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Comment by lowkeyoptimist | Hacker News Reader

Partially the politicization of it, but also because it is lumping together three issues that the society cannot even broadly agree one of the issues within 'ESG'. I don't think it is difficult to see why "ESG" is political by its nature.

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Thanks this is a nice way of saying what the other poster said :)

I agree, ESG is just a bunch of numbers but if we can't agree on what the right output is then it's political in nature. I wonder if society has a bigger issue with disagreements about the E and S rather than the G, maybe not?

I think there is a strong case for that, companies concern themselves with governance constantly and I would agree that there is less to be concerned about there. It seems like governance problems have been pretty well worked out over time and there is a good process for that even before the focus on ESG.

E and S are where many draw their political divides so I would tend to agree that is where many of the problems lie within ESG.

That's most of investing though. Investors won't all agree the operating cash flow, asset base, organic sales growth if there's been M&A, etc. let alone with a P/E, P/FCF, EV/EBITDA ratio makes a company cheap or expensive. Yet, this doesn't make it political in nature though.

"Society" has plenty of disagreements on the G, but, fortunately for the companies in question, shareholders don't. G measures, essentially, how much the company prioritizes its shareholders.

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