The argument was subsequently reiterated in Friedman’s famous 1970 piece in the NYT, under the suggestive headline The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits. “Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible,” he wrote. In his seminal book Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Milton Friedman considered corporate social responsibility a serious threat to the survival of the capitalist system itself. Furthermore, the notion of the firm as a nexus of contracts is theoretically groundless and legally contradictory.Įditor’s note: To mark the 50-year anniversary of Milton Friedman’s influential NYT piece on the social responsibility of business, we are launching a series of articles on the shareholder-stakeholder debate. The anti-CSR position defended by Friedman would be acceptable only under conditions that have never been met by any real-world economy.
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