It isn't that the doctrine was wrong when Professor Friedman introduced, but rather that the internet has made it obsolete now.
. It's a reversal, but it's not shocking. For the last 15 years or so, the pendulum's been moving back in the other direction. The trend is toward the activist, engaged and socially-responsible CEO.
Yet the tipping point may have come in 2018 when Laurence Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset management firm in the world with over $6 trillion dollars under management, in his annual letter called for corporations to play a more active role in taking on societal problems. After all, BlackRock represents the very shareholders whose interests so bothered Friedman. If Fink says corporations shouldn't be just about profit, it must be okay, reasoned some CEOs.
To be fair, very few corporations have ever followed the doctrine to its sociopathic extreme. Think of it as a spectrum. Unvarnished greed is on one end and pure altruism is on the other. A rigorous adherence to Friedman would mean a company operated solely on greed. The other extreme would be a company that gave all its profits away, essentially a not-for-profit.
One of the signatories of the Business Roundtable was Jeff Bezos, who leads Amazon, the company that played cities off against each other for the right to domicile Amazon's second headquarters, called HQ2. Amazon sought and received commitments for billions in tax breaks from the cities under consideration.
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