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The Social Responsibility of
Business
Fifty years ago, Milton Friedman
declared in the New York
Times Magazine that “the
social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” And for
50 years, we've witnessed the destructive power of that thinking, as
Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia Wong captured in
The
Emerging Worldview: How New Progressivism Is Moving Beyond
Neoliberalism. Today, Wong, Roosevelt Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz, and 20
more experts reflect on Friedman’s era-defining manifesto
in
a NYT Magazine and DealBook
discussion.
“Friedman ends with a warning: The doctrine of ‘social responsibility’
would invade ‘every human activity.’ But he got it backward,” Wong
writes. “Today it’s the mind-set of the shareholder—short-termism,
‘greed is good’—that invades all.”
As Stiglitz writes, “in a democracy
where money matters—clearly true in this country—it is in the private
interest of corporations to do what they can to make sure that the
rules of the game serve their interests and not the interests of the
public at large. And they often succeed.” For more from Stiglitz, watch
his Bloomberg Markets interview on small business
policy needs.
A Legacy of
Exclusion
In an interview with CNBC’s Jon
Fortt and Andrew Ross Sorkin, Roosevelt
Fellow Mehrsa Baradaran explains the structural
reasons for widening racial wealth gaps. “This is not a problem
created by Black Americans. This is a problem created by exclusionary
zoning, by racial covenants, by redlining, by people wanting to
maintain for years and years and years their racially 'homogenous'
neighborhoods, which meant, essentially, all white. And this is about
property values, and this is about schools and exclusion. That is the
legacy that we are dealing with right now." Watch
now.
 Race-Conscious Stimulus
“Instead of slashing aid in the midst of an economic
crisis, Congress should maintain unemployment support where it has
been, as well as making race-conscious fixes to the distribution of
further stimulus checks by the IRS,” Roosevelt Fellow Anne Price and
Universal Income Project Co-Director Jim Pugh write in a
TIME op-ed. “Open up the process to
ITIN filers, send recurring checks instead of band-aid stop gaps,
coordinate with other social service agencies to identify people
without prior tax returns, and invest in outreach efforts and
infrastructure needed to ensure Black and Latinx people know about
this support and how they can receive it.” Read
on.
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