Can corporate social and environmental responsibility issues be addressed by adding constraints to profit maximisation?
Milton Friedman's thinking is often caricatured as suggesting that companies simply maximise profits for the shareholder. In reality, Friedman suggests that this is maximisation under constraints, taking into account incentive policies or rules put in place by the government. We will give different examples of this. An interesting question is therefore: what are the societal or environmental objectives that cannot be achieved through this profit maximisation under constraints and that require a more direct intervention in corporate governance? We can think of: Ethical issues (corruption, child labour, gender equality, executive remuneration, etc.); Informational issues (employee information, insider trading, etc.); Relational issues (relations with subcontractors, etc.). But there are many issues that can be addressed in the context of profit maximisation under different constraints.