Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Being Done With Milton Friedman

Being Done With Milton Friedman In an article of just under 3,000 words, published on September 19, 1970 in The New York Times under the title The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, Milton Friedman strongly expressed a simple idea, summarized in its title, which quickly took off as a statement of the obvious.This article has achieved the wonder of making appear as obviously true inferences about the role of the firm and its executives which, in fact, are based on erroneous assertions. Friedman’s argument, in particular, is based on the claim that shareholders own the firm. This is totally false, as our article will show. But based on this assertion, the argument has been built that corporate executives are the shareholders’ agents, that they must maximize the shareholders’ interests -equated with a maximization of the profits- and that they should not pay attention to anything else and especially not to the impact the pursuit of this goal may have on other contributors to the firm or on its social and natural environments. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Accounting, Economics and Law de Gruyter

Being Done With Milton Friedman

Robé, Jean-Philippe
Accounting, Economics and Law , Volume 2 (2) – Jun 8, 2012
Download PDF
33 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/being-done-with-milton-friedman-BL79eJ5hfq
Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by the
ISSN
2152-2820
eISSN
2152-2820
DOI
10.1515/2152-2820.1047
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

In an article of just under 3,000 words, published on September 19, 1970 in The New York Times under the title The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, Milton Friedman strongly expressed a simple idea, summarized in its title, which quickly took off as a statement of the obvious.This article has achieved the wonder of making appear as obviously true inferences about the role of the firm and its executives which, in fact, are based on erroneous assertions. Friedman’s argument, in particular, is based on the claim that shareholders own the firm. This is totally false, as our article will show. But based on this assertion, the argument has been built that corporate executives are the shareholders’ agents, that they must maximize the shareholders’ interests -equated with a maximization of the profits- and that they should not pay attention to anything else and especially not to the impact the pursuit of this goal may have on other contributors to the firm or on its social and natural environments.

Journal

Accounting, Economics and Law – de Gruyter

Published: Jun 8, 2012

There are no references for this article.