CapitalistImperialistPig

Via Marginal Revolution Charles Murray, ostensibly reviewing two new biographies of Ayn Rand: In 1991, the book-of-the-month club conducted a survey asking people what book had most influenced their lives. The Bible ranked number one and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was number two. In 1998, the Modern Library released two lists of the top 100 books of the 20th century. One was compiled from the votes of the Modern Library's Board, consisting of luminaries such as Joyce Carol Oates, Maya Angelou, Edmund Morris, and Salman Rushdie. The two top-ranked books on the Board's list were Ulysses and The Great Gatsby. The other list was based on more than 200,000 votes cast online by anyone who wanted to vote. The top two on that list were Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943). The two novels have had six-figure annual sales for decades, running at a combined 300,000 copies annually during the past ten years. In 2009, Atlas Shrugged alone sold a record 500,000 copies and Ran...

Done at last and somehow I feel that I ought to have something to say about the whole thing.  I undertook this to try to find out why so many people seem to find this book so inspirational.  I guess that I've said enough about why I don't like it .  There are a few sentiments expressed in the book that I can applaud: having a purpose and a goal, for example(like *finish*this*damn*book*, perhaps). So why did I invest a large part of my free time over the past few weeks in these 2/3 of a million words?  I had read some Rand before and was pretty confident that I wouldn't like this one or learn much from it.  I blame Bobby Fisher. I have been fascinated by his peculiar tragedy for nearly half a century.  What caused this brilliant individual to launch into a succession of progressively more self-destrustive acts even as he reached a peak of success?  Frank Brady's excellent book, Endgame: Bobby Fisher's Remarkable Rise and Fall , gave me a theory...

Atlas Shrugged features various elements of magic, or "science" fiction physics, including one that is a focus of Dagny's search for much of the book: Galt's magic engine that runs on the electrostatic field of the Earth.  The Earth has an electric field, averaging something like 150 volts/meter in fair weather near the surface.  Galt apparently figures out how to harness this.  Science or fiction? A bit of each.  It's actually not very difficult - just stick a conductor D meters up in the air, collect charge at  150 D V/m and discharge it through your motor into the ground.  The trouble is that the currents you get are extremely small, so you don't have much power. You could get a lot more current if you could stick your conducting antenna all the way up into the ionosphere where ions are plentful and current flows pretty freely, but the global energy flow is still pretty small by power industry standards - perhaps 800 MegaWatt...

Sam Tanenhaus on Atlas Shrugged, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and John von Neumann: The advance guard of Cold War planners, space and weapons theorists like J. Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann and James R. Killian, the president of M.I.T., chosen by Eisenhower to oversee the creation of NASA, were administrators rather than doers, unlike the executives at New York Central Railroad and Kaiser Steel whom Rand had interviewed while writing “Atlas Shrugged.” It would be hard to imagine a more monumental mischaracterization of Oppenheimer, and von Neumann, especially.  Not only did von Neumann essentially invent the modern digital computer, but he was also a profoundly creative mathematician.  Tanenhaus not only gets administrator vs. doer completely backwards, he also confuses Galt and Rearden, a couple of the cardboard characters in AS.

I ask myself, why do I read, and continue to read, books that I don't really much care for? Books like Gravity's Rainbow, Atlas Shrugged , and Infinite Jest , for example. It's partly curiosity, I expect, rather like climbing up a difficult and brush obstructed trail to get to a mountain top or at least some sort of overlook. Maybe there will be something worthwhile at the end. Such questions are tied up with the question of why we read at all. Saying, "for entertainment" is too simple. We humans, or a lot of us anyway, want to understand our environment and especially other people. The more alien a point of view is, the more challenging the effort to understand it. Something like twenty million copies of Atlas Shrugged have been sold, and a fair proportion of the readers have fallen under its spell. I had read a little of AR before I tackled AS, and enough about her to know I was extremely unlikely to be a fan. I did want to know what made the devotees t...

The great thing about reviewing a biography is that you get your chance to take your shots not only at the biography but the subject as well. Adam Kirsch makes good use of the latter opportunity in his New York Times review of Anne Heller's new biography of Ayn Rand. Like Heller (and unlike YHC) he is no mad dog Rand hater. He starts with a few notes about her continuing appeal to a certain strain of conservatives: A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of John Galt. In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.” “Atla...

