To the Students in MIT 10-250, and All Other Students of Engineering and Science: Why Atlas Shrugged Is a Book You Should Read

Abstract

Atlas Shrugged has long earned sharp criticism for its simplified characters and situations, and for the extreme selfishness that it advocates as the highest morality. In 1974, as a 19-year-old, when the author of this paper read Atlas Shrugged, the author was put-off by these elements of the book. However, Atlas Shrugged also advocates that young people study both physics and philosophy, and with that advice the author agreed. That advice led the author to transfer from Pomona College to MIT (to study architecture; but an MIT degree, regardless of major, requires physics, calculus, etc.)

Also, Atlas Shrugged is a novel featuring inventive, highly-productive engineers as the main praised characters, and while such characters frequently are featured in science fiction novels, featuring them in a non-science fiction novel is quite rare. Apart from its advocacy of a selfish philosophy, Atlas Shrugged focuses on the psychology of such individuals – quite accurately, in the author’s experience-based opinion, then and later – and on the elements in their social environment that either encourage, or discourage, such people from first inventing and second sharing their inventions with the rest of the people of the world.

After reading Atlas Shrugged in 1974, the author had no desire to read it again. The author noted in the 2000s that some prominent political leaders had been inspired by it, but this did not cause the author to take it up again; and when the Atlas Shrugged movies came out, the author did not bother to watch them.

But during Thanksgiving 2018, 44 years after reading Atlas Shrugged, the author discovered that his video-artist daughter had a copy in her studio, given her by a fellow-artist. The author was struck by the fact that Atlas Shrugged was being read by some of today’s young avant-garde artists. Such interest by the politicians and rich business leaders had not caused the author to return to it; but interest by the creative young in 2018 was a different matter. So the author took up Atlas Shrugged to read it a second time.

This paper is the result.

The invention of new technologies has proven, during the last 100 years, to be most profoundly transformative of the economies of the world. The century 1918-2018 has seen the beginnings of worldwide popular radio make progress through to today’s world-wide instantaneous television and internet; has seen transportation progress from rickety motorcars to interplanetary probes; has seen society-upending protests in several countries (the ongoing “yellow vest” protests in France being an example) sparked by websites such as Facebook.

These massive, Facebook-originated protests invariably are about government economic policies, each policy instituted with the advice of experts trained in economics, that massive numbers of people intensely dislike. The continuing influence of the economics profession itself is threatened if economists continue to lead political leaders into policies that produce such massive and unanticipated opposition. Leaders will shun advisors who repeatedly guide them into such disasters.

A scholarly website such as the Social Science Research Network certainly must be interested in the psychology and motivations of the individuals, the inventor-engineers, who make the things that are so transformative of world economics.

While most economic studies focus on the distribution or re-distribution of such technologies after the inventor-engineers have invented the technologies, few studies focus on why the individuals who make such technologies actually work so hard to make them in the first place.

Every economist who wishes to provide wise counsel on policy must learn to anticipate when policies may deter those who invent the technologies from inventing and sharing those technologies. Atlas Shrugged, however objectionable its philosophies may be, is the best available source for understanding this issue. Atlas Shrugged is, moreover, in a form that communicates effectively not merely to economists, but to the inventor-engineers themselves, and to the wide general public that wants the flow of new technologies to continue.

Atlas Shrugged is the most well-established and well-known means by which the “consumers” come to understand the motivations and desires of the “makers,” and thus, Atlas Shrugged must be as well-known to economists as it is known to the general public of “consumers” and of “makers.”

The most economically transformative event in the history of our times – the collapse of communism – is a direct result of communism’s failure to understand the motivations and psychology of the “makers.” In 1987 the author was behind the Iron Curtain, and in 1989 the author watched (via television) the masses of people in 1989 flood out of the communist world to the West.

This 1989 flood of populations occurred not because the populations read, understood, and chose between arguments and theories, but because the populations saw the differing results that derived from the arguments and theories adopted and applied by the contrasting cultures. The populations saw the much higher Western availability to all people of the products of technological invention that all people want.

This paper thus is submitted to the Social Science Research Network – which is a network founded primarily to serve economists – because everyone working in economics needs to understand this.

The young who are the future inventor-engineers of the world also need to understand this, even more importantly than the economists need to; they need to know, even if the economists refuse to know. The quality of their own lives depends upon it. Thus the paper is written to them, so that they understand how the future which the economists propose may encourage or deter them in their lives, regardless of whether the economics professionals educate themselves in these matters.