232 Reviews institutions—implicitly treated in this book—posits the problem of the place of ethics in institutions and what justifies such ethical order. These problems may be overcome with a different ethical approach, for instance, one based on human goods, virtues, and the common good. — Domènec Melé University of Navarra, Spain Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good Colin Mayer Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 (261 pages) Colin Mayer’s Prosperity has two main parts: First, it identifies the main problem that Mayer sees with business today, as well as its primary responsible party; and second, it offers a series of reforms that, if enacted, Mayer argues would enable business to achieve the good of which it is capable. Mayer believes that business in a market economy creates wealth, which is the good news, but the bad news is that it is also “the source of inequality, deprivation, and environmental degradation” (1). Mayer asserts that we must therefore “ensure that we harness business as a source of societal benefits and avoid its detriments” (2). This is not exactly a novel ambition: The last few decades have seen book after book, and article after article, that (sometimes grudgingly) concede that something beneficial might come from business, but only if we “harness,” regulate, control, nudge, and steer it in the right directions—directions that the authors aspirationally spell out, though without always identifying who will serve as the philosopher-economists commanding the ship of good commerce. What is Mayer’s contribution to this discussion? Mayer begins by identifying a single cause, indeed a single person, as the “starting point” of business’s wrong turn: Milton Fried- man. Mayer claims that Friedman’s “most enduring legacy” is the “Friedman doctrine,” which holds that all business activity should begin from “the premise that the purpose of business is to maximize shareholder value” (2). Mayer fingers Friedman’s 1970 New York Times Magazine essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” as the beginning of this wrong turn, and he claims that, despite its obvious moral dubious- ness, its thesis has come to dominate the world of business and business academia. According to Mayer, it was not Friedman’s work in, say, monetary theory that constituted his “most enduring legacy,” but instead this one nonacademic essay, which articulated a position about fidelity to shareholders that is not only “unnatural” but “has been the seed of nature’s destruction.” Indeed, “the damage it inflicts on our societies, the natural environment, and ourselves” is so great as “to threaten our existence” (2). “The assets of the firm,” Mayer claims, “have been accumulated on the back of the investments of virtually every segment of society—employees, suppliers, communities, nations, and nature.” According to Mayer, shareholders do not own companies; instead, they have “roles and responsibilities as well as rights and rewards deriving from their