AHA the stock price! I have trying to sit in the CEO’s chair in order to try to drill down on what is going on. The ESG score is interesting.
So if there is anything at the very top of the list of what CEOs care about it is the price of the stock. Now I have been thinking of corporate profitability as totally the driver of stock price, and this is absolutely the primary factor. But what this discussion is making me realize is that there are secondary factors as well, e.g., good press rather than bad press, scores which institutions like mutual funds, pension funds, insurance company investment managers pay attention to. So I think you CAN make the argument that these are somewhat akin to the social credits in communist China.
The only fly in that argument is that there is a big difference between an authoritarian dictatorship and a consumer driven (mainly) democratic society. Don’t pension funds and insurance companies, etc somewhat answer to the end consumer or the voter? I guess that is a philosophical question that depends on how broken you think our system may be. But what then are the motivators?
By the way, do you really see anything that wrong in portraying black people in more upscale “white” type imagery? Jeez, there are enough portrayals that go in exactly the other direction (listen to rap, for example). And every year there are more and more middle class blacks out there.