The CEO of the business media company, Fortune, just said it's time for businesses to stop talking about ESG—environmental, social and governance—i.e. politicized investment. 

No, he didn’t say companies should stop doing it, only that they should stop calling it that. 

But why? 

If you meet someone and find out that every decade or so he has changed his name, you might want to know why. Politicized capital keeps changing its name: socially responsible investment (SRI), corporate social responsibility (CSR) and most recently, ESG. Ideas which bear good fruit, don't have to keep shedding their skin and changing their names. 

By whatever name, the imposition of political positions on companies using other people’s money is a bad idea. There’s an old adage that by the time a company is on the front page of Fortune, it’s time to sell the stock. 

Well, Fortune has been front-paging ESG quite a lot in the past year, once again signaling it’s time to drop a bad idea.