Almost 51 years ago, on September 13, 1970, Milton Friedman published an essay in The New York Times with a title that captured his thesis that “The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” This shareholder value maximization metric for evaluating the legal and financial fiduciary duties of corporate officers has served as the dominant paradigm for defining the purpose of the corporation both before and certainly for the fifty years after publication of Friedman’s influential essay.
