USA Today has an enormous front page story today on, of all things, Ayn Rand’s horrible novel Atlas Shrugged. The article is centered on CEOs reading the book as a defense of what they do in light of corporate scandals.
I’m amazed that busy CEOs would have the time or energy to plow through it. Even though I agree with Rand on many things, Atlas Shrugged is ideological fiction at its worst, including an enormous political speech that goes on for something like 50-70 pages.
But to be fair to Rand, some of the criticism in the USA Today article seems unfair. For example, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, CEO of the Leadership Institute at Yale University, claims that,
Ayn Rand did not anticipate CEOs who would loot their firms for hundreds of millions of dollars beofre bankrupting them.
But if you actually read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead (which is not a very good novel either, but a better polemic than Atlas Shrugged) I think it is clear that Rand did anticipate crooked/corrupt businessmen and lays out quite well her view of such people. Rand certainly was clear in her vehement opposition to fraud, whether originating in the private or public sectors (though she did think, like many of the people interviewed in the USA Today article, that many CEOs and businesses had received a bum rap).