
Economics in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged [pdf] - jimsojim
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/JARS12-13.pdf
======
forgotpwtomain
I find very little merit or pleasure in reading fiction where the author has
an underlying agenda which they constantly grind as the novel progresses (I
find some of Le Guin's otherwise good novels marred by this trend). Ayn Rand
is absolutely the worst offender though, her characters are shallow to the
point of ridiculousness, the plot is obvious 100 pages in for the next 500 -
but she's going to serve up 'profound world changing philosophy' to you for
the next 500 pages anyways. But hey - America's answer to communist ideology!

~~~
dschiptsov
It seems that you have no idea what you're talking about.)

Her philosophy is sound and so are her principles of free market economy,
while, perhaps, her plot is idealized and naive and some characters too
sophisticated to be true.)

Edit: I have tried to explain it better in a separate comment.

Hint: this is a fiction based on philosophy, not a philosophic treatise based
on fiction.

~~~
andrepd
I don't think her philosophy is sound. You cannot advocate unregulated
capitalism in a society where people don't start on equal footing.

~~~
BinaryAcid
It's intrinsic to existence that no two people start on equal footing. One
will be smarter, another will be a harder worker. Your rule would mean no form
of capitalism is permissible at any point. I think at some point parents must
have stopped informing their children that life isn't fair and deal with it.

~~~
andrepd
That's very easy to swallow when you are born on the upper end of the scale.
Not so much when you are born to a single mother on a Flint MI ghetto or when
you are born gay in Nigeria, or a girl on war-torn Sudan.

Just because you are comfortable on middle-upper class doesn't mean you can't
be objective about this things. That some kids are born into wealthy families
and some are born in sub-Saharan Africa and forced to mine minerals for the
former's iPad until they are 15 and keel over is undeniably wrong. But it's
what arises from capitalism.

~~~
andrenth
Yes, because there's so much free market in sub-Saharan Africa.

------
IsaacL
Objectivist here.

(For what it's worth: I don't hate poor people, nor do I think all rich people
deserve their wealth, nor do I think the free market is a universal panacea
for all ills.

What Rand actually says is that there are good people and there are bad
people, and the defining characteristic of good people, the essence of virtue
is not altruism, but productive work. People rarely mention that there were
truck drivers and manual workers in Galt's Gulch, and that half of the
villains in the novel are unscrupulous businessmen).

Rand didn't actually say that much that's original about economics _per se_.
This leads people on both left and right to dismiss her as a simplistic
thinker. This ignores what _is_ original is what she's saying.

Unlike many libertarians, she doesn't argue that the free market is good
because it leads to good results for society. She says that a capitalist
society is good because it's the only society which fully protects individual
rights. It's not a coincidence that capitalist societies are more prosperous
-- however, when this is used as the _justification_ for capitalism, the
logical conclusion is to have a semi-free market where the government tries to
manage the economy and optimise different variables (GDP, employment,
inflation, etc), i.e. the system in almost every western country today. I'd
argue the constant financial crises and ballooning sovereign debt show that
this system cannot possibly be sustained.

Also: the _Journal of Ayn Rand Studies_ is not respected in official
Objectivist circles. It's one of a number of organisations which attempt to
water down Rand's message to appeal to more people, but as a result put off
both Objectivists and non-Objectivists.

~~~
roymurdock
I'm a big fan of Hayek who would be described today as the libertarian
counterpart to Keynes, although they agreed on almost everything.

If you follow individual liberties to their extreme end, you have cannot have
a society as nobody makes sacrifices in personal belief systems, pleasures
etc. for one another. You have small warring tribes. If you follow government
control to its extreme end, you have perfect communism where nobody has an
incentive to work hard and corruption/cronyism cripples the entire system.
There always has been, and always will be a balance that swings back and forth
along the two extremes.

We allowed capitalism to get out of control through deregulation since Reagan
and now people are angry because they thought the government was supposed to
protect them from corporations (FTC, FDA, SEC) but it did not. So now the
pendulum is swinging back in the opposite direction. It's a never ending
cycle.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
The Reagan-era "deregulation" was severely overrated. The highlight of the so-
called "Golden Age of Capitalism" where supposedly full employment and
Keynesian demand management prevailed had, for instance, a Federal Register
that was a seventh the size of what it is today. Reagan did pay a lot of lip
service to free markets and rugged individualism, but his fiscal record and
foreign policy doctrine speak otherwise.

It seems to me like a lot of left-leaning commentators have a sort of vested
interest in maintaining this pseudohistorical divide between "embedded
liberalism" from around 1946-1974 and the "neoliberal" period since then. Many
of them never lived through or remembered this period (neither have I), so it
serves as a sort of utopian benchmark of hope that we should return to.

A more accurate picture to me would be a virtually constant period of state-
merchant/corporate coalition since the mercantilist era after the dismantling
of feudal relations, to the present.

(After all, it was the Golden Age of Capitalism when the Truman Doctrine was
in full effect and the United States had some of its greatest foreign policy
ventures, a true renaissance for the military-industrial complex.)

------
roymurdock
Atlas shrugged and catch 22 are the only two books that I have been unable to
finish.

In atlas shrugged, Rand takes the most incredibly boring, one-dimensional,
unbelievable, cliched, cement-mixed characters and starts beating you over the
head with them right out of the gate. I saw her singular point 10 pages into
the book, and could not bear the pain of the next 300 of the manifesto.

While I can see how the "trader of justice" ideal that is mentioned in the
article might appeal to some, it's simply not applicable to real life
economic/social governance. Humans aren't spawned directly from market
processes, they have parents and friends and communities and their
relationships extend beyond the reach of the free market mechanisms.

~~~
dschiptsov
Have it ever occurred to you, that the problem might be not with these works
of art?)

