Levitt on Social Responsibility
Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, spoke earlier this spring at Boston College's International Corporate Citizenship conference. A brief account of his remarks is here.
I point this out because Levitt is exactly the kind of person we need to get more involved in the global exchange of views on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and socially responsible investing (SRI).
I have come to believe that CSR and SRI have too many normative critics, and not enough positive ones. That is, there is a good supply of people to criticize social investors for holding the values they hold, or for the way they act on those values (examples here and here). But there are not enough who bring quantitative sophistication and fresh perspectives to the study of these problems.
Good positive critics can be scary - they question your assumptions about how things work, they make you look at uncomfortable facts, they present analysis that doesn't fit your world view. But that kind of engagement can also be transformative - it may be the only way CSR and SRI can move meaningfully forward from their current practices.
Levitt has what it takes to be a valuable positive critic - he is curious about how things work, he is not afraid to tackle difficult or controversial subject matter, and he is brilliant at question-framing.
Hats off to BC for inviting him.
