The Great Anti-ESG Backlash
22nd December 2022
For more than thirty years, Scott Adams has captured the absurdity and humor of office life in his popular syndicated newspaper cartoon strip “Dilbert.” The title character, an oblong-headed, cubicle-dwelling everyman, is one of the most familiar cartoon characters in America, but last September he vanished from more than seventy newspapers.
Shortly before Dilbert’s partial disappearance, his opinionated creator had set his sights on ESG. Adams’s views on the vogue for “Ethical, Social and Corporate Governance” investment strategies weren’t exactly difficult to discern. In one strip, for example, Dilbert asks, “What is this ‘ESG’ thing I keep hearing about?” His sidekick Dogbert offers a definition: “Imagine if a crooked politician and a crooked financial advisor got married and had a baby.” “So… ESG would be that baby?” “Only if it is colicky and has firehose diarrhea.”