It is also plausible though I know of no direct evidence on the point that when the students who graduated with their MBAs from American business schools from the 1960s on came to occupy senior positions in corporations, they would have remembered at least some of what they had been taught in courses on the new financial economics. They would thus know that the goal of market-value maximization could be defended as being right, as well as being career-enhancing and wealth-enlarging. Many people were exposed to financial economics in the course of studying for the MBA degree. By the end of the 1990s, U.S. business schools were awarding about 100,000 MBAs a year (Skapinker 2002). The growing prestige of financial economics and the increasing emphasis in American corporate life on market-value maximization may thus have been to at least some degree mutually self-reinforcing.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 1177