The Blue Way

By Daniel De Faro Adamson and Joe Andrew
(Simon & Schuster, 246 pages, $26)

Ever since the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock, Americans have felt the need to prove that material fortune is endorsed from above. Prosperity, according to the early Calvinists, is the sign of a reverential spirit. If God smiles on industrious workers, then great wealth testifies to a divine soul.

The modern Republican Party has carried on in this vein; indeed, contemporary conservatism can be construed as an apologia for the rich. Profit is the market's verdict, and markets, as we know, are close to God.

The liberal response has been to flip the equation. Instead of declaiming that profit is good, liberals aver that doing good will lead to profit. As with eating spinach, doing the right thing (in this case, paying generous wages and providing comprehensive employee benefits, protecting the environment, and refraining from exploiting foreign trabajadores) brings its own rewards.

During the past generation, a passel of "socially responsible" mutual funds have sprung up to test this proposition. These funds do not invest in Exxon, Wal-Mart, or tobacco companies, having instead committed to buying shares of green firms such as Microsoft and Starbucks (but please don't mention possible health problems stemming from caffeine). The funds' results have been mediocre. Socially responsible funds do no better or worse than any others. This is altogether logical; we don't expect baseball players who are also vegetarians or who play the guitar to be better or worse than the average. However, Daniel de Faro Adamson and Joe Andrew, authors of The Blue Way, say this logic is dead wrong. According to their book, the subtitle of which is How to Profit by Investing in a Better World, the stocks of virtuous companies perform much better than other companies' stocks.