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REVIEW:

Investing with Your Values:
Making Money and Making a Difference

By Hal Brill, Jack A. Brill, and Cliff Feigenbaum
Princeton, N.J.: Bloomberg Press, 1999
368 pp., $23.95, cloth; ISBN: 1-57660-026-2

The title of this comprehensive and detailed book on socially responsible investing reflects its central premise. Counter to what most people believe, you can invest in stock market shares of companies without putting your conscience or values aside and still make money. And, as almost nobody believes, just as much money as if you had invested with a blind eye to companies' records on environmental pollution, product safety, employment practices and policies, and other issues you care about.

In Investing with Your Values: Making Money and Making a Difference, Hal Brill, his father Jack Brill (both longtime "values-based" investing consultants) and Cliff Feigenbaum, editor of the Green Money Journal, have adopted an alternative term for socially responsible investing (SRI) that emphasizes the logic behind selective investing (and perhaps aims to clear the stigma of "do-good" investing that doesn't make money). Natural Investing (NI), they argue, is the inevitable culmination of four trends risen over the past two decades: ecological imperative, as we recognize that the world's environment is at risk; changing values, with greater concerns about quality of life, economic justice, and a healthy ecology; the rise of global corporate power and influence to shape events; and the rise of investing. And they show that after the modest gains in the nearly three decades since the first "screened investments" offered by the Pax Fund in 1971, the performances of funds like the Domini Social Equity Fund, the Good Money Fund, Citizens, and others, funds that have out-performed Smith and Poor or the Dow Industrial average consistently over the past 20 years, have proven that we don't have to separate our financial choices from our beliefs. "Like a blade of grass emerging through concrete," they write, "Natural Investing is penetrating the fortresses of Wall Street." It is now a "mature industry," with $529 billion invested selectively, $736 billion in assets controlled by investors who play an active role in shareholder activity, and $4 billion dedicated to community investment.

SRI or, using the authors' term, NI funds are no longer really outside the mainstream: Fortune 500's top five "favorite" companies, for example, are among Domini's top holdings. And while NI or SRI funds have fewer companies to choose among because they screen out many dozens, there are still plenty left.

A "tour" of issues drives home compelling reasons to screen out companies that pollute, contribute to global warming, produce and market products that cause disease (like tobacco), support gambling, produce weapons, exploit child labor in foreign countries, inhumanely raise animals for food production, support repressive regimes, or foster unfair labor practices. "An enormous power shift has occurred in the last few decades," the authors write, "with international corporations becoming more powerful than governments. Once people understand that corporations are making most decisions of consequence in our society, they will look for ways to have influence." A "dialogue" explains how screening of companies matters, and that it works cumulatively at least to influence corporate managers' decisions and ultimately stock prices.

The Brills and Feigenbaum argue cogently and well for all the reasons why we should invest selectively, and the book's fourth section offers their philosophical and social outlook on economics and environmental sustainability, Wall Street and corporations, and what they call the "evolutionary dance" of money and values. Theirs is an ambitious, unabashedly visionary and optimistic, empirical view that sees an "encouraging and fundamental shift in our culture's underlying world view," away from a mechanistic universe to a "living planet of interconnected systems."

But their book never ignores the specifics of NI, offering detailed guidance on "avoidance" and "affirmative" screening either weeding out companies you find objectionable or going another step further to choose deliberately companies whose work, practices, or products you wish to support community investing, and shareholder activism. A "nuts and bolts" review of stocks and bonds and investment planning, including a discussion of special-interest funds, Investing with Your Values is an excellent primer or refresher, depending on what you may already know.

Appendices supply a wealth of supporting information, with lists of organizations, publications, and Web sites; listings of socially screened companies including "clean utilities" and those among the Domini, Good Money, Citizens, and Natural Products Industry investments funds; an "avoidance screening" list of companies identified as large environmental polluters, companies associated with repressive regimes, those involved in gambling, nuclear power, tobacco, military and nuclear weapons industries, and also those associated with the National Foreign Trade Council, which works actively to restrict local and state governments' rights to enact selective purchasing laws. A fourth appendix lists NI resources; a fifth gives chapter-by-chapter resources pertinent to all the content. Extensive reference notes and a detailed index are also included.

This is a richly detailed, enlightening and impressively persuasive book that should encourage many investors to put their money in better places.

— Kathy Cone

Available from:
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P.O. Box 888
Princeton, NJ 08542-0888

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