Readers are offered the text of the author's speech at the conference, which dealt with the issues of sustainable development and ESG. The conference took place on February 16, 2023. PSU in Pyatigorsk (Russian Federation) and its organizers were PSU, the INK Sustainable Development Consortium and the Center for Marketing Initiatives. The author criticizes the theory of sustainable development for not taking into account objective socio-economic laws. The author argues that without its own ethical content the components of ESG would be empty shells and the whole ESG would become a formal staff exercise to satisfy elites and all those who care more about correctness and empty formalism than about people, their lives and destinies. I warn against such a slide towards formalism and provide an undesirable image of the ESG as a "Potemkin village". He proposes his concept on the problem discussed at the conference, which must correspond to objective laws. Writes about the possibility of not falling into the trap of formalism when presenting ESGs. It is possible to create what might be called an 'ESG community' and within that community create teams focused on each of the key components of good governance. For example, recycling, new resources and materials or new forms of reproduction are what he thinks makes sense. Governance can emerge that goes beyond profits and the consumption of resources belonging to all, for the benefit of the few. There is more to economics than the privatisation of income and the socialisation of expenditure, as this is more common today. The author concludes that it is time to start thinking about the complex concepts of “ethics of productivity“ and “productivity of ethics”.