[panta]

Corporate culture changed radically in the 70s adopting Milton Friedman views that ethics and responsibility towards society have no place in the private sector, and as a consequence started maximizing profits in spite of everything else.

[timthorn]

I'm not convinced that's exactly what he thought, though corporates might have gone that way.

[chrisco255]

Corporations never had "responsibility towards society". In fact I much prefer corporations that don't pretend to have such a burden. It's almost always a false front.

Corps have a responsibility to deliver a product or service at a competitive price in order to sustain growth.

Friedman was an economist, not a corporate whisperer. To the extent that corps changed, they were forced to by market forces, most notably globalization, a force much bigger than one man and a force that was inevitable and even necessary in the wake of world war one and world war two.

[panta]

Maybe, but somehow their behaviour and their products and services changed. Companies are made of people, and individuals had more freedom to put value in what they did, they took pride in the quality of their work. After Friedman everything got "optimized" for revenue, even if this meant screwing the customers (or the society). There are some things that cannot possibly work with this "self-regulated" market, so if we want to accept this way of doing business, we should move back some responsibilities to the public sector (healthcare, infrastructures, rehabilitation, education, research), because the search for "immediate gratification" of shareholders can't move the society as a whole out of local maxima that are far away from society best possibilities.