This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 7, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What does it mean for a capitalist to give something back to society?

The late Steve Jobs, innovator and longtime leader of Apple, was widely believed to be light on philanthropy,

but he delivered enormous value for society.

Should he have been expected to give something back over and above that value.

Trevor Burris, legal associate at the Cato Institute, offers his thoughts.

On Steve Jobs, CNN notes that the Stanford Social Innovation Review

Review named Apple one of the least philanthropic companies,

essentially because they had shut down their charitable operations when Steve Jobs came back to the helm,

but it sort of misunderstands perhaps what it means to deliver value to society.

Yes, exactly.

The death of jobs has created some interesting ruminations on the value that a mere businessman can have to the economy and the

scrutinizing of his charitable contributions or seeming lack thereof and Apple

has had people asking you know did jobs give back enough and it's a valid question but

you might want to ask how could you possibly compute how much he gave back and

there's a there's sort of a dead reckoning thing we could try to figure out how much he gave back

which would be using a thing called consumer surplus that economists use where

we look at the difference between what you would have paid at the top of your point of your indifference point for an

Apple product and what you did actually pay. So for example if you would have paid a

thousand dollars for an iPod because it gave you that much pleasure and you only paid 200 then you have

$800 in wealth and the sum total of all of those of the entire world's

...