Business and Society: A View from the Top

In a now infamous 1970 article in the New York Times Magazine, the late University of Chicago and Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman spelled out this fundamental precept of the free enterprise system.1 “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,” he explained. “In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business.” Actions such as “providing amenities for a community … or reducing pollution … or hiring the ‘hardcore’ unemployed,” he decried as window dressing and, should these come at the expense of corporate profits, as tantamount to fraud.