting experiment. So we put a little money in there. And as they grew, like Tesla made electric cars sexy. There were other electric cars before Tesla like came on the road en masse, but they were like Honda had one and it wasn't all that great. And other car companies had some, but they weren't that great. And here comes Tesla and they run really well and, you know, they're reliable. They're fun. Scott, what kind of car do you drive? I drive a Tesla. I think that Tesla is a great example because, you know, you could take the opposition point of view about morality and talk about some of the personal practices of Elon Musk that I think now everybody from both parties can find something that they don't like about Elon Musk at this point.

8:05And everybody from both parties may find one or two things that they do like about Elon Musk over the last couple of years. So you have that dynamic. And then, of course, the extraction of lithium from the environment has been taking a terrible toll in certain areas. And so that's where it comes down to, right? Like oil and gas power the vast majority of American cars, and Tesla is making a real dent in that. And there are trade-offs that come with that. And that's the challenge of society is every single company in the S &P 500 produces a good or service that other people want and are willing to pay for.

8:39And every single company does it in the pursuit of profit. And that's capitalism. That's how you get 8 billion people worldwide to work together to create computers, pencils, keyboards, houses, the materials that go into them. That's how that works. And there are other ways to maybe do it. Maybe we'll find a better version that exists someday. But overall, the net effect is a drastically increasing standard of living for most of the world's population, more and more people coming out of poverty. And I'm proud to participate in a system like that, despite its flaws. So I think that there's two parts of that, right?

9:12There's the, is it ethical to invest? Yes, that's my worldview. Now, steel manning the opposition, taking this position of somebody who's trying to be morally pure and never participate in any of the bad things, we have to create a subjective view of what good is, right? One person may think that defense contracting is evil and I don't want to participate in the act. Another person may feel like the defense contracting is a good that they are very happy and willing to pay for because it allows them to discuss other issues like whether capitalism is a good or bad thing and not whether we're going to get invaded by this other country.

9:44That's two sides of that moral argument. And you are not right in every one of your moral arguments. Neither is the other guy in these, right? And that's the challenge with moral arguments is capitalism does not argue what is moral. It just allows people who want to pay for something to buy it with their own dollars if they have the means to generate them. There's only so much beef on property in this country. How you allocate it used to be based on proximity to political power. And today it's still based on proximity to political power in some instances, but also a little bit more based on production of goods and services other people want.

10:22Mindy Jensen:How do you respond to a listener who's asking about, once you've reached enough, do you have a moral obligation to invest more ethically? I think that's a reasonable question, right? So I'm not chasing returns anymore. Maybe I am. I want to invest in Tesla because I think that that's a good company. I don't know. But I think, yes, there are options to invest that express certain worldviews out there. Before we do that, I want to get to why, like framing why this problem is so hard. We've talked about how there's trade-offs in all these other companies here, but you can literally make a case that every act of participation in capitalism is evil if you choose to want to, right?

10:57Housing is a right, so it's evil to own it or rent it or sell it for profit. Healthcare is a right, so any for-profit activity that services healthcare is evil. Food and basic household necessities are our right. Therefore, investing in grocery stores or Costco again is evil. Many forms of energy production are bad for the environment. It's evil to invest in energy. And so you can get there with basically any form of logic. And you can even go so far as if you open a bank account and you don't even want to participate in the capitalist system by not earning interest, you are thereby allowing the bank to arbitrage your capital and loan it out to these companies that you disagree with from a world do.

11:32So there is no way that I can see to totally fail to participate in the capitalist society and not at least in some way touch all of this interconnected chain in a morally pure sense that expresses a specific vision. So you can only approach it. And I think there are options though to do that once you get to a comfortable number. I think that's where we should go next. So Mindy, you've done some research on this. What are some of the things you found?

11:56Mindy Jensen:Well, there are quote unquote ethical investing options. Both Fidelity and Vanguard have, they call ESG funds, environmental, social, and governance funds. And when I saw these, I was like, oh, great. This will be so easy. Yeah, you can ethically invest, just invest in ESG funds. But then I jumped into those ESG funds. Some of those holdings don't really scream ethics to me. The ESG US stock ETF holding for Vanguard holds NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, which is Facebook, and Tesla. These are not the companies that I think of when I think of ethical investing. These are actually the companies that I think of, oh, those are probably the companies people are going to have a problem with.

12:44Mindy Jensen:And I'm curious why those companies are in the ESG fund. Environmental, I don't see anything in environmental except for Tesla. And you had the counterpoint that the lithium extraction is counterproductive of the environmental aspect of Tesla. I believe all of these companies are billionaires. The heads of all these companies are billionaires, with the exception of Elon Musk, who's now a trillionaire. So the same people who ask about, you know, is it ethical to invest in the stock market are There are a lot of the same people who are saying billionaires shouldn't exist. I don't have that thought.

13:21Mindy Jensen:I think that these people became billionaires because they worked really hard. They worked hard or they bought a company that worked hard to become a billionaire. I think they should exist. Are they great people? I don't know. I probably wouldn't have a lot to say to them at a dinner party. But even these ESG funds, I think, are going to be difficult. If you want to, you said pure investing, Scott, purely ethical investing. you're going to have a much more difficult time finding investments that are producing returns, which is the whole reason to invest in the first place, while keeping in this pure ethics mindset that you're having.

14:00Mindy Jensen:I don't think capitalism is bad. All I can go so far is to say, I don't think you can feasibly express purity. You can only approach something that you are more personally comfortable with. Because in order to express a pure ethical worldview as an investor, as a participant in capitalism, you have to first define that worldview in great detail. You have to acknowledge trade-offs. There is going to be no company out there that has a pure model that you can arrive at at an extreme end of a worldview here, right? Like we just talked about Costco. We just talked about Tesla. I mean, you can talk about almost any business that is for profit.

