The collapsing price of Blu-Ray
The Mel Brooks collection from Amazon - $29 (Insert some commentary about people moving to different media consumption patterns, etc., etc.)
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Companies and Social Responsibility - Not as straightforward as you would imagine
What is the social responsibility of a business? There are many and varied responses, but the most straightforward one that I've seen is from Milton Friedman who said There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud. Sounds brilliant and simple, right? As with all such things though, the devil is in the details. To be precise, What are these rules of the game ? Who makes them? How are they enforced? What are the societal norms that exist in your ecosystem? Increase Profits in what timeframe? Justin Fox points this out in much gorier detail - The most obvious complication is that the "rules of the game" Friedman mentions aren't set by impartial referees. In the U.S., laws and regulations are crafted in ...
Markets (do) have hearts...
What is the difference between a profit and a non-profit organization? Peter Drucker pointed out way back in 1994 that non-profit organizations were - in the US at least - organizations that don't pay taxes. Thats it. From an actually profit-making perspective, they were exactly the same as any otherfor-profit organization! However, in our lexicon, we tend to have a vision of non-profits as implying "Activists", and for-profits as implying "Capitalists", i.e., organizations and people focused on social outcomes as compared to economic (market) outcomes. However, as Facebook, Twitter and the FOSS movement have shown, social interactions and their associated outcomes can have a profound effect on market activity, a paradigm changing one at that. An article in the Paris Tech Review asks the question What happens with such a differentiation if the creation of social ties is to become the core for new economic activities? (As a side note, it should ...