50 years ago, Milton Friedman published an essay that changed the world.

For the worse. In telling business to ignore society, it made the world crueler, more full of suffering, more unequal.

@NYTmag asked me and others to reflect on his legacy of pain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/business/dealbook/milton-friedman-doctrine-social-responsibility-of-business.html

Milton Friedman told businesses not to stray from their lane of moneymaking into the lane of worrying about human society.

But his essay didn’t counsel against straying into the lane of rigging society through lobbying and campaign donations and philanthropic goodwashing.

So Milton Friedman gave companies moral cover to rig the rules and secure bottle-service public policy, and then when, inevitably, it hurts people, to deny any responsibility to those people because business is its business.

Business uses the Friedman doctrine to intervene in social life every damn day — for its gain.

It just denies any duty to intervene in social life for people’s good.

And while reading through others’ essays, it may seem like the Friedman doctrine has fizzled and woke CEOs now practice social responsibility, do look up the records of the actual CEOs in this special section. Some minimum-wage bashers, some layer-offers.

Just keeping it real.

My final lines were cut, but I‘ll share them with you:

“His legacy is tragic. I am not being hyperbolic — I am being totally literal, because I have seen their faces and have told their stories — when I say that a great many people needlessly suffered and died because he lived.”