Like Diogenes, who, according to legend, roamed Athens with a lantern in search of an honest man, JC de Swaan has sought to find virtuous people in finance. But unlike Diogenes, who apparently failed in his search, the author of Seeking Virtue in Finance finds such people in abundance. Not that they dominate in the offices and on the trading floors of Wall Street—the popular image of rapacious wolves is safe—but there is a sufficient number of exemplars of virtue in the financial world, as de Swaan documents, to fill a good-sized book. Indeed, the most prominent feature of this book is the plethora of profiles of people who exhibit integrity and contribute significantly to society.

As a set of profiles of exceptional individuals, along with accounts of a few miscreants, this book excels in its stated aim of demonstrating to young people—such as de Swaan’s Princeton University undergraduates—that a career in finance can be a noble calling. In this respect, Seeking Virtue in Finance is similar to Mihir Desai’s book The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return, which contains his upbeat message to Harvard finance students, and also to Finance and the Good Society by Yale University professor Robert Shiller. Apparently, finance faculty at Ivy League schools feel a need to expand the vision of their charges before their inevitable entry into the financial world.

The author explicitly states that the book was written for his students to demonstrate how a finance professional “can pursue a viable career while benefitting society and upholding humanistic values” (ix). This goal is pursued mainly through “the stories of remarkable individuals” (4), which constitute the bulk of the book. In addition to these stories, the book contains a fourfold “framework,” which is presented variously as principles to be followed, as dimensions for assessing professional conduct, and as an organizational structure for the book’s four chapters. The four parts of this framework are 1) the treatment of customers (serve customers’ interests faithfully), 2) the creation of social wealth (create genuine wealth rather than merely extracting it from others), 3) humanistic leadership in organizations (treat colleagues with dignity, support them, and foster a responsible culture), and 4) engaged citizenship (use one’s financial skills and knowledge for the benefit of society).

Judged on the basis of the book’s admittedly limited and modest aims, de Swaan’s project is an admirable success. A reader can only marvel at the number of truly remarkable individuals whose stories are told in the book, and at the author’s effort to obtain these stories. Much of the material can be found in public sources, but some of it appears to be the result of personal contacts—in one case, with a source who was persuaded to cooperate only by the author’s assurance that the book would not be widely read!

In presenting these individuals as models of virtuous conduct, de Swaan takes great pains to counter possible objections from cynics with constant qualifications about the rareness of their feats, the difficulty in overcoming the incentives and constraints that operate in finance, the organizational dynamics that foster unethical conduct—and, in some cases, the fleeting nature of noble efforts, which sometimes get reversed. The cumulative effect of these counters to cynics is possibly to blunt an enthusiasm in the reader to emulate these, admittedly, inspiring examples. Similarly, the author is modest about the potential effect of these stories on their intended audience, his students, by focusing his appeal on a “subset” of “well-intentioned” financial practitioners or professionals. By admittedly preaching to the choir, de Swaan seems to aim at getting the existing members to sing enthusiastically rather than to attract new members.

A notable strength of the book is the author’s sophisticated knowledge of the financial world, especially the workings of the investment industry. This focus on the investment industry, however, is also a weakness insofar as vast stretches of the financial world that finance students will enter are neglected. Finance is about much more than banks, mutual funds, and other consumer-oriented financial services, from which most of the book’s stories are drawn. The book’s scope is enlarged, though, by examples from outside the United States, most notably Japan. Especially welcome in a book focused on individual conduct is the author’s extensive utilization of the behavioral finance literature, with its useful tools of biases and heuristics, to explain some of the obstacles to virtuous conduct.

In contrast to the stories, which successfully convey the main lessons with which de Swaan hopes to inspire his young students, the fourfold framework has less value for achieving the stated aim of cultivating virtue in finance. The four elements, as a device for analyzing stories and organizing the book, are wholly adequate, but as principles for guiding conduct, they lack sufficient specificity and complexity. Faithfully serving customers’ interests, for example, assumes, first, that one’s organization has customers; much financial activity takes other forms. Second, should all customer interests be served—and who is a customer versus a trading party? Consider John Paulson as a customer who wants Goldman Sachs to collateralize a group of mortgages that he has personally selected. Should the bank do this deal? And when the bank sells the securities, are the unsuspecting investors also customers, whose interest should be considered, or third parties, who should be capable of protecting themselves?

