A business school case competition, some years back. A team pitches a plan that saves a factory town by cutting wages twenty percent instead of closing the plant. The judges score it high. Nobody in the room asks what a wage cut does to the people living in that town, because that isn’t the number being graded. The number being graded is whether the firm survives with its return intact. That’s the whole education, compressed into one afternoon.
We vilify Friedman for shareholder wealth maximization, but the case competition worked exactly as its incentives told it to. The counter to Friedman, arriving about thirty years late, was to swap shareholders for stakeholders. I like the idea. I don’t think it works.
But not for the reason people assume. Change the ownership structure all you like. Socialism, cooperatives, stakeholder capitalism, the Triple Bottom Line. Every one of them assumes a person who will optimize for something other than personal gain, and then hands that person a system where optimizing for personal gain still pays. Communal experiments have tested this honestly for a century and most drifted back toward differential reward, because the members who could earn more elsewhere eventually did. Equality held only where leaving was hard.
So was Friedman prescribing or describing? Both, and that's the uncomfortable part. He described how we had already been trained to behave. Then business schools taught it back to us as the definition of management, and the description hardened into architecture.
We come from different places, worship differently, speak different languages, eat different foods. What we share is a blind obedience to money. Every alternative on offer is a patch on a system whose smallest unit is a self trying to win.
Which leaves one thing untried. Not redesigning the system but dismantling the self that the system runs on. Every tradition that attempted it worked one person at a time, voluntarily, from the inside, and none of them scaled. Every attempt to do it at scale, from the outside, produced something worse than what it replaced. So the only hope left is that the individual decides to change. No external force can make that work, and no external force ever has.
This reads like a counsel of despair. It isn't, quite.
If the change can only happen inside a person, then the only useful work is on the conditions that shape what a person wants before they're old enough to argue about it. Homes, schools, universities. And here I'm implicating myself.
We measure students on GPA, then on starting salary, then on the value of what they own. Every number we hand them says the same thing: your worth is a figure that can go up. We don't do this because teachers are shallow. We do it because rankings, accreditation and placement statistics measure us that way, and we pass the measurement down. The saint in the classroom loses to the structure just as reliably as the saint in the CEO chair.
So the practical question isn't how to teach kids to care about community. It's what we would have to stop counting first.