Your wish has been granted
It is interesting how deep the belief that “consumption is the cornerstone of the economy” is anchored in the public opinion. We can look at history to see what happened when the population saves the majority of its income instead of spending it. This gives Singapore, which went in 40 years from a swamp full of mosquitoes to one of the wealthiest nations in the world. if you are interested in the subject, you can read From Third World To First, the memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew.
Consumption is not the engine of society. Investment and innovation are.
There are many ways to answer this question:
- one is to say that if there is a shortage of people willing to clean the streets, the pay for these jobs will go higher. This is exactly the same reason that software developers are well paid: it is not because they are smart, but because there is currently a massive need for their skills.
- Let’s push further the thought experiment. if everybody is wealthy and does not want to clean the streets, why should they? I’d bet this would get automated pretty quickly. If we would have asked your question 150 years ago, this would have been “Who will till manually the soil in the fields?”. Thankfully somewhere there was an investor backing the guy who commercialised the tractor.
The trend has been historically to automate laborious and unpleasant jobs, and i don’t see why this would change.
As said in this post, you need to make the difference between primary and secondary market. In short, the ETF investor money does not go to the various invested companies, but to the previous shareholders of these companies. The firms never see your money.
As a result, ESG investing is quite a nonsense, as the investor does not have any impact on the “bad” companies. This is however a shiny branded product with juicy fees that the investment industry will market with great energy to investors… And what a fabulous business MSCI has created for themselves!
At a deeper level, here is how I see it: as long as customers will be willing to pay good money for the goods/services of a company (evil or not), a market is thereby created and there will be capital flowing to this market.
If you want to change society, don’t act at the investor level, this will work only marginally (as explained above). Act directly at the customer level, by providing him a better solution that will satisfy his needs. if a “clean” product is more attractive for the consumer than an “evil” product, it should not take long before the evil company is out of business (with the obvious exception of addiction-based businesses (drugs, sugar, tobacco, gambling…).
If you translate this to the climate crisis, you may shout at the western population so that they don’t consume so much and even accept to “un-grow” (whatever that means), but this will not occult the fact that there are 4 billion people in Asia who want to get out of poverty and will laugh at you when you mention the climate. Not starving is more important for them.
On the other hand, if you provide them with an energy that is cleaner, cheaper and healthier than gas, they will be eager to switch. So the focus should be on better energy ventures rather than shaming people into un-growth. But you need innovators and investors for this.