~~~
andrepd
For what's worth, I also haven't been able to finish Atlas Shrugged for those
very same reasons.

------
daughart
I got to the third sentence: "Based on an analysis of reality, it is well-
informed on economics..."

Funny, I remember it as a comedy about petulant capitalists.

~~~
notahacker
It's basically the _reductio ad absurdum_ version of arguments in favour of
capitalism.

For those that haven't read it, it involves rugged, noble and pure capitalist
innovators getting so upset at government overreach and not being able to
enforce patents on their genius they go and form a _commune_. (which isn't
really a commune, because when a billionaire industry titan offers you a lift,
you pay him a taxi fare to prevent him from feeling guilty about his altruism)

Which is a bit of a shame really, because a satire about entrepreneurs vs
corrupt governments could have been really powerful in the grasp of someone
that actually understood enterprise.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Not necessarily a contradiction for capitalist-entrepreneurs to advocate
communes. After all, the mutualists and 19th-century individualist anarchists
were pro-market, though coming at it from a labor theory of value.

Then again, it depends on how you've loaded your definition of capitalism.

------
vignesh_m
this is a totally unbiased article in the The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

~~~
mortehu
... which has an impact factor of 0.00:

[https://www.researchgate.net/journal/1526-1018_Journal_of_Ay...](https://www.researchgate.net/journal/1526-1018_Journal_of_Ayn_Rand_Studies_The)

For comparison:
[https://www.researchgate.net/journal/0033-5533_Quarterly_Jou...](https://www.researchgate.net/journal/0033-5533_Quarterly_Journal_of_Economics)

------
applecore
I can't wait to read the comments. Don't you know Ayn Rand is verboten here?

~~~
calibraxis
After all, Ayn Rand would call Silicon Valley libertarians "moochers" off the
tech welfare state. [http://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-
state/](http://marianamazzucato.com/the-entrepreneurial-state/)

------
jkxyz
I agree with Ayn Rand's theory of economics insofar as it would work great if
everyone only ever acted in their own self-interest. But there will always be
exploitation if there are people who choose to act in ways that damage
themselves, so the theory is impracticable in the real world. There's also no
treatment in the book of, for instance, how disabled or ill people should be
treated by an economic system where no one is available to provide support.

But the book is genuinely a great read; she's a fantastic writer with a
powerful and gripping style. I did, however, have to skip a 50 page chapter
which was the third monologue speech explaining the details of her theory.

------
lostmsu
A commie here. I actually liked Atlas a lot. It still inspires me to do work,
rather than sit on my ass. For that I recommend it to people. It is great in
that.

No so much in 'honest - then, and only then - capitalist' part.

Long speeches never bothered though - you can always skip them, because you
kinda know what they are talking about for 10 pages.

------
anotheryou
want's to be a paper and begins with declaring the subject a "masterpiece".
Very objective....

------
dschiptsov
As a student of philosophy and, it seems, having a slightly autistic
mentality, she had strong emphasis on the underlying principles - philosophic,
economical and social around which she has invented her characters and the
plot.

The characters and the settings could be criticized (usually by idiots who
couldn't see the whole) for being too idealized and artificial but there is
not a single major flaw with principles of free market economy (as a self-
sustained and self-healing ecosystem), democracy (as an evolved "immune
system" of a civilized society against social parasites and cancer-like
corruption of authoritarian regimes) the operating selection on the basis of
best performance, which is one of the principles behind evolution itself, etc,
etc.

Ask any decent evolutionary biologist, and he would tell you that diversity,
specialization, cooperation, selection on the best performance, fairness (as
in a coin toss) and law of big numbers (averages) is what is behind life
itself.

Verbosity, perhaps, is the only major flaw, but as a work of art it should be
placed next to 1984 and Brave New World.

~~~
tamana
Those of us with an interest in _humanity_ aren't looking for a perfect
description of how humans can organize a society around the principles of
animal evolution.

You also seem confused when you say that Democracy is part of the Objectivist
vision. Democracy is mob rule, not individual liberty.

~~~
dschiptsov
It is not mob rule, of course. It is a set of mechanisms to _remove_ corrupted
or failed officials from power by replacing them with better performers. At
least in theory.

Are you trying to say that humans are not subjects to "animal evolution" or
ecological laws?

------
andrewclunn
I'm a fan of Rand's ideas, more or less, but come on. Atlas Shrugged has some
interesting ideas, which were very novel and taboo in their day (some might
say still somewhat taboo). Like all works of fiction though, the author had
complete control over the narrative, the world, the characters. As social
commentary and criticism of frequently promoted religious and neo-marxist
ideas, it has value. As literature, it needed an editor. But as a realistic
model for economics?

Usually I'm pissed off by the anti-Rand flaming by people who prefer to
misrepresent her ideas. But if you are going to play right into the cult of
personality Rand worship with stuff like this, then you kind of brought it on
yourself.

~~~
forgotpwtomain
You know it's a funny thing, there were Maxim Gorky statues all over the
Soviet Union - so of course post-perestroika most young people avoid him like
the plague. But Gorky at his worst is a far more honest and talented writer
than Ayn Rand ever was - just pick up a collection of his short stories.

It's strange that a similar thing actually hasn't happened here and instead
there is a _Journal of Ayn Rand Studies_ and really at best a mediocre writer
in terms of literary merit and talent has been well-preserved for posterity;
which is not to say that she didn't have historical significance, she did of
course, as did Lenin's writing I'm sure - but no one is praising the high
literary merits of Lenin's 30+ tomes of writing today. I guess that's the
difference between a defeated ideological system and one whose existence has
continued to this day.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Actually Lenin's writings on imperialism are still considered relevant and
influential to this day by historical commentators and left-wing movements
alike.

