CEO's, You Can Forget about Milton Friedman

When it was first published in The New York Times in 1970, Milton Friedman's "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits" heralded a new way of thinking about the mission of a company and helped to shift Corporate America from a stakeholder vision of capitalism to one that gave shareholders pride of place. In this episode of the In-House Ethicist, John Paul Rollert looks at some of the central claims of Friedman's essay and situates it against the backdrop of the Cold War and fears about creeping socialism. He also explores how relevant Friedman's famous arguments are to a world where Mikhail Gorbachev and the Berlin Wall are now a distant memory.