Inside the Leaders' Club

CHAPTER 7

HOW TO MEET SOCIETY’S DEMANDS

Journalism is an ephemeral trade. In the days of print, people used to say that today’s news was tomorrow’s fish and chips wrapping. Even now, when online articles are supposedly preserved forever, much of what is written is soon forgotten. Not so a 1970 New York Times article by the economist Milton Friedman, which continues to be quoted more than half a century later. In its most famous line, Friedman, an economics Nobel Prize winner who died in 2006, wrote that business executives’ responsibility was to their employers, the owners of the business. ‘That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming ...