Among the many things Milton Friedman could not have predicted in 1970 was that the 50th anniversary of his famous New York Times essay, headlined “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”, would fall in the middle of a global pandemic.
The University of Chicago economist might have been less surprised that corporate social responsibility was enjoying a revival, half a century after he condemned executives for indulging in “hypocritical window-dressing” by spending shareholders’ money “for a general social interest”.
Friedman’s ideas continue to provoke debate. That much was clear at a recent online anniversary event, hosted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. As Raghuram Rajan, a Booth professor and former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, told me in a live interview at the conference, Friedman’s ideas “make sense, but only to a first approximation”. Shareholder value maximisation “sounds sinister, it sounds pro-rich, it sounds evil — even if it may be the right thing to do for society and in many circumstances”.