There's a big trend in business that you may not be aware of.

It is the practice of what's called corporate social responsibility or CSR.

You have 90% of G250 companies, with these global Fortune 250 companies, 90% of them are

now publishing annual CSR reports.

So you say they're publishing annual CSR reports, is that am I to infer than that they're

actually doing CSR or they're just publishing reports about it?

Yeah, I can't vouch for what each particular company is doing, but I would say buy and

large firms are trying to do the right thing and I think also some people think that that's

a way to enhance the bottom line. That's our friend John List.

And I'm an economist at the University of Chicago.

So let's just give me a quick basket, I guess, of either activities or declarations that constitute

modern CSR. In other words, firms do what? What does it include?

I would think about it is every dollar we earn, we give a nickel to charity or we use items that

aren't produced by child workers. We're trying to make the world a better place and we're

willing to even give a profit to make the world a better place.

Is that really why so many firms practice CSR? Many businesses large and small surely are

populated by people with good intentions and pure hearts, but you can also imagine some less

than pure reasons for a company to embrace CSR, maybe to make itself more appealing to customers

or to shore up a fragile or damaged reputation, maybe even to balance out some questionable

business practices. One of John List's predecessor economists at the University of Chicago

was skeptical about CSR on an almost existential level.

Milton Friedman argued CSR is a fundamentally subversive doctrine and declared that the business

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