I didn’t agree with Friedman then, and the decades since have only exposed his myopia.

The communities beyond the corporate campus? Not our problem. Our sole responsibility to society? Make money. It influenced - I’d say brainwashed - a generation of C.E.O.s who believed that the only business of business is business. I’ll never forget reading Friedman’s essay when I was in business school in the 1980s.

Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.

A selection of their responses is below you can read extended versions online and see all of the annotations in the context of the full original essay in print.įriedman: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” Some addressed specific passages, and others took on the entire argument. We wanted to mark the occasion by stirring a series of discussions and debates, so we assembled more than 20 experts - including C.E.O.s, Nobel laureates and other top thinkers - and asked them to respond to the essay. Fifty years later, his theories on the primacy of shareholders and the priority of profits still hold sway over large parts of the corporate world. He became a regular on the talk-show circuit. Friedman, who was on the faculty of the University of Chicago and who died in 2006 at 94, was no mere economist he was a kind of celebrity. 13, 1970, was a call to arms for free market capitalism that influenced a generation of executives and political leaders, most notably Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The essay, published in The New York Times Magazine on Sept. Milton Friedman’s “ The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” laid out arguably the most consequential economic idea of the latter half of the 20th century.

A free market manifesto that changed the world, reconsidered

Want this delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up here. This newsletter runs through some of the highlights, along with bonus material and other features to mark the occasion. DealBook teamed up with The Times Magazine to revisit the legacy of the so-called Friedman Doctrine in a special issue out today in print. Fifty years ago on that day - today - Milton Friedman published a seminal essay in The New York Times Magazine that is still hotly debated in business and policy circles. 13 is an important date in the world of business.

Friedman milton capitalism and freedom