I finally got around to reading Atlas Shrugged (confession: I read an abridged version because life is short). It’s a childish book in many ways. It depicts a naive vision of perfect competition and innovation between large corporations, then suggests that any government interference is a mistake. Government is as incompetent and corrupt as private industry is virtuous and innovative. The government interference in question is not the environmental regulation and anti-trust regulation of today, but rather an extreme form of anti-competitive central planning that sounds very much like the vision that would have prevailed in the Soviet Union at the time. In fact, I think Atlas Shrugged makes the most sense through a Cold War lense. At the time the book was written, the early 1950s, the Soviet model did seem to be producing fast growth, and if it had been able to stay on that trajectory for decades it could have theoretically overtaken the west. Some people probably admired it for this, and some people were terrified of the implications. Ayn Rand was somewhat prescient in foreseeing how such an extreme form of central planning would eventually destroy incentives for productivity and innovation, and she even foresaw the risk of the military industrial complex managing to hijack such a system. Of course, what she gets wrong is the idea that large corporations engage only in perfect competition and innovation. They do their best to avoid competition whenever they can because it is cheaper to buy political influence. This means that capitalism is creating exactly the kind of government corruption that Ayn Rand railed against! It shouldn’t be surprising though, if we look at ecological analogs to how competition actually works. Plants and animals occasionally compete head to head for the exact same resources at the exact same place and time (thing Coke and Pepsi), but more often they try to find and exploit niches where they are complementing or at least not interfering with each other (think Coke itself versus bottlers, trucking companies, restaurants, etc.) Parasitism and gangsterism also are strategies that work pretty well in the natural world. So in summary I think Ayn Rand was prescient for her time on certain things, but overall the book is just childishly dumb and not even all that entertaining.

I’ve just started Red Plenty, which is a historical novel about Soviet central planning in the 1950s. The book tries to capture a moment in history when people were really excited about this model, thought it was working, and didn’t see that it would lead to ruin and military-industrial domination. You know how the story ends, and yet you are sympathetic to the characters (some actual historical leaders, like Nikita Krushchev), and actually pity them because they are so full of hope and have no way of knowing their story will end in tragedy. And unlike Atlas Shrugged, this book is well written and entertaining.