Institutional Investor
Alongside Bono, Richard Branson, and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, private equity firm TPG launched the Rise Impact fund in 2016. The offering committed “to deliver positive and sustainable impact” while creating a “top-performing fund.” At the time, Bono remarked that “capitalism is going up on trial, and I think that it’s clear that putting profit before people is a nonsustainable business model.” Bain Capital followed suit, launching its own Double Impact fund, and KKR recently closed a $1.3 billion impact fund.
Private Equity Makes ESG Promises: Their Impact is Often Superficial
Too many academics, commentators and experts have fallen victim to magical thinking regarding our ability to tackle the major societal challenges facing humanity. To wit: many of the signatories to a recent pledge to find societal purpose in business are furloughing employees during the Covid-19 pandemic, paying dividends to shareholders and provoking complaints from workers that they aren’t adequately protected from danger. It is time to give up on hopeful stories and get back to basics. If the global pandemic can teach us something, it is to remind us to return to those ideas, like regulation and good governance, that we know work, even if they are obvious or dull. Taxing carbon is not a shiny new idea, but it would redirect investment and effort to low carbon solutions. Mandating accounting and reporting standards for non-financial measures sounds like an notion from a previous century, but it works. Nobel Laureate James Heckman long ago showed that investing in early childhood education improves social justice and economic productivity. But it has upfront costs. Maybe it is time we listened to him, despite our dislike of taxes. For other global problems, proven interventions are available, but they require effort and sacrifice to deliver results
The Guardian