Hamlet asked it first. To be, or not to be. He meant it as a personal question. Survival or extinction. Authentic existence or its hollow performance. The choice between enduring what life demands — or surrendering to it.

We named our organization 2B because we believe that question has outgrown the individual. It now belongs to all of us. It now describes the choice civilization itself must make. And we believe — with evidence, not abstraction — that a single ideological decision made in the 1970s may well have brought us to this moment.

One doctrine, exported from a university to a boardroom to a courtroom to a legislature to the entire operating logic of human civilization, has placed us at the edge of the question Hamlet asked.

I am not dramatic. I speak with precision.

The 1,500 Words

On September 13, 1970, Milton Friedman published "A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits" in The New York Times Magazine. His argument was surgical: a corporate executive is an employee of the shareholders. Their money. Their company. Their return. Any executive who diverts corporate resources toward workers, communities, or the environment was, in Friedman's precise language, "spending someone else's money." It is, he argued, a form of theft.

Fifteen hundred words. No debate. No hearing. No legislation required. Within a decade, Friedman's Doctrine had become the operating system of American capitalism. Within two decades, it had become the operating system of the world.

One year after the op-ed, corporate lawyer Lewis Powell sent a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce titled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System." His prescription was specific. Fund think tanks. Staff university chairs. Cultivate the media. Weaponize the courts. Organize politically with the same discipline brought to building products and markets.

Two months after writing it, Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court. The memo was never disclosed to the Senate. It was executed with remarkable fidelity.

In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington. By 1982, nearly 2,500 did. Corporations with public affairs offices grew from 100 in 1968 to over 500 in 1978. Corporate PACs went from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by 1980.

The Heritage Foundation arrived in 1973. The Cato Institute in 1977. Funded by the same concentrated corporate wealth that shareholder primacy was generating, these institutions translated Friedman's ideology into legislative language. They didn't lobby directly. They manufactured consensus. They gave legislators intellectual cover.

The business schools moved in lockstep. Harvard. Wharton. Chicago. Stanford. Shareholder value maximization gave executives a single clean metric — measurable, legally defensible, and enormously convenient. Before Friedman, business leaders navigated competing obligations: to workers, to communities, to the long-term health of the enterprise. That was complicated. Friedman simplified it. One number. One obligation. One direction.

I graduated with distinction from Harvard Business School. I worked on Wall Street. I was inside this machine. The doctrine wasn't debated. It was assumed. It was absorbed in the way you absorb grammar — the definitive framework through which all other thinking operated.

What Friedman asserted ideologically, courts converted into obligation. Activist shareholders sued boards that prioritized anything other than shareholder return. Executives who invested in workers faced legal exposure. The law created an environment in which choosing shareholders over workers was a defense. Choosing communities over shareholders was a risk. That asymmetry alone was sufficient.

Wall Street built the amplification system. Analysts at Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan published quarterly scorecards that moved capital. Their models measured one thing: return to shareholders. A company that cut 10,000 jobs and boosted earnings per share got an upgrade. A company that invested in worker training and saw margins compress got a downgrade.

The financial media closed the circuit. CNBC. Bloomberg. The Wall Street Journal editorial page. When a CEO announced mass layoffs, the coverage wasn't "thousands of families disrupted." It was "bold restructuring." "Shareholder-friendly move." "The stock popped 4% on the news." Language shapes reality. When every financial platform frames worker displacement as corporate virtue, the culture follows. Legislators hear it. Boards hear it. Executives hear it. The loop closes.

Then came the compensation packages — the true master stroke. In 1965, the average CEO of a major U.S. company earned 21 times the median worker's salary. By 2020, that ratio was 351-to-1. By 2023, stock-based pay accounted for 77.6% of average CEO compensation.

What changed? The greed was, and will always be, omnipresent. What really changed was architecture: stock options, restricted stock units, performance bonuses tied to total shareholder return. The CEO's personal wealth was structurally fused to the share price and nothing else. Not worker welfare. Not community health. Not long-term sustainability.

A CEO who laid off 20,000 workers and bought back $5 billion in stock didn't just satisfy shareholders. They made themselves $50 million richer in the same transaction. They didn't need to be told. The package told them.

By 2024, federal lobbying expenditures hit a record $4.4 billion — $37 billion since 2015. And the 2010 Citizens United decision removed the last meaningful constraints on corporate political spending. Lewis Powell's dream had finally become the law of the land. A company spending $10 million lobbying to preserve a tax preference saving $500 million annually was earning a 50-to-1 return on investment. No product line in their portfolio performed like that.

The Evidence

The Federal Reserve and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis do not interpret. They don't opine politically. They accurately record and present the raw data by which the best possible decisions might be made. The numbers are simple.

Profits up 54%. Taxes paid down 78%. More extraction. Less contribution.

And here is the summary number — the great algorithm:

Not a rounding error. Not an abstraction. Fifty trillion dollars. Out of working people's pockets. Into concentrated wealth.

That is what the doctrine purchased. That is Milton's real legacy.

This Is Bigger Than America

Here is what most accounts of shareholder primacy miss. The doctrine does not stay put. It does not respect international boundaries. By definition, it metastasizes.

