Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business

[The current issue of Fast Company, www.fastcompany.com/homepage/index.html, discusses the top 25 socially responsive corporations in the world. This week we feature a Reason Magazine debate by three world-renowned experts, Milton Friedman, Whole Foods’ John Mackey, and Cypress Semiconductor’s T.J. Rodgers, discussing the social responsibility of business.]

Thirty-five years ago, Milton Friedman wrote a famous article for The New York Times Magazine whose title aptly summed up its main point: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” The future Nobel laureate in economics had no patience for capitalists who claimed that “business is not concerned ‘merely’ with profit but also with promoting desirable ‘social’ ends; that business has a ‘social conscience’ and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing em­ployment, eliminating discrimination, avoid­ing pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of re­formers.”

Friedman, now a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the

University of Chicago, wrote that such people are “preach­ing pure and unadulterated socialism. Busi­nessmen who talk this way are unwitting pup­pets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”

John Mackey, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods, is one businessman who disagrees with Friedman. A self-described ardent libertarian whose conversation is peppered with references to Ludwig von Mises and Abraham Maslow, Austrian economics and astrology, Mackey believes Friedman’s view is too narrow a description of his and many other businesses’ activities. As important, he argues that Friedman’s take woefully undersells the humanitarian dimension of capitalism.

In the debate that follows, Mackey lays out his personal vision of the social responsibility of business. Friedman responds, as does T.J. Rodgers, the founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor and the chief spokesman of what might be called the tough love school of laissez faire. Dubbed “one of America ’s toughest bosses” by Fortune, Rodgers argues that corporations add far more to society by maximizing “long-term shareholder value” than they do by donating time and money to charity. To read the debate, please go to www.medicaltuesday.net/index.asp.

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