14:37There's going to be a trade-off. There's no way to grow lima beans in the Midwest and get them to Denver without some trade-off that somebody will find objectionable to some degree across there. And that's about the least controversial building block of capitalism you can come up with, right? So I think that that's going to be the first challenge. You have to define a worldview, then you have to figure out a way to express it. I think that these ESG funds may align reasonably well with some people's worldviews. Some people's worldviews may be more simple than what you just articulated there, which is I don't want to participate with a tobacco company or alcohol industry or whatever.

15:08And maybe these ESG funds do a good job of doing that. And you can go find that. And there's a research project there. It'll take you a lot of work to get there and you will have to make trade-offs. There's always trade-offs, but I think you can get somewhere closer. I think it's the wrong frame. I think that that's not the right way to frame participation in capitalism and the pursuit of financial independence from an ethical standpoint. If you have a worldview that you want to push or changes you want to see imposed on society, the best way to express that is at the voting booth. Capitalism cannot be allowed to run totally unchecked.

15:40It must be constrained by the law in many cases. There are externalities, right? A company cannot, in the pursuit of profit, dump all its waste in the river. There must be a government that comes into play and controls certain aspects of that capitalism. And there's a debate that reasonable people disagree with on what those ought to be. And I think the way you should express your worldview is on the voting booth and in the political arena, not in whether or not to participate in an index fund, which you could invest in the most ethical company in the world today. And then in five years, they're not anymore.

16:11And you have to keep track of that across a huge basket. I think it's an unreasonable ask of the average investor. And putting your money to work with companies that are producing goods and services for human beings will come with trade-offs, but will generally raise the standard of living across the economy. I'm comfortable and proud to participate in that personally.

16:26Mindy Jensen:So here's another question for you, Scott. Is it ethical to pursue financial independence? Because then you're not working any longer. You're not contributing to society in air quotes. You're not paying taxes. Is it ethical to pursue financial independence? Absolutely. The pursuit of financial independence, generally speaking, will come with producing much more than you consume for a prolonged period of time and then putting your capital to work in the economy that continues to produce, you know, that other people are going to use to produce more goods and services. So I think that that is totally, totally ethical.

17:00And I also think that the pursuit of financial independence for many people will empower them to stop having to work for money. And they're not going to go and play video games all day. There was like one Reddit post about a guy who plays video games all day and his wife called him a loser. I thought that was funny. I think that's perfectly fine, by the way. But I think many more people who pursue financial independence will spend their time on Reddit answering personal finance questions for people in the wee hours of the night. And that adds just as much value to those in many of those cases or the discussion as maybe they would get from paying somebody in some cases, or at least a component of that value that they would get from paying other people.

17:33And that's real value to the society as well. So how is that incompatible with an ethical existence? I don't think so.

17:39Mindy Jensen:Well, I think that anybody can make an argument that anything is unethical. There's ways to be financially independent or to move towards it that are unethical, and there's ways that are ethical. Is it ethical to continue to work when you have enough, when you've reached your financial independence number? Because you're taking a job from somebody else? Because you're taking a job from somebody else. Ethics is so hard. It's a worldview that you impose. Let's talk about real estate, right? Real estate, landlording, making a profit off somebody else. I think that the country needs more housing. Real estate investing in the construction of housing for profit creates more housing.

18:11You can attempt to subsidize it with the government. That doesn't usually work in most cases. Most impositions, many of the impositions that people place on capitalism create worse environments for renters and homeowners in their cities because they constrain supply. Some are necessary. You have to be building properties that go to roads, right? There's a reasonable level of government requirement for construction that's a minimum here. And then there's versions of it that are too much. The crime, I think, or the unethical thing is to create an environment where large amounts of housing are vacant.

18:44When housing is vacant, now something has gone wrong, either with the intersection of capitalism and government or how things are going. And in capitalism, at least, that punishes the owner of the property. In a reasonably pure expression of capitalism, if your property is vacant, you are not earning money on that property. And there's a very painful incentive if you have leverage to get that property rented as soon as possible. That keeps housing stock full and much more efficiently, connecting the people who need housing with the housing. alternatives. Now, other people are going to come up with all these reasons why landlording is unethical.

19:19That's fine. That's a different expressions of the worldview on this. But every good, every service, every want, every need that people have in the States of America, or almost all of them, are provided by for-profit enterprises and they're provided at a better quality than in many other places in the world that are not capitalistic. Not all of them, but many of them. So that's my defense of capitalism and my answer to this ethics question here?

19:40Mindy Jensen:Yeah, I think it is ethical to pursue financial independence. I think it's ethical to continue to work when you have enough. I think that ethics is when you are doing something wrong and you know that you're doing something wrong. I think that's when something becomes unethical. So I'm not doing something wrong by investing in the stock market. I don't know that I'm doing something wrong by investing in the stock market. The same with pursuing financial independence. it's not wrong to pursue financial independence. It's not wrong to continue to work when you have enough. And it's like, is it wrong to consume, right?

20:14That's another one. Is it wrong to consume? I don't know. On the one hand, consumption takes resources. On the other hand, consumption creates jobs, right? For other people. So it's like, what is right and what is wrong? I think it's, you have to construct a worldview. And my worldview is that the resources are finite and that's the core reality. And the best we can do is create more of those resources and distribute them more efficiently to more people and to participate in that in some way, whether it's for profit or not across my lifetime. And that's what we're trying to do here at BiggerPocketsMoney, right?

20:45Like financial information and research on fire and real estate investing and the intersection of complicated problems for people who have accumulated wealth and want to actually get optionality back into their life. That's expensive and hard to come by. And we're trying to make that available at lower cost and better quality than other folks. And that's our, me and you, participation in that system in our small way.