Question

Which one of the following is NOT one of the arguments against social responsibility as used by economist Milton Friedman?

Answer 1

Answer:

B) Businesses can actually do very little in terms of social responsibility.

Explanation:

Milton Friedman is most famous for the defense of the Chicago School economics which is a neoclassical approach to macroeconomics. He favored free trade, smaller government and a slow but constant growth of the money supply. I personally disagree with neoclassical economists because they have the tendency to mess things up and time proves they are always wrong (that is a biased but positive statement). He was the father of monetarism, but if you look at his last two disciples, George Bush and George W. Bush, the outcome was not positive ⇒ 3 deep recessions in 3 presidential terms.

As a neoclassical economist, Friedman believed and argued in favor of the trickle down in economics. That means that if you allow the rich to get overwhelmingly rich, their riches will spill over to the rest of society. Not because they are good people that like to share their wealth, but because they need workers and employees to keep consuming goods and services in order to get the economy moving. Eventually the spilled over wealth should return to the top. So it is no wonder why he opposed corporate social responsibility, since wasting time and money in the community, employees or the environment was simply a waste of resources that could be used to increase stockholders' wealth.

I understand how theoretically this might work, but it takes the human factor out of the equation and expectations are extremely important in economics, that is why they always fail.