“How did we get to the point where the highest standard a business will hold itself to is simply the absence of evil?
“And how did we get to a so-called “ethics” of business that insists that the only affirmative responsibility of a corporate executive is to maximize value for shareholders?
“I believe that these corrosive moral claims derive from a fundamentally flawed understanding of how market capitalism works, grounded in the dubious assumption that human beings are “homo economicus”: perfectly selfish, perfectly rational, and relentlessly self-maximizing. It is this behavioral model upon which all the other models of orthodox economics are built. And it is nonsense.”
Read Hanauer’s acceptance speech for the 2018 Harvard and MIT’s Humanist of the Year Award.
