Leaders in business, government, and finance have increasingly imposed Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria on the rest of society. These top-down restrictions on society are costly and ineffective ways to address perceived and actual social problems. Societies flourish when they are free to solve their problems through decentralized experimentation and innovation.
The language and priorities framed by ESG have permeated public and private institutions around the world. ESG advocates want to reshape our world in profound ways — from how we travel and heat our homes to what practices and products businesses must prioritize.
They want to move the world to a “low carbon” economy built on renewable energy. They also favor dramatic redistribution of wealth and power from the “haves” to the “have nots.” Their strategies for doing so undermine freedom, political self-determination, and economic prosperity.
ESG suffers not only from epistemological and ethical shortcomings, but also from conceptual ambiguity, ineffectiveness, and inefficiency. ESG’s advocates often wrongly conflate financial and nonfinancial objectives in their pursuit of deeply partisan progressive ideology on climate change, pollution, diversity, LGBTQ+ issues, and more.
