[Chicks]

How Wrong Was Milton Friedman? Harvard Team Quantifies the Ways

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wrong...100023069.html

Friedman ... declared that a corporation choosing social responsibility over maximizing profits was practicing sociali$m -- a “fundamentally subversive doctrine,” he called it in 1970. In a free society, Friedman said, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business -- to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Cracks in adherence to that philosophy are showing. Last year, the Business Roundtable, a group of the largest U.S. corporations, surprised many business leaders when members committed to broadening the beneficiaries of their firms’ work from simply shareholders to customers, employees, suppliers and communities.

Serafeim’s work at Harvard could ease those changes by putting number values on them.

“What we’re doing is empowering capitalism to really have free and fair markets,” Serafeim said. “Otherwise, it’s kind of a crony version of it.”