The IMF made it a condition of loans. The World Bank embedded it into development policy. American trade agreements exported it as a term of market access.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Western economists arrived with one doctrine: privatize, deregulate, maximize shareholder value. The speed and certainty of that export helped accelerate the Soviet collapse. The communist model had no answer for a system that appeared, from the outside, to generate extraordinary wealth. What the Soviets couldn't see — and what we are only now naming clearly — is that the wealth creation was real. But its distribution was the lie.

China watched. And did something more dangerous. It adopted shareholder primacy economics while keeping authoritarian political control. The result is a regime that has mastered the extraction of productivity gains — for the state, for connected elites, never for the worker — with an efficiency that makes American corporate raiders look timid.

We did not defeat a command economy. We taught it to run on greed.

The ideology kept moving. Into environmental policy — where the cost of pollution was externalized off the balance sheet and onto the planet. Into democratic institutions — where concentrated wealth purchased the legislative outcomes protecting it. Into the fabric of community itself — where every human relationship became subject to the logic of transaction, every hour of life measured against its productive yield.

The loneliness epidemic. The mental health crisis. The collapse of civic institutions. The erosion of trust in democracy itself. These are not separate crises with separate causes. They are symptoms of a single disease.

What really is capitalism? Ask 1,000 academics, economists, business leaders, and you will get 1,000 answers. But let me tell you what it really is. Moneyism. The deification of the golden calf we were all warned never to worship.

We have made money the supreme value. We subordinated worker dignity, environmental survival, democratic participation, community, family, time itself — our entire humanity — to a single metric of shareholder return.

We built every system around that choice. We exported it to every corner of the earth. And now we are living in the world that choice made.

The AI Jobpocalypse

Now we stand on the precipice — and it is a precipice — where AI will transform our economies in ways far greater than Henry Ford's mass production techniques ever could. The largest productivity gains in human history are already underway.

Companies are announcing layoffs in the tens of thousands, citing AI as the reason. At the same moment they are reporting record profits. The stock prices surge.

And the machinery is already in place. Productivity gains flow to corporate profits. Corporate profits become dividends and buybacks. Dividends and buybacks become capital gains. Capital gains are taxed at 0%, 15%, or 20% — not the 37% paid on wages. The top 1% receives 63% of their income from investments. The top 10% captures 75.7% of all capital gains.

AI does not change the experiment. It accelerates it. Every efficiency gain, every position eliminated, every dollar saved on headcount flows through the same machinery to the same destination — unless the machinery changes.

The Choice In Front of All of Us

Shareholder primacy is a policy architecture. Not a natural law. Not an economic inevitability. It was not legislated into existence. But it has been enabled and protected by legislation — the preferential tax treatment of capital gains, the weakening of labor law, reduced antitrust enforcement, decades of deregulation.

It can be addressed through legislation. Three tools are available. Each has historical precedent.

Productivity gain sharing requirements. Companies experiencing significant AI-driven productivity gains should be required to distribute a defined portion to workers — through wages, profit-sharing, or reduced hours — before booking those gains as shareholder returns. This is not redistribution. It is a restoration. Let's restore the model that prevailed during the thirty most economically productive years in American history.

Capital gains rate reform. There is no economic justification for taxing investment income at nearly half the rate of wage income. Honestly, ethically, morally, it should be the other way around. Real value creation comes from human transformative energy. Not paper. Not laws. And not derivative instruments. Narrowing this gap removes the structural incentive to funnel labor's contribution into capital returns, and funds the public investment that makes productivity possible.

The work week as a policy lever. Henry Ford reduced hours in 1926 and watched profits double within two years. His logic: rested, well-paid workers produce more, make fewer errors, and buy the products they build. A legislative framework enabling companies to reduce hours in exchange for AI productivity gains delivers the benefit of AI directly to workers' lives — more time, same pay. It has worked before. It can work again.

These are not radical ideas. They are the restoration of a model that built the American middle class.

Or Not To Be

Fifty years ago, a professor wrote 1,500 words. A lawyer wrote eight pages. The boards, the banks, the think tanks, the lobbyists, the business schools, the compensation consultants, the financial media — all executed faithfully. And we are here.

$50 trillion transferred upward. Wages for the bottom 90% barely moved. Communities hollowed out. Democratic institutions weakened by concentrated economic power. An environmental crisis created by the systematic refusal to count the cost of extraction. A mental health epidemic born of a culture that measures human worth in productivity. A geopolitical order destabilized by the export of a doctrine that rewards extraction over everything.

And now artificial intelligence — the most powerful productivity amplifier in human history — is arriving into this same architecture. The same machinery. The same destination.

Hamlet's question was never abstract. To be, or not to be — to endure, to choose, to act — or to surrender to the forces that diminish us.

We named this organization 2B because we believe that question now belongs to civilization. Not to a single man on a stage in Denmark. To all of us. In every legislature. In every boardroom. In every community absorbing the consequences of a choice made before most of its members were born.

The question is not whether we can afford shared prosperity. We built it once. The data proves it. The historical record confirms it. The tools exist.

The question is whether those in power will choose it.

We believe they will. We believe you will. That is why we exist. That is what 2B means.

Please be.

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