Corporate Social Responsibility, according to the Economist

So this week's issue of the Economist has an article called "A sceptical look at Corporate Social Responsibility", so I snatched it up (at $6.95 news stand price).

The article primarily appears to be a response to the hippies, WTO trade protesters, and B.C. law professor who had shockingly advanced the idea that perhaps corporations should be required to consider more than pure profit as a guiding principle.

The article's twelve-page response can be summed up as:

Corporations' singular purpose of profit-seeking motivation maximizes benefits to society in general.

How does it come to this conclusion?

• Supply and demand will naturally curtail resource consumption when we actually begin to run out of a given resource. Or it will encourage discovery of more reserves, or develop new technologies to replace existing reserves (prime example: copper cable replaced by fiber optics).


• Protests against "unfair" labour or trade in third-world countries that curtails an organization's practices hurts the development of those countries and "artificially" drives up prices of those goods in Western countries due to a smaller pool of labour, ergo higher wages.

Augh, more later when I'm less tired and less cranky. The article read like a 1950's response to communism (which it invoked as the failed alternative to capitalism) and held an almost religious sense of faith in the "natural" power of the market to right all of the wrongs of the world -- if only meddlesome people with their concerns about resources and the environment and living conditions in other countries wouldn't try to alter the beneficence of the almighty dollar.

Argh.