How do you feel about the facts pointed out below by maizefolk? Do you avoid investing in any major US company that has a presence in China and that invests in China? Because Tesla recently built a gigafactory in China and hires local Chinese to run it. Disney built an ecological park for Shanghai. Pfizer is working on a deal to partner with a local Chinese pharmaceutical company to produce the Pfizer BioNTech COVID vaccine. The list goes on and on...
Similar way as I avoid over-consumption. And i'm getting similar responses.
E.g. I say: a mansion, big SUV, boats, flying for "pleasure" to be avoided since the persons footprint would be way too big for the planet to support.
I get reposes: but you bike and you create extra CO2 when breathing :) Or i use a car (19 yo Pontiac Vibe) to reach XC skiing destination. Same pattern.
I don't, at this moment, hold individual stocks. But i would avoid (responding to your cases) Tesla too (for maybe different reasons too). Disney avoid since i blame it for making kids consumers. Pfizer helping to protect China population (people) from a decease is a good thing BTW (also for all humans).
US corpo world recently is starting to understand that the globalization is not such a good thing, and starting to bring their operation home. Also they are seeing their IP has been stolen by China, and trying to rectify it. E.g. my biggest holding, Apple, is trying to do the right things for the planet; and they are re-thinking China as the main production centre.
I even would not hold Coca-Cola. I don't know their single product that should be consumed by humans (so unhealthy); no support here :)
Our choices (in investments too) do have consequences. We need to make the planet a better place. Instead of being deadlocked in "but X does bad too, so i can too". We can only control what we can do. I start with myself, making sure that my choices are at least not horrible. But of course nothing is back or white.
I'm not sure if it makes sense what i'm trying to say, i do hope it does.
This makes sense, but it circles us back around to the old paradox often mentioned here that most of the economy and most of the stock market consist of companies that are doing things that are bad for people.
Any investor who owns the indices owns tobacco companies giving people cancer, pharma companies using IP laws to squeeze the last dimes out of sick people, SUV manufacturers and fossil fuel companies doing all they can to increase the pace of environmental destruction, electronics companies forcing slaves to mine rainforests for rare earth elements, information companies nudging people toward violent extremism and mental health problems, manufacturers of plastic futuretrash, advertising companies that encourage people to over-consume, the sugar and restaurant industries giving people obesity and diabetes, alcohol which is mostly consumed by alcoholics, banks that market credit cards and payday loans to financially illiterate people, pesticide/herbicide companies lobbying Congress to silence scientific evidence about the dangers of their products, etc. That's not China, it's the S&P500!
Whether these evils amount to more than or less than an index in another country is beside the point. It is very hard to be an investor anywhere and not profit from the destruction of people, because most of what the people consume nowadays contributes to their destruction. We've moved beyond the point where people strive for "higher living standards" and we're now living in an economy where the good life is only obtained by avoiding dozens of types of addiction, shepherding one's attention carefully, resisting consumption, and resisting the popular culture, while simultaneously --- investing in the indices.
There are questions of guilt related to owning the gears that grind people and the planet into misery, debt, and death. To some extent, the
very existence of products like Facebook, Coca Cola, cigarettes, plastic grocery sacks, Twinkies, Whoppers, Dodge Durangos, McMansions, TikTok, and coal power plants is the evil, because these products can only cause destruction of human lives and families. Through another lens, these toxic products exist because people are aggressively buying them, and wholeheartedly believing that their lives are better thanks to them. Even as they gain weight, develop cancers, go deeper into debt, exhibit more and more signs of addiction, spend their entire lives working stressful jobs, and increasingly live in polluted wastelands with beggars on every corner, consumers keep on believing that they'll be the smiling models in the advertisements
any day now. To some extent the relationship between corporation and consumer is less like a predator/prey model and more like a cult, where the manipulators and the manipulated are the same people, and they're all striving for something that will prove delusional and deadly in the end.
To protect people from themselves would require a government regime more controlling than communist China, and some evil acts would be necessary to keep such a regime in charge. China's strict COVID policies have probably saved the lives of millions of people, whereas the U.S's fumbling of the pandemic and infights over the tiny inconveniences required for minimal cooperation resulted in the deaths of probably a million people, judging by the excess death rate. Does that make up for the genocide the Chinese are pursuing on their Western borders? That's another way of asking whether it's more ethical to own Facebook, Google, and Apple, or a Chinese bank, manufacturer, and transportation firms that each benefit in some way from forced labor camps?
The endpoint of this reasoning isn't nihilism, resignation to evil, or radical off-grid anticapitalism; it's the realization that nothing is black-and-white and being ethical isn't as easy as sitting in VTSAX and forgetting about how the dividends and capital gains are essentially the life and joy that has been taken from other people and given to you. We have our own accounts to balance, and I suspect we have to pay back the world outside of our brokerage accounts. At the very least, don't parlay investment gains into more self-destruction or planetary destruction.
