The Biden Administration is wasting no time in building up its economic team. Close watchers of his moves should be encouraged by one pick: Heather Boushey as a member of his Council of Economic Advisers.

Boushey is a co-founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth which is focused on how we can create an economy with stable and sustainable growth. After the news was announced, Boushey tweeted: “We have an opportunity to rethink how we invest in people, and we need to seize it as we rebuild our economy.”

Boushey is the kind of person we want advising our new President as we recover from this global pandemic. She and others on Biden’s team understand that we can’t go back to where we were before COVID-19. Instead, we need to create an economy and society that better mitigates systemic risks like income inequality and climate change.

After nine months of the global pandemic, it is increasingly clear that we need to build a new financial and social “normal.” Instability and unrest across all aspects of our lives—from financial markets to public health to racial reckonings to the environment—have forced investors to realize that global systems are inextricably interconnected. Many have been and are responding to this idea by considering environmental, social, and governance issues (ESG) in their investment analysis. Yet the compounding crises of 2020 show that ESG considerations are no longer enough. Investors must instead think bigger, consider the relationship of their investments to the broader systems within which they operate, and bring their investment practices in line with the realities of the 21^st Century.

Investors are beginning to understand the need to be good stewards to the systems they work in and benefit from. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic is not an isolated incident; social (and environmental) disturbances will continue to occur—more often, simultaneously, and with greater severity over time. The need for a systems-oriented approach to investing will only grow in the coming years as additional interconnected complexities create new disasters.

Yet the sheer scale of the issue prevents many investors from acting. Where do investors begin? The Investment Integration Project (TIIP), in partnership with the Moving the Market (MtM) initiative—a collaboration between Humanity United, UBS Optimus Foundation, and The Freedom Fund—has analyzed the lessons learned thus far from the COVID-19 pandemic to develop a roadmap in their report, “Addressing systemic social risk: A roadmap for financial system action.”

This is a most welcome report and one that investors need to heed. Previously I’ve written about the Test of Corporate Purpose (TCP) initiative. Part of it involved a global survey by GlobeScan of 561 individuals from business, the investment community, government, academia, and civil society. The survey asked for opinion on how well these different groups have responded to COVID-19 and inequality. Institutional investors ranked dead last—and by a lot. On COVID-19, only 10 percent of respondents rather their performance as strong and 45 percent rated it as week. The second lowest group was governments at 27 percent and 35 percent, respectively. (Companies were 25 percent and 28 percent).

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