stolinski Effective altruism, My investments, My story

Loanstock investment in peril

I said in a previous post about my ethical investments And I must say, so far so good for me! I haven’t lost any money yet.

Then of course the next day I got an answer to an email asking about loanstock repayment saying that the housing cooperative had fallen apart and had been fined by the FCA for not submitting taxes for two years. At this stage we are discussing repayment plans and since some friends are/were involved i think i will get my £2000 back, but it did make me think about the frailty of investments. And also about the wisdom of mixing friends and money.

On the flipside, this is the first blip I have had in twenty years of ethical investment.

2020 UPDATE – The story I was given didn’t stack up, but I got my money back so I didn’t press further.

Conclusion – be wary of mixing friends and money! Without keeping an eye on this investment, I would have lost it.

More philosophically, some investments don’t work out.

stolinski Effective altruism, My investments, My story

It’s not all about profit (part two)

The second attitude (part one here) I seem to come up against a lot regarding ethical investment is a nihilistic argument with two prongs.

One is represented mainly by my father (hi dad!) who takes the view that he wants to double his money as quickly as possible and if everything is legal then where on earth is the problem? Further, he firmly believes in survival of the fittest.

I actually find this view quite offensive, even though I would imagine the majority of people would share it. I feel that anyone who has enough money to invest is not necessarily amongst the fittest in evolution terms but definitely privileged in many ways. I don’t want to lose money but I would rather everyone got rich, not me at the expense of others. There is enough for us all! If the game of capitalism results in winners and losers then I want to change the game. I believe in abundance, not poverty.

The rules of the game have been drawn up wrong, I truly believe we can all win. Or if not all win, maybe that’s too much, but at least ensure that no-one is hungry and everyone is housed. For fuck’s sake it’s 2020 and we can’t even do that!?

The second prong says that buying/selling stocks in a company doesn’t really affect them that much anyway, you can’t cause direct change by buying their stuff instead. I understand this argument, but i still don’t really get this, it’s just as ridiculous to me as Marxists telling me they buy coffee at Starbucks rather than the local cafe because we are powerless in the face of multinational corporations and it simply doesn’t matter. Yup rather nihilist. I would much rather put my money where my mouth is and therefore this argument simply passes me by for the most part. Not thinking only about profit means that i can invest my money where i want it to be and not be ruled by the market. I am generally quite nihilistic in the sense of thinking we are all fucked, but as the ship goes down I’d still like to be spreading my money so that more people than ME ME ME benefit.

stolinski Effective altruism

It’s not all about profit (part one)

In this post I’d like to address two attitudes which I come up against frequently in discussions surrounding green or ethical investment… actually having now written part one about the first attitude, the second seems worthy of a post of its own (and who knows, maybe some discussion) so I’ll put that in part two.

First, I want to discuss the developed utilitarian argument promoted by Peter Singer known as effective altruism which states in short (I’m assuming the reader already has some knowledge of this, so I won’t explain it all here) that people should aim to make as much money as possible and then later on funnel it towards good causes.

Now, Peter Singer is a very interesting moral philosopher and I find his arguments quite compelling concerning animal liberation and what it is to be human, but I find the ideas of effective altruism ludicrous. Here’s why:
Continue reading “It’s not all about profit (part one)” →