This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 15th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. For fans and opponents of ESG

environmental, social, and governance goals built into investing in corporate management, the terms

taken on many different meanings.

So when policy makers decide to enshrine or prohibit ESG investing, the details matter for taxpayers, pensioners, and everyone else.

Cato's Jennifer Schullf explains.

State government officials have at least, know in my examining of this issue just from headlines

the issue of ESG environmental social governance goals that are if you listen to the right are taking over the

ability of people to make good investments and sort of compromising corporate America for the purpose of

meeting these goals as nebulous as they they might be. How do you evaluate the sort of state-level push by certain

officials to grab on to this issue and make political hay out of it.

The state level goals, I think you're right, they're looking to make political hay.

And I think before we jump in to talk about where they're headed, I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about ESG and what that means and what it might not mean.

Because I think as you just characterized it,

if you listen to the right, it's doing something.

Well, if you listen to the left, it's doing something else.

And the fact of the matter is that ESG does a lot of things depending on how you're using the term.

And a really important split in talking about ESG is talking about the distinction between value and values investing.

Value investing is essentially taking ESG factors,

so environmental factors or social factors.

And determining whether or not those factors

have a risk, a material impact on the risk return of a particular investment.

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