The invisible hand needs a conscience

Linda K. Brown Stroh is an emerita professor at Loyola University Chicago's Quinlan School of Business.

On Sept. 30, Citadel founder Ken Griffin pledged more than $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, the largest individual gift in the history of higher education. Much of it will build a new CMU campus in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, which is expected to enroll its first students in 2028, pending regulatory approval. Griffin described the challenge facing universities as how to “reignite both the belief and the realization of the possibility of the American dream.”

Griffin’s gift is an extraordinary act of philanthropy. It also raises a question philanthropy alone can’t answer. Must stewardship wait until a fortune is given away, or should conscience be part of how the fortune is made?

Griffin’s gift undoubtedly deserves admiration. The larger question is whether stewardship should begin only after wealth has been created, or whether it should also help guide the way wealth is created in the first place.

I believe it should. I also believe we rarely ask that question because we have come to expect too much of the invisible hand. We are asking an economic mechanism to perform a moral function it was never designed to perform: to supply a conscience.

I first met the invisible hand in an undergraduate class taught by Dr. Michael Smith. The idea is that individuals pursuing their own interests in a free market can, without intending it, advance the interests of society as a whole. It has stayed with me for a lifetime.

But Adam Smith was a........

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