Next year marks the 50^th anniversary of my graduation from MIT with a bachelor’s degree in pure mathematics. As an entering freshman I had dreams of doing important work such as proving The Four Color Theorem (first posed in 1852 and finally solved in 1976) and Fermat’s Last Theorem (first posed in the late 1630s and finally proved 350 years later). Alas, when I turned 19 and realized I had not proven any significant theorem, I decided it was time for another line of work. I got a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard and have had a career as a business school academic. Through this long and winding road I began working in the field of sustainability about 10 years ago.

At that time the somewhat awkward acronym of ESG (for environmental, social, and governance) was just beginning to be bandied about. A Google Trends chart shows the term getting fairly little worldwide attention from 2004 to 2016 when the slope began to increase and really started to spike up in 2019. In its early days only those interested in sustainability knew what the acronym meant. When the term was explained to the uninitiated, the knee jerk response was that paying attention to ESG (or certainly the E and S parts) was a way for companies and investors to lose money. It then went mainstream and in a short period of time ESG investing, based on companies that “cared” about ESG, was seen as a magical elixir, a way for people to make the world a better place and earn superior returns at the same time. ESG is now under vicious attack, and it is fascinating to observe how broad the spectrum is of those who hate the idea—although those who do so infuse it with a meaning convenient to their world view.

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