An Interview with Sir John Kay

A: On reflection, Paul (Collier) and I should perhaps have added a question mark to the title Greed is Dead (?). Our claim is not that greed is no longer widely seen in the worlds of business and finance; sadly, it is all too evident. Our claim is that the intellectual framework that appeared to provide justification for Gordon Gekko’s claim is crumbling. (Gekko was himself echoing Ivan Boesky’s assertion that “greed is alright by the way…you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself”).

We might trace that intellectual framework back to Milton Friedman’s notorious 1970 article in the New York Times Magazine; ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Maximze its Profits.’ Or to Lewis Powell’s memorandum to the American Chamber of Commerce, written in the following year, which stressed the need for business to promote sympathetic academic research to counter the anti-business propaganda generated in the 1960s by authors such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Ralph Nader. The memorandum was the trigger for the establishment of several conservative think tanks and set a tone for much of what was taught in leading business schools.