Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is a guest who we featured before on this show, Alison Schrager.

She's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

She's an economist with very wide-ranging interests.

The author of An Economist Walks Into a Brothel, a book about

understanding risk in everyday life. Her scholarly research focuses on public finance, tax policy,

labor markets, and monetary policy. And she's been writing up a storm for City Journal lately,

covering such topics as shareholder primacy, which is the theme of

her forthcoming essay in our spring issue, the latest legislative proposals on the economy from

Washington and the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences.

Alison, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So let's start with that forthcoming essay, which is on shareholder primacy. This is a subject

fundamental to the way we think about the structures of the economy. And it's a debate about whether shareholders and stakeholders should be the,

you know, the agent in the economy that goes back to, you know, decades to 1970, when Milton

Friedman, the famous economist, wrote a landmark essay, that the primary social

responsibility of business is to simply increase profits.

Now, lately, in particular, that doctrine has been coming under ferocious attack, with many

arguing that corporations should be pushing the interests of stakeholders.

And stakeholders could include customers, employees, suppliers, local communities.

And the push is coming not just from activists, but now from business figures with the business roundtable,

actually recommending that companies embrace stakeholder capitalism in a statement it made a couple of years ago.

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