Shaping the Post-COVID-19 Agenda: A Call for Responsible Leadership: How the COVID-19 Crisis Could Accelerate the Transition to a New Era for Society When Its Leaders Take Responsibility to Establish the New Common

In 1970, the late economist and Nobel Prize Winner Milton Friedman spread a doctrine that has dominated the business world ever since: that a company’s solitary purpose is to increase financial value for its shareholders. Author during the height of the Cold War, Friedman tied in with the narrative that economic freedom is essential to political freedom. Friedman died in 2006, but his mantra did not. From the beginning of the 1990s until the financial crisis in 2007, the business world increasingly witnessed a movement towards the “Anglo-American” or “neo liberal” model, based upon Friedman’s doctrine. In the period after the collapse of Lehmann Brothers, leaders in the public and the private sector tried to fight the financials crisis by holding on to the very same measures and instruments that—arguably—caused the financial crisis in the first place. The last convulsions of Friedman’s doctrine?