Corporations have always had a huge role in society. Not only as the entities that make all of the stuff that we use and the entities that employ the vast majority of the American workforce. But because of that, there's been a desire to control them in some way. Now this debate goes way, way back in American history. So in the pages of the Harvard law review from the 1930s, there was a famous debate between Merrick Dod on the one hand and Adolf Berle on the other and what they inaugurated on the pages of the Harvard law review was what we now think of as the stakeholder shareholder debate. Corporations are so important and they touch so many parts of our society, that there are all these segments of society that should be stakeholders in corporations, we say. Those stakeholders include not only the investors, but they also include the employees that work for the corporation. They include the communities in which the corporation is based or the areas that the corporation's business affects. They also include the purchasers of the corporation service. So the buyers and the sellers, they include the government that taxes the corporation, all of these different areas of society, they do have some stake in the way in which the corporation is run. So the debate between stakeholders and shareholders is that we need to give these stakeholders more of a say in what corporations do. The shareholders side of the ledger says, "Wait a second, no, corporations are organized by shareholders to pursue shareholder ends." As a result of that, as a result of the fact that the shareholders have this residual interest in the corporation, corporations need to be run for shareholders interests overall. This is an old argument. It's an argument that comes back though. It came back in the sixties and the seventies, it was get over by on the one side, Henry Manne and Milton Friedman. On the other side, Ralph Nader. And then it's come back today. It's a subject of some legislation in Congress. It's something that's talked about on Wall Street all the time. For example, in 2018, a major investor, Larry Fink from BlackRock, a massive mutual fund that owns a very large percentage of the Fortune 500 said it was time for corporations in BlackRocks portfolio to manage not just for shareholders, but also for stakeholders. A year later in 2019, the Business Roundtable, which is a trade association of the largest CEOs in America, issued a statement that said shareholder wealth maximization was not the right way to think of corporate purpose anymore. Instead, corporations would need to be run for all stakeholders, including employees, communities, et cetera, and so on. The one thing that it's important to realize is that when the criteria is shareholder wealth maximization, there's still a problem in the firm. There's still an argument. And the argument is between managers and shareholders, and shareholder wealth maximization provides a metric, a means of understanding what managers are supposed to do and what interests managers are supposed to serve. When we talk about stakeholders, notice a lot of the managers, the ones making this argument. For example, the Business Roundtable, the largest CEOs in America are taking a stakeholderist position. Why might that be? Well, it goes back to the old saying that a servant of many masters has none. When a manager is serving many interests, it gives the manager more space to serve his or her own interests. It might be the case that a manager who is accountable to the environment, to his or her employees to other communities and other constituencies, is actually less accountable than a manager that is clearly accountable to his shareholders for the shareholders best interests.