The voice of the late economist Milton Friedman has dominated this question for the last half-century. In his seminal 1970 essay entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits,” he argued that “a corporate executive is an employee of the owners” and that their primary responsibility is to maximize shareholders’ profits. Since profits are to capitalism what points are to basketball, the Friedman doctrine, which has come to dominate and define Western shareholder capitalism, has led us to spend decades creating and training basketball players from the ground up to focus on a scoreboard that measures one thing only: points. And our agents, like BlackRock, who act as the owners of the players on our behalf, have spent decades training and directing those players to be point-scoring machines. Indeed, they’ve consistently hired the pilots in the cockpit based on their ability to do one thing: score points. Not only that, but we pay them directly linked to how many points they score and give them handsome bonuses for hitting high point targets. To deal with a competitive economy, we built winners. [links]