What is Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good about?

Prosperity is Colin Mayer's argument that the modern corporation has lost its sense of purpose — and that recovering it requires not marginal adjustments but a fundamental rethinking of what corporations are for. Mayer, a professor at Oxford's Said Business School, wrote the book as part of the British Academy's Future of the Corporation project, and it reads like what it is: a rigorous, historically grounded proposal for institutional reform.

The central target is shareholder primacy — the doctrine, associated with Milton Friedman and institutionalized in corporate law and financial economics over the past fifty years, that the purpose of a corporation is to maximize returns to shareholders. Mayer argues that this doctrine is not only ethically problematic but historically anomalous and economically counterproductive. Corporations existed for centuries before shareholder primacy was invented, and the things we actually want corporations to do — solve complex problems, make long-term investments, earn trust — are systematically undermined by a governance structure optimized for quarterly returns.

Mayer's alternative is a purpose-driven model in which corporations define a primary commitment that is not reducible to profit. Profit remains essential, but it is the means rather than the end — similar to how an individual needs food and shelter to pursue their life's goals without food being the goal itself. The practical implications are substantial: different ownership structures, different board accountability, different measurement frameworks, and different relationships with the communities in which corporations operate.

The book is more diagnostic than prescriptive — Mayer is more confident about what is wrong with shareholder primacy than about exactly what should replace it, and the final chapters on solutions are less fully worked out than the earlier chapters on the problem. But as an argument that the question "what is a corporation for?" deserves a more thoughtful answer than "whatever its shareholders want," Prosperity is clear and well-evidenced.