, Columnist
Stakeholder Capitalism Isn’t Working as Planned
It’s a prescription for culture wars, political backlash, managerial paralysis and human-resources nightmares. And it’s anything but nice.
Just one of nearly 200,000 Disney employees.
Photographer: Octavio Jones/Getty Images
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Wouldn’t it be nice if companies cared less about profits and more about the social good? It’s popular to think so. Stakeholder capitalism is fashionable. Shareholder capitalism is not.
Many high-profile business leaders and academics now condemn the idea Milton Friedman laid out in a famous 1970 New York Times Magazine essay: