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by Finny Kuruvilla

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We’re so excited to share a conversation today that we think is long overdue. If you’ve been following the website, you’ve no doubt seen the name Jerry Bowyer as we’ve featured several of his blog posts (including “Jesus’ Terrible Financial Advice,” “How God’s Work is the Model for Your Work” and others)—all of which are must-reads. 

Jerry is a leading thinker in finance and economics and a frequent contributor for Forbes and Townhall. His writing has been influential in the Faith Driven Investor movement, and we think you’ll enjoy our conversation.

Tune in to hear Jerry’s thoughts on how to read the Bible, how to live like Jesus, and how to invest as faithfully as we possibly can. 

Useful Links:

Jesus’ Terrible Financial Advice

What Does Jesus Teach About Investing?

How God’s Work is a Model for Your Work

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On today’s episode, we’re talking to an expert on capital, influence, and how investments can serve the common good. Finny Kuruvilla is the Chief Investment Officer for Eventide Funds, and if you haven’t heard of them, you’re going to be glad you did. 

They’re on a mission to pursue investments that make the world rejoice—and today, Finny is going to tell us just how they do that. With a unique background in healthcare, statistics, and investing—not to mention two postgraduate degrees from Harvard and one from MIT—Finny is the type of guest you just can’t get enough of.

As always, thanks for listening.

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Eventide

Priorities and Investing

Do You Know What You Own?

To Change the World by James Davidson Hunter

This article and video were originally published here.

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by Jason Myhre

When it comes to investing, many people today believe you have to choose between financial performance and social impact. Many tend to see these two goals in a kind of a see-saw relationship, where if you want to ‘shoot the lights out’ on performance it will likely come with ethical compromise, and if you want to maximize social benefit it will likely mean accepting a lower rate of return.

Where does this mindset come from?

At least one significant source for the modern split in thinking between ethics and economics comes from Adam Smith, in what is called Das Adam Smith Problem (use your browser to translate the page) or the Adam Smith Problem. Adam Smith wrote two famous books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), about ethics, and Wealth of Nations (1776), about political economy, which would go on to found the discipline of modern economics. The problem is that, though written by the same person, the two books are very difficult to harmonize. The two books have different and contradictory presuppositions about human nature: whereas human sympathy is the basis for Smith’s book on ethics, self-interest is the basis for Smith’s book on economics. There is little intertextual evidence of the same author between the two, save a thin thread of the virtue of prudence that can be traced in both. Because of the different and contradictory starting understandings about the nature of human beings, if you didn’t know the same person wrote the two books, you might conclude they were written by different people. Importantly, it was the first time in history where ethics was broken out from economics. If you can believe it, prior to this point in history political economy was a branch of moral philosophy!

What was Smith thinking? Did he have a shift in thinking about philosophical anthropology between 1759 and 1776, where he came to believe that human beings are most basically self-interested creatures instead of sympathetic? Unlikely. Rather, it’s helpful to understand the historical context of his writings.

Smith was writing at a time when scientific thought was really getting off the ground. Many of our modern ‘disciplines’ – the things we study in college today as separate fields of study – were founded during the time of his writings. At that time, there was a big push to really talk about the science of things – how things really worked – and to isolate subjects for examination in order to hone in on their inner workings. To separate ethics and economics, it’s likely Smith availed upon a popular approach at the time of making what’s called a fact/value distinction, or a positive/normative distinction. It goes like this:

• Let’s talk about the ‘facts’ and not make ‘value’ (or ethical) judgments;

• Let’s talk about what’s ‘positive’ (or true) and not ‘normative’ (shoulds and oughts about human behavior).

It was believed that you could bracket ethical considerations and talk about the pure, supposedly value-neutral ‘science’ of things – in this case making money. Right or wrong aside, this is how you make money – it’s science. Ethics is a separate discussion.

Play this forward to today and you get the modern mindset. This works upon us in a very strange way. I’ll describe it using three different metaphors:

1. The easiest way to picture the effect is to think about a child who grows up in a home where two languages are spoken. The child will learn both languages fluently and often switch between those languages seamlessly, sometimes even in the same sentence. “Mama, can I have more juice? Por favor?” This is called ‘code switching’ – to switch between two different languages. Like this child, we today are able to easily switch between two different ‘languages’ we’ve learned to speak about ethics versus economics.

