Responsible investing [2025]

Investing / Portfolios
41

I was discussing public health with officials and leading clinicians from 5 countries for 2 days in London, just came back last night. Public health is only important because there’s an associated cost to the healthcare system meaning that state/private funding can’t be used to treat highly emotive conditions like pediatric cancer and other non-communicable diseases.

Exactly, there’s essentially zero humanistic interest in public health from a healthcare system perspective, only economic, which tells me not to give a rat’s ass about it, also because my personal health is…personal. Productivity cost is one example paraded all the time as an argument, but if you try to talk to the BAG, the NHS or US insurers about it as a basis to charge a higher price for a drug…good luck. Trust me (bro), it’s literally in my job description :wink:

As a smoker but very rare drinker I’d say to me alcohol is worse, smoking doesn’t impair ones perception, ability to operate machinery etc etc yet alcohol is actively advertised everywhere :slight_smile:

Anyway off topic!

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42

Most countries have socialized healthcare. Unless smokers get to pay their own insurance it’s a cost for society.

And that’s without counting the impact of all the life lost to cancer (iirc 14y less of life expectancy) which will reduce how much we can achieve as a community.

(And all the families impacted, some of my grand parents died from lung cancer)

I’m not even sure which position you’re trying to debate, that smoking had no impact?

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43

Is it an urban myth or do smokers have reduced life insurance costs? It made me wonder whether deaths from tobacco (assuming most come towards end of life) is a net economic (obviously not social) benefit by reducing the social cost of retired people.

44

The WHO? Seriously?

Goofy unsubscribes from this topic.

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Shrug… there’s a link in that page to a survey paper. But I guess it’s WHO researchers who made so it’s some kind of conspiracy.

I guess wikipedia is also in on it? Health effects of tobacco - Wikipedia

Honestly I’m not quite sure what’s controversial here, the healthcare cost of smoking are well known since the 60s. There’s massive amount of cancers due to smoking, it’s not like we just let those people die without treatment…

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46

Cancer can take a while and there’s also higher odds for various disease (heart disease, diabetes, etc.), I saw some numbers like for each death there’s 30 people with serious disease or disability (couldn’t find the paper).

For Switzerland, there’s a somewhat recent paper: Burden of smoking on disease-specific mortality, DALYs, costs: the case of a high-income European country - PMC (Switzerland has a fairly high share of smokers and really expensive healthcare)

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47

I want to say you’re the minority, but it’s probably just enough inconsiderate smokers for me to not feel well. It’s mostly public transport stops (often disallowed but ignored by the smokers) and cafes (sadly, mostly allowed) where I worry about my health and that of my kids. I have a friend who switched to commuting by car because of how bad the situation is in Switzerland.

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48

Indeed I was fairly shocked when I first came here by how many people smoke, and coming from Greece it’s saying something… I personally never smoke next to other people, in bus stops or restaurants or anywhere, I just smoke while walking outside.

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49

I can’t see how such conspiratorial takes help moving this discussion forward.*
You were probably right to unsubscribe.

*Could have misinterpreted the intention of that line, but guess I’ll never find out. :wink:

While I do not invest in ESG myself, I find it hard to believe it has a below net-zero effect. Less than advertised, likely. But negative I have yet to find proper evidence that goes beyond anecdotes.**

**If company X does some greenwashing campaign and 95% of it is bullshit there is still >=0% positive effect vs not giving a f*ck at all.

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50

I don’t. A lot of effort/energy is expended on ESG. As is a lot of co-opting by special interest, fraud and other items.

We see already fraudulent carbon credits being sold (I was surprised this was discovered as it is in nobody’s interest to reveal the fraud), but some efforts were so brazen and sloppy they were easily detected.

It wouldn’t surprise me if corn-based ethanol mandated to be included in gasoline is overall net negative return on energy.

I was also approached to consult on a few projects which had obviously no intrinisic economic value and no environmental value but were purely plays to exploit tax credits.

51

What matters is probably more the lifecycle emissions than return on energy.

But yeah, the solution is to stop using combustion engine whenever possible (it’s also not very efficient and often requires more maintenance anyway).

Bio-ethanol still lead to significant emissions (and the impact can be fairly big when taking land use into account).

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