This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 8th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

Businesses love telling us about the good they're doing when we buy their products

and they love to tell us because it helps

the bottom line. But is corporate social responsibility really all that responsible?

Kimberly Joseph sent his professor at business at Lebanon Valley College.

Her view is that businesses should avoid the temptation to stray from the one true bottom line,

which is profit.

I was speaking recently with Sam Staley of Florida State University about social

entrepreneurship. These are for-profit organizations that put a portion or a large chunk of their revenues into achieving some

social good. We talked about Tom's shoes as an example of how not to do this in part because of the the problems that Tom's shoes

unwittingly created for local markets when they air dropped all these shoes into poor communities.

But in general, it's the idea that there are, there can be multiple stakeholders, shareholders are obviously first and foremost, but there are other groups to consider when you are making decisions so that you can maximize impact for social good.

And you disagree with this and we talked about this a little bit when we spoke in Florida last month.

Tell me what is the issue, what is the rose-colored glasses that were wearing when people talk about social entrepreneurship and trying to use a

business enterprise to engage in explicit social good?

Yeah, so I mean, I feel, I don't want to turn people off of the idea of wanting to do good

and using business to do so, but I also think we need to be careful about it right if we think

about how business has really benefited society in many ways just in serving as a business and once again as an ethical

you know organization so not one that exploits or takes advantage or abuses or right just a good solid business. That is a benefit in and of itself and I see these

social entrepreneurship programs kind of popping up at different academic institutions and

I know that social entrepreneurship is a real kind of a

you know hot buzz term and the stakeholder model right so thinking outside of just my

...