From the comments:  Arun finds a great Maureen Dowd column on Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. I would take exception to one of her paragraphs, though: She wrote about Nietzschean superheroes who made things. She died before capitalism evolved into a vampire casino where you could bet against investments you sold to your clients, and make money off something you didn’t own or that existed only on paper. No, Capitalism was always like that - think about the South Seas bubble of Isaac Newton's time. Most of Rand's villains were also capitalists - crony capitalists in bed with the government of the type that populated the Bush administration and did anyone mention Goldman-Sachs? The stuff that Rand failed to see was always there.

Having devoted my last three novel reads to Africa (Conrad, Achebe, and Naipaul), I have rather recklessly embarked on David Foster Wallace's semi-infinite novel Infinite Jest . In my youth and middle age, I loved long novels - War and Peace, The Lord of the Rings, The Alexandria Quartet, Moby Dick, Harry Potter and even other long books generally. Now that I'm old, and sadder if not wiser courtesy of Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, and Atlas Shrugged I find them intimidating, like the sort of long walks in the mountains that I can no longer manage. Well Wallace is another kilo-pages plus, so we shall see.

David Brooks explains the Republican mind, and I suspect he is more or less correct, though I think he's leaving out a lot of crucial details. Democrats frequently ask me why the Republicans have become so extreme. As they describe the situation, they usually fall back on some sort of illness metaphor. Republicans have a mania. President Obama has said that Republicans have a “fever” that he hopes will break if he is re-elected. I guess I’d say Republicans don’t have an illness; they have a viewpoint. Let me describe it this way: In the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower reconciled Republicans to the 20th-century welfare state. Between Ike and George W. Bush, Republican leaders basically accepted that model. Sure, they wanted to cut taxes and devolve power, but, in practice, they sustained the system, often funding it more lavishly than the Democrats. But many Republicans have now come to the conclusion that the welfare-state model is in its death throes. It's just, says Dave, t...

In case any of you are tempted to write in my name for President (if nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve) I thought about my answer to the traditional candidate question: what books are you reading or have you read recently. I find that I don't read as many books as I used to. The intertubes, plus deteriorating vision (and intellect) are probably to blame. Commenters, whether running for office or no, are invited to join in. On my Kindle (* reviewed here, @ still working on it): *Debt, the First 5000 years, by David Graeber *The Science of Evil, by Simon Baron-Cohen *The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson *On the Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche *Beyond Good and Evil, by F. Nietzsche *Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand *@The Shape of Inner Space by Shing-Tung Yao and Steve Nadis *Endgame: Bobby Fisher's Remarkable Rise and Fall by Frank Brady *The Great Stagnation, by Tyler Cowen *The Big Short, by Michael Lewis @Confidence Man, by Ron Susskin...

The mostly off-stage hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, purportedly an engineer, but actually an evil magician who plots the destruction of human civilization out of pique. His magical powers include conjuring electric power out of the air, creating invisibility shields, and a variety of other handy plot drivers. Today's Plutocrats can't do any of those magical things, though most of them are pretty handy with a spreadsheet. In their own minds, though, they are Galt and more. They are the job creators, the masters of technology. What they actually do, aside from bribing and hustling government officials, is allocate capital. That is a very important job, and a far from trivial one. It also has enormous rewards for those who chose, or guess, correctly. Given those immense rewards, and the resultant sycophantic bubbles they live in, it's pretty easy for them to convince themselves that they were indispensable. In reality, though, I suspect that there ...

Answer: A megalomaniacal psychopath whose ambition is to destroy civilization as constituted. He is also the fictional hero of Ayn Rand's gigantic word brick, Atlas Shrugged . His ambitions are aided by his considerable magical powers which allow him to conjure amazing inventions out thin air. Of course the author attributes the inventions not to magic but to super-intelligence, an intelligence entirely belied by his idiotic philosophical monologues. I like to think of him as a sort of motor-mouth Lord Voldemort. His psychopathic character is perhaps unsurprising when you consider that Rand based some of her heroes on a notorious child murderer who delivered his victim's body parts to the parents. Of course she claims she didn't admire his deeds, just his attitude. It is more than a bit bothersome to me that this novel and author are bible to many of the Republican big shots, including Rand Paul, who had all his staffers read AS. The novel is also immensely popula...

