Economics in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged [pdf]
quebecoislibre.org
quebecoislibre.org
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.
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.
Equal rights for by definition inequal beings is what smart guys have tried to put into constitutions.
Rand is a relic and has largely been repudiated by far superior scholars (such as Murray N. Rothbard) who have since made most of her work deprecated.
This is a form of calling names, which the HN guidelines ask you not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Your comment would be much better with that sentence taken out.
You can really feel her anger burning. The whole book feels like she banged it out in one long amphetamine binge.
Many of the characters are caricatures, which, given the length of the book, I'll concede is more annoying than it is humorous. I did think Hank was solid.
Almost all of the antagonists are, as you say, ridiculously shallow, which goes to your point about her agenda. She did a shockingly better job with The Fountainhead (which I liked less) - but still far from perfect.
Finally, about the plot being obvious. That's true of most stories. It's a big book, and there were plenty of small plots and paths that I wasn't sure how they'd turn out.
Reductio ad absurdum could have been entertaining in a ~300 page package (I'm thinking Animal Farm).
[1] A first-person shooter set in a zombie-infested underwater failed libertarian state led by a man named Andrew Ryan. Subtle, no? Well, the nuance comes in the form of backstory that you get while fighting the survivors. Briefly, after construction of the city was complete demand for unskilled labor tanked and unemployment exploded. Nascent genetic engineering entered the scene, the market forced desperate laborers to "splice" in order to remain competitive even though it was known to be a Faustian bargain with psychological side-effects, and the predictable tragedy of the commons ensued. The craziest, most spliced-up, "fittest" citizens survived, and those are what you fight as the game progresses. On a macroscopic level the plot begs the question "how can this be a good economic system when it can't even handle mundane declines in growth rate or overcome tragedies of the commons that everyone sees coming from a mile away?" On a microscopic level, you listen to audio journals and ask yourself "this is supposed to be freedom?" or "this is what the market considers 'value creation'?," an exercise which transfers well to real life.
I strongly disagree that Dostoevsky characters are created to be genre representatives by the way - the closest match to this kind prototypical categorization would probably be Devils (Or Demons depending on the translation) which of his works has the most political character hues - and I've read the various literary theory that pigeon hole Dostoevsky's characters in Devil's to various ideological/political positions - but in my own natural impression of the work this wasn't there and I am inclined to believe this is the author's of the related literary theory imposing what they would like to read form the work onto Dostoevsky's imagination.
It's hard to explain why exactly I think it reads so differently - but I would say my impression of the literary imagination and creative process is entirely at odds with the accounts that want to extract political or ideological positives from which these theories are built; it's not that > 'God is mandatory to ethics' is not part of Dostoevsky's thought process let's suppose it is - but I would rather suggest that the idea of agenda is foreign to his work (consider what is the agenda in for example The Idiot? -- to prove that natural goodness in people is useless and leads to insanity?) - and that rather the construction happens organically, my hypothetical recipe for imitation would be something like this: let us suppose some starting conditions and an ideological theory within a setting (suggested say by current events, or local conditions, or a real life individual) and then try to see how this character (with application of his ideological theory) develops in this setting. But this is surely a different process from starting with agenda and designing characters with the goal of convincing the public of a particular ethical or economic theory. Of course I cannot prove that Dostoevsky was not trying to convince the public of something - this is only my particular impression, but I would say two things point in favour of it - the literary merit itself - and the fact that despite the literary merit, rarely is the agenda ever clear or strongly convincing.
In contrast, a writer who I personally greatly love, C.S. Lewis, had a tendency to become overtly preachy. I'm using him as an example because he strikes me as a perfect case of someone torn between telling a good story and wanting to put out a message.
There's an interesting split in his oeuvre between books that are wonderful stories (Perelandra), and books that try to convince you to be a Christian, and his Narnia Chronicles occupy a confusing mix of the two. Many people love his stories despite his preachiness, and many people absolutely hate him for his preachiness despite the fact that he was a good writer.
Personally, I wasn't bothered by most of his overt Christian themes in Narnia, for example, because many of those themes transcend mere Christianity (budum ching). But the little tidbit about one of the core characters not going to heaven because she liked lipstick a little too much (basically) felt like a terrible violation of his storytelling just to make a point.
Anyways, I'm getting off topic here but I like any excuse to get into Lewis, as he's one of my favorite characters precisely because he strikes me as so maddeningly torn between different things. Carry on.
(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.
Rand is pro-government where it's needed. She's even pro-environmental regulation - she says it's justified where there's an objective threat to human life (as with air pollution), or violation of property rights (as with noise pollution).
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.
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.)
>She says that a capitalist society is good because it's the only society which fully protects individual rights
Any theory of society that ignores that it's defining characteristic is that it is NOT fully individual is fundamentally flawed. That is what is broken about Objectivism.
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.
The only people that can identify with any of the main characters are people that completely lack any kind of self distance.
Funny, I remember it as a comedy about petulant capitalists.
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.
Then again, it depends on how you've loaded your definition of capitalism.
https://www.researchgate.net/journal/1526-1018_Journal_of_Ay...
For comparison: https://www.researchgate.net/journal/0033-5533_Quarterly_Jou...
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.
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.
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.
You also seem confused when you say that Democracy is part of the Objectivist vision. Democracy is mob rule, not individual liberty.
Are you trying to say that humans are not subjects to "animal evolution" or ecological laws?
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.
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.