Three Modest Proposals, Instead of Divesting...
The modest proposal comes after a bit of serious economics, because, well, you have to eat your vegetables before you get any dessert.
Also: Global warming is real and anthropocentric; we're going to need to stop it; we're going to need to stop using fossil fuels. If you don't believe these things, then I'm not going to try to convince you here. If you do believe these things, and also think that I'm wrong here, I'd be really, really, glad to hear it.
All of that said, the majority of this post is either intended as satire or double-satire; the only thing that I'll admit to honestly believing is that no one, not even Divest, is above a little tongue-in-cheek mockery.
Also, despite my use of the narrative first person, I am in no way involved with the Divest movement, at Harvard or elsewhere, except that sometimes I give them unsolicited financial advice.
Recently, Milo King, on Gains From Trade, asks: What is the economic impact of divestment? A few years ago, and seemingly unrelatedly, the HPR came to the same conclusion, namely:
Because the stock market is efficient, selling off stock for reasons unrelated to that company's profitability will cause more amoral investors to step in and kindly take your depressed-price shares, reaping the spread for themselves. No long-term depression of prices, no pain felt by Exxon et al., and now the shareholder voting those shares has worse morals than you did. Oops.
Consider, for example, the widely-acclaimed divestment from South Africa, in protest of apartheid...
Despite the prominence and publicity of the boycott and the multitude of divesting companies, the financial markets' valuations of targeted companies or even