Pamela Paul thinks you should read books you hate. She has done her time in book purgatory hell. My taste for hate reading began with “The Fountainhead,” which I opened in a state of complete ignorance as bonus material for a college class on 20th-century architecture. I knew nothing of Ayn Rand or of objectivism. I thought it was a book about building things. I even showed it off to a French friend, an architect and a die-hard socialist, thinking he’d be impressed. “How could you bring that into our house?” he asked in disgust. “But it’s about architecture,” I replied weakly. Or was it? Within pages, I found myself suffering at the hands of its tyrannical egomaniac of a protagonist, Howard Roark, forever plunging a fist into soil and holding forth. The lead female character, Dominique, who naturally took second place to the godlike Roark, kept striding across rooms in long, column-like gowns. Still, I persisted. A hundred pages later, I was more of a French socialist than I’d ev...

Re Asperger's, Lee asks: Are you really serious about this or are you being facetious?   Let's consider it part by part.  First two paragraphs - I'm just reporting here.   Do I seriously believe that there is such a theory?  Of course.  Do I believe it is seriously speculative? Yes.  Do I think it's interesting?  Yes. Next two paragraphs.  Let me be more explicit.  Suppose we take a standard diagnostic list like this one .   If we sort a large random group according to the degree at which they exhibit these characteristics, do I seriously believe that physicists would tend to cluster more on one side of the mean?  Yes.   The side with the extreme constituting the true Aspies?  Yes. Finally, I really do believe that the heroic characters in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged are pretty far toward the Aspie/Autistic side of this line - far enough to be classifiable. Does that answer the question?

I may have to read Atlas Shrugged in order to understand contemporary political discourse.

Alysa Rosenbaum's bourgeois childhood was disrupted by the Russian Revolution. Doubtless this fact explains at least part of her lifelong antipathy for collectivism in any form. Her unrelenting ferocity, and her own quasi-Stalinist intolerance for any opinion but hers suggests something deeper to me, though. Yes, reader, I have embarked upon Atlas Shrugged . I'm not in a position to do any kind of review - I'm only on Chapter 2, but I have formed certain impressions of the lay of the land. The number one impression I have is that all the heroic characters (as I imagine them) and probably the author are somebody I've seen before - the Asperger's syndrome semi-genius. Naturally that's a snap judgement, subject to revision after further reading, but the fundamental diagnostic criteria (DSM IV) appear to be there for Dagny and Hank. I don't want to attempt to compete with the many talented reviewers who have mocked her prose, but I don't find it too...

Yet another sign of the apocalypse: Rex Tillerson's favorite book is Atlas Shrugged.

It is reported that Atlas Shrugged contains 645,000 words. Approximately 1/3 of them consist of repetitions of the phrase "It wasn't my fault" or variations thereof. That is all.

I've been reading Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild . Hochschild is a highly regarded sociologist who specializes in close up looks at groups of people who might be unfamiliar to many of us. Here she ventures into the heart of Tea Party country in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She prepped for the trip, she tells us, by rereading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged , which is something of a Bible for the Tea Party founders. That alone tells me that her pain tolerance is a heck of a lot higher than mine. The area around Lake Charles is densely packed with petrochemical plants and has been devastated by pollution. Some of the nation's most productive rivers and estuaries used to be here, but many of them have now been killed by the deadly flood of chemicals. Hoschschild wanted to get a look into the mind of the Tea Party, and thought the pollution issue, which has devastated many, might be what she calls a "keyhole...

Recent hurricanes, the incredible shrinking airline coach seat, and, especially the recent Equifax data breach, have reminded me of how important I believe government regulation to be. Which gives me yet another excuse to bash libertarianism. I believe that I first encountered libertarians in high school, and I reacted with an instant hostility which has neither evaporated nor abated in the succeeding sixty years, though reading Ayn Rand certainly refreshed my immune reaction. I have sometimes tried to comprehend the deep roots of this distaste, with only modest success. I consider myself a liberal, more classical than modern, so I share some values with the libertarians, but certainly not all. In the Bible, after Cain had whacked his brother Abel, God asked him, perhaps rhetorically, "where is your brother?" Cain replied, "Am I my brother's keeper?" That question, or rather its answer, is the central difference between liberals and libertarians. To put ...