It is probably correct to say that there has never been as much pressure to reform the US Supreme Court as right now. President Biden has proposed a commission to report in 6 months on court reform, and today a number of democrats presented a bill that would lead to expanding the number of justices to 13.

This, in itself, is interesting – the Court has looked the way it does now for a long time, and you may think that reforming it should be something one does only with great reluctance, but the reality is that the way the Republicans blocked Obama’s pick of Merrick Garland has started a chain reaction that currently is expanding into a great big fireball of reform.

Now, this may be good or bad, but it does pose a serious question: how do you reform constitutional institutions? What should the principles be? How should you approach older institutions and their value?

A version of this is playing out in France, where president Macron has decided to shut down ENA – l’École nationale d’administration. This school, a kingmaker institution of sorts, is now a symbol for elitism and has been challenged to the point that one of its former students – Macron – has decided to shut it down. In effect, this means shuttering an institution that has been responsible for producing the leadership of public sector France for the last 70 something years.

How do you decide to do that? How do you think about that kind of institutional reform? The conservative response is to say you should not, you should perhaps reform at the edges and let the organization adapt, but killing it makes no sense. Yet, still, we live in a time where there is appetite for institutional reform it seems. We want to burn the old down and replace it.

You may feel that comparing the proposals to reform the US Supreme Court and the ENA is just wrong, and that they are very different, but the core of the trend we are observing here is the same – an impatience with institutions. This impatience may well be legitimate, but it is blunt.

There is little to no recognition of the value that the two institutions here have produced. No real discussion about the constitutional role both institutions have played. Maybe that is where this all needs to start, and maybe this is what bothers me – that we lack the ability to see the value of what has evolved over time, and believe that we, in our time, have the unique wisdom to build better.

There is, in this, a kind of chrono-chauvinism that I worry about, a shrinking of the political moment to this present second, and no realization that the political now stretches hundreds of years back and forward in time.

We increasingly live in a society that is ignorant of the geography of time.

The FT editorial today deals with Danone and its shift to a “purpose driven company”. The shift has been less than successful and its architect was unceremoniously removed. The editorial then goes on to note that there is a tension here between the Milton Friedman vision of companies as socially responsible when they maximize their profits and the more fuzzy vision today of companies as mission and purposed driven. Overall, this leads to a discussion of companies as political actors that is interesting and increasingly overdue. The editorial ends by noting that CEOs have to manage multiple challenges and balance them and that the idea that there is a single metric that companies are managed on is ridiculous – and they are absolutely right.

Now, anyone who reads the original article also finds that Friedman has been misread. His point is not that the purpose of a company is to maximize profits. It is that the leadership of a company work for the owners of the company. This is a significant difference and one that is largely obscured in the discussion. Friedman even writes that if the owners have specific purposes in mind the leadership should work for them: “A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose—for example, a hospital or school. The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objective but the rendering of certain services.”

And then the real Friedman doctrine is spelled out in detail:”In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them.”

Apart from reminding us of the wonderful word “eleemosynary” this highlights how a misreading of Friedman has set up a fake juxtaposition between purpose and profit, suggesting that you have to choose one or the other, and intentionally leaving the “you” vague.

The “you” is not vague, however – it refers to the owners of the enterprise.

And the interests of the shareholders are not simple, either. Friedman reminds us that shareholders – owners – have an interest in the community and future of the society that they are operating in:

To illustrate, it may well be in the long‐run interest of a corporation that is a major employer in a small community to devote resources to providing amenities to that community or to improving its government. That may make it easier to attract desirable employees, it may reduce the wage bill or lessen losses from pilferage and sabotage or have other worthwhile effects. Or it may be that, given the laws about the deductibility of corporate charitable contributions, the stockholders can contribute more to charities they favor by having the corporation make the gift than by doing it themselves, since they can in that way contribute an amount that would otherwise have been paid as corporate taxes.

A Friedman Doctrine, New York Times, Sept 13 1970.

The hard reading of Friedman is partly inspired by a quote in Capitalism and Freedom where he synthesizes all of this into a pithy paragraph, but the article leaves no doubt that his views are more complex, and that the time scale they play out on also matters a great deal to the actual results.

Profit maximization cannot be understood in isolation. If you want to understand what it means you have to ask over what time period you are maximizing profits. There is a huge difference between the company that maximizes profits over 100 years and the company that does so quarter to quarter. If we were able to think creatively about this we would encourage companies to work on longer time horizons, and think about the value they create not in yearly increments for the purposes of taxation, but allow companies to build long term value.

Now, you don’t need to agree with Friedman on any of his ideas or be a libertarian or even be liberal to worry that the fake tension between profits and purpose is taking center stage in today’s discussion about the role of the corporation in society. The only concern you need to share is one of oversimplification of complex issues.

Whenever we end up in simple dichotomies we all lose.