At the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s in America, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt said:

However, the wisdom of this statement was rapidly forgotten when, after World War II, most Americans went back to work as usual to maximize profit no matter what the human or environmental costs. By the 1980s, in boardrooms across America one could hear the slogan preached by the lead actor in the Hollywood movie Wall Street -- "Greed is good!"

But, at the same time, a dramatic and largely unseen revolution was taking hold. Started by investors during the Vietnam War who did not want their investments supporting the war, socially responsible investing (SRI) rapidly spread as investors began screening their investments for such issues as corporate environmental practices, whether or not U.S. business operations in South Africa supported apartheid, and how American companies treated their employees. Until the mid 1980s, SRI was considered to be nothing more than what Fortune magazine sarcastically called "feel-good investing" or what would be labelled today as "politically correct" behavior. The movement needed to get over two credibility hurdles --- one social/political and the other economic.

Wall Street "wisdom" had long preached that making social judgements in the investment process would have no effect on corporations, especially large ones. The second bit of wisdom was the belief that making social judgements would limit return to investors. The first hurdle was successfully negotiated as a result of the South African divestiture movement in the late '80s. As more and more U.S. corporations stopped doing business in or with aparteid South Africa (graph above left), some foreign corporations moved in and to fill the gap (graph on right). There was one major factor that accounted for this difference --- a successful and strong social investing movement in the U.S. American corporations began listened to the voices in this movement, and, as a result, rethought their roles in apartheid South Africa. The movement also publicly dramatized the evils of apartheid, which, as a result, eventually fell.

In addition, years of accumulating research began to demonstrate that corporations with good social records on the whole outperformed corporations with bad social records. In turn, socially screened portfolios, no matter what the social issue, rewarded investors better than unscreened portfolios. In other words, investors and businesspeople could do good socially while also doing very well financially. As a result, SRI took off in the U.S. in the 1980s. The portfolios of churches, universities and colleges, and state and city pension funds were among the largest financial assets involved with SRI. The number of bond, equity, mutual, and money market funds that utilized some type of social screening increased from a literal handful in the early 1980s to well over 100 by 1997. Increasing numbers of American corporations initiated corporate codes of conduct and mission statements that included what came to be known as "the double bottom line" --- a commitment to serving the special needs of employees and the communities in which the business operated, in addition to making a profit and serving the needs of customers. This was reflected in the spread of voluntary corporate family- and environmentally-friendly programs and practices, which in many cases went far beyond governmental requirements.

In the late 1980s, interest in SRI began to go global as it spread from North America to both the East and the West --- in Australia, Japan, Austria, France, Germany, Switzerland, and many more countries. As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it:

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