The creation of social wealth raises at least two questions: what is social wealth, and does any particular activity actually create, rather than merely capture, it? While acknowledging the complexity of the first question, de Swaan tackles it with a rejection of the standard marginal utility theory definition based on individual preference satisfaction, replacing it with a view of long-term increased productivity that is both sustainable and inequality reducing. Progressive accounts of social wealth have been advanced by many thinkers—de Swaan attributes his to Mariana Mazzucato—and he cannot be expected in a book with other aims to offer more than a summary view that is adequate for his purposes, as it is here.

Even more difficult is the second question: how to identify true value creation. He calls this “by far the most challenging” (78) and admits that definite answers may be possible only in extreme cases. In place of a well-developed theoretical answer, de Swaan examines three controversial practices—venture capital, private equity, and shareholder activism—and provides an extended discussion of some Japanese developments. These four lengthy discussions are well done and well worth reading. His evaluations of venture capital, private equity, and shareholder activism are largely the same: in theory, these practices ought to benefit society; in practice, the results are mixed; and in the end, we don’t have enough concrete evidence to render a judgment. Given that these conclusions are probably the best that can be expected, the author’s solid discussions are welcomed.

The two remaining pillars of his framework, humanistic leadership and engaged citizenship, stray from finance into, broadly, management practice and philanthropy. In chapter 3, “Humanistic Leadership within the Organization,” the stories are drawn from individual financial institutions, but similar stories could be found in any sphere of business with the same lessons conveyed. Central to this chapter is the concept of servant leadership, which is a staple of the responsible management literature, on which there is little original left to say. Ironically, the main profile in this chapter is of John Whitehead, a legendary leader of Goldman Sachs, long before, as the author admits, that firm was famously described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” Sic transit gloria mundi, Goldman Sachs edition.

Chapter 4, on engaged citizenship, subtitled “Contributing Expertise, Time, and Wealth to the Common Good,” focuses mainly on how finance professionals who have been successful and who, perhaps, have become fabulously wealthy in the process can contribute to society outside of the world of finance. While the opportunities for making significant nonfinancial contributions are vast and, generally, to be welcomed, the author may have missed an opportunity here to explore further the role of innovation in finance. Chapter 2, on creating social wealth, includes a section “The Promises of Innovation,” but the main focus there is on how innovation is used, as though the innovation itself were not the product of real genius, which ought to receive more recognition and encouragement.

In chapter 2, for example, Muhammad Yunus is cited for developing microlending through the establishment of the Grameen Bank. Yunus’s innovation was more than the idea of lending to the poor—which many had tried to do and failed—but the discovery through experience and inspired insight of the mechanisms that would enable a microlending institution to succeed. Yunus had more than good intentions; he made some important discoveries worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize that he received. Indeed, every recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences provides an example of the contribution that individuals in finance can make to the common good. Such aspirations are not realistic for the undergraduate readers of de Swaan’s book, but they can be proud to be part of an enterprise in which innovation holds such high promise.

One final observation about the concept of virtue: advocates of virtue ethics, who are increasingly prominent in business ethics, may be disappointed by the lack of any sustained development of a virtue ethics approach in the book. De Swaan writes that he did not aim to apply virtue ethics to finance but to “draw from its tradition,” especially its emphasis on character (15) and on its contrast with a Kantian or utilitarian approach. However, aside from repeated references to the character of the individuals profiled in the book, little use is made of any list of virtues or exposition of their features, as is found in typical virtue ethics treatments. Furthermore, the four pillars of the framework are not expressed in terms of virtue and, indeed, do not require them. Serving the interests of customers, for example, or creating social wealth, or promoting the common good belongs to no one moral tradition and is recognized in all.

“Seeking virtue,” as used in the title of this book, appears to be little more than a rhetorical device that could easily be replaced with the concept of integrity, Kantian respect for persons, or even utilitarian well-being. Rather than constituting criticism, however, this observation merely reflects the sound, commonsense element in the book’s main message, which does not depend on any particular ethical approach. It is an important message for all of us, in finance or not.