2. This effect can also be thought about as different ‘social characters.’ Have you ever found yourself being a very different person in two different groups of friends? We sometimes call this being a chameleon. You may be more of a thinker with one group, and more carefree and humorous in another group. Similarly, we can tend to be different people whether we’re with our ethics friends or our economics friends. If I ask you, how does one make money, you take on the social character of economics; if I ask you how you think about ethics, you change social characters and start telling me about love for others.

3. We suffer from a kind of epistemological schizophrenia. Epistemology is the study of how we know things. It’s our method of exploration in life. So, with epistemological schizophrenia, we suffer from a radical change in person in how we go about approaching life. One moment we’re the kind of person who cares deeply about others and we seek to do good to those we can, and then all of sudden we change into a totally different person caring only about looking out for ourselves.

In each of these three descriptions of the effect on us today, we’ve learned to deal with the discontinuities of our views on ethics and economics rather easily and invisibly.

Philosopher Charles Taylor, in the hugely influential book A Secular Age, says “as we function within various spheres of activity – economic, political, cultural, educational, professional, recreational – the norms and principles we follow, the deliberations we engage in, […] the considerations we act on are internal to the ‘rationality’ of each sphere – maximum gain within the economy, the greatest benefit to the greatest number in the political area, and so on.”1 We have these different ‘spheres’ of life and we tend to execute the script we’ve learned for each when we enter these spheres. You’ve heard people talk about compartmentalizing our thinking – having these different, separate, and uncommunicating compartments to our lives.

Fortunately, where modernism broke us up, postmodernism (or late modernism) has started to call this into question. Postmodernism said, “You know what, this inherited understanding has problems. Let’s go back and look at the presuppositions or assumptions that underlie this thinking.” On a personal level, people have felt the discomfort of having life all broken up and want to put themselves back together. Many people today are dissatisfied with and exhausted in remaking themselves over and over many times throughout the day. They want to be people whose lives have a genuine integrity – a ‘wholeness’ – where they’re the same person in every area of life. They want one sphere of engagement, life.

At Eventide, we count ourselves in their number. We reject the idea that we need to think about ethics differently from how we think about economics, or as we started, investing. We see investing this way: you are investing your money with companies, the companies inside of mutual funds, for example. Companies are made up of people and human relationships, therefore investing in our view is always, already, ethical. We believe that caring about investment return requires first caring about the kinds of companies that benefit people – customers, employees, suppliers, communities, the environment, and society broadly. We’re of one mind about ethics and investing, and it feels great. Want to join us?

This blog expresses the views of Eventide Asset Management, LLC, and such views may not be accurate. There is no guarantee that any investment strategy will achieve its objectives, generate profits, or avoid losses. Readers should be aware that Eventide’s approach may not produce the desired results, and Eventide’s ethical values screening criteria could cause it to underperform other firms that do not have such screening criteria.

4691-NLD-6/15/2018

This article was originally published here by Financial Advisor.

by Amit Bouri

In 1758, at their yearly meeting in London, all Quakers were called to “to avoid being in any way concerned, in reaping the unrighteous Profits” from what they called the “iniquitous practice” of slavery. Members of the same faith would later be among the loudest to call for divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the Rerum Novarum encyclical that called all members of society to contribute to its betterment and outlined the relationship between labor and capital in a Christian society. Today it lends its name to a fund supporting Catholic businesses and philanthropy.

And as of 2016, 126 faith-based organizations of “diverse religions and creeds,” such as Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity, and with a collective $24 billion in assets, had committed to divesting from fossil fuels, with many feeling a moral imperative to provide clean energy to the world’s poor.

There are similar examples from all faiths—from Judaism to Sikhism to Buddhism—around the world. Faith-based investors have long recognized the importance of ensuring their money is not out of step with their convictions.

So, while the increased attention that values-based investing has received may be new, many faith-based investors have been doing this type of investing for generations.

Read the rest of this article here!

It’s estimated that Christians manage over 150 trillion dollars. That’s over half the world’s wealth. That’s 200-300x what is given (around the world) philanthropically each year. Capital has influence. Yet many of us are content to let others determine our investment strategy. Watch this 3-minute video below or on our homepage to see what’s being done to change the conversation!

Please feel free to share it with others!