HOW BAD WRITING DESTROYED THE WORLD. Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis

Literary history meets economic policy in this entertaining polemic on the ethical and
potentially destructive power of terrible literature.

Key Features and Highlights
An entertaining (if alarming) story of a destructive idea's voyage through the lives and works of great and terrible artists and influential historical figures, ranging from 19th-century Russia to contemporary Wall Street
An enlightening new history of the origins of the economic policy of the Greenspan years
Serves as a warning of the dangers of bad writing, lazy reading and borrowed thinking

Literature can be used to disseminate ideas with devastating real-life consequences. In How Bad Writing Destroyed the World, Adam Weiner spans decades and continents to reveal the surprising connections between the 2008-2009 financial crisis and a relatively unknown nineteenth-century Russian author.
A congressional investigation placed the blame for the financial crisis on Alan Greenspan and his deregulatory policies—his attempts, in essence, to put Ayn Rand's Objectivism into practice. Though developed most famously in Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Objectivism sprouted from the Rational Egoism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to be Done? (1863), an enormously influential Russian novel decried by the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov for its destructive radical ethics. In tracing the origins of Greenspan's ruinous ideology, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World combines literary and intellectual history to uncover the danger of hawking “the virtues of selfishness,” even in fiction.

Adam Weiner is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Wellesley College, USA. He is the author of By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (2000).