The economic implications of sustainability wokeness, the primary flaw of Friedman's idea that private wealth should address the damage done by business is that it's inefficient. Overall, the economy is more efficient when a river is never polluted than when the river is polluted by business and then cleaned up by others.
"Why do we even talk about anything other than climate change?" says 2008 Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman. "The problem is, we have a combination of denial and the problem of which country bears the burden. That dominates everything else." "We rewrote the rules before, to make the economy more unequal, and now we have to rewrite them once again to make them more equal," he says.
Heckman's research found one way to influence those factors: investing in early childhood development. That means investing in families, like supplying high-quality childcare for low-income or single-parent families. Is the need for businesses to prioritize environmental, economic, and societal sustainability a simple alternative to focusing entirely on profit?The good news is that evidence suggests that truth is starting to resonate. With forward-thinking business leaders shifting their focus from only profits to sustainability and impact investing on the rise, the world is moving in the right direction., where you'll find the stories of the brightest economic thinkers of our time.
UBS American business and UBS have drawn this conclusion incredibly late, while by and large, European business has understood this since Silent Spring, even though some of them were briefly (but never fully) tempted by Friedman in the 80s and 90s.