Ezra Klein: evaluation

Transcript context

…Say you have a company, the manager, the executive is supposed to maximize profits, but this would involve some pollution, and the pollution may not be good for broader society, but once you sign on to be the manager you either do the pollution if you think you can get away with it, or at least you feel to obliged to lobby Congress so you could pollute if they would allow, and that’s part of the deal with being manager. Now, people who are conservative, libertarian, maybe more to the right, they tend to see less of a conflict between fiduciary responsibility and the overall good of society. In a sense them being a CEO is morally more of a seamless venture. That might even be the wrong view. There might be a real conflict there. Say you own some factory farms and you answer to your shareholders. Correct? People who you would broadly call progressives, is there for them a greater psychological clash in principle between the CEO’s responsibility and what they think about politics? I have a couple thoughts there. One, I think this actually is pretty industry-specific, and I think that taking that view resolves a fair amount of the clashing. You used an example there that I think is a good example, but will cut very much towards the argument that this would be harder for somebody on the left, which is you’re talking about an industry where you have as a by-product high levels of pollution. My guess is that kind of industry will select against people who have highly environmentalist views rising to the tops of those firms. I could be wrong about that, but that would be my assumption. Whereas I think there are also industries where it will cut a little bit the other way. Media might actually be one of those industries where in order to do the things that your shareholders want you to do it will imply pushing in leftward direction. I just assume that people select into industries that they basically find morally aligned with their views, at least at that top level where you have a lot of selection power, if you’re going to be running one of these firms. As we talked about, CEOs can be more generalists now. If you’re at that level on the market you probably have selected somewhere where you just don’t find it to be a problem. I will say, though, that even as someone who I think in contemporary American politics falls more on the center-left side of the spectrum, I have always found the amount of corporate social responsibility stuff to be a little puzzling. I don’t find it intuitively appealing myself. A lot of it’s public relations.…

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