Category: The Atlasphere

All things Atlasphere can be found here, columns, podcasts, interesting anecdotes, and more.

Greenspan on Sensible Economic Policy

Posted on by Heather Wagenhals

In a column for WaPo, David Ignatius discusses Alan Greenspan’s views on sensible economic policy, noting his Rand influence in the process:

It’s a delicious irony of Washington that Clinton’s heir in the trade debate is the balding, obscurantist, Ayn Rand-reading chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. He gave a speech last Friday in Omaha that should be required study for every Democrat this year. It expressed the hard fact that escapism isn’t an economic policy.
The Fed chairman began by agreeing with the trade-worriers that intense global competition has brought stress and anxiety. “There is a palpable unease that businesses and jobs are being drained from the United States, with potentially adverse long-run implications for unemployment and the standard of living of the average American,” he said.
Greenspan went on to summarize some of the growth statistics that make economists so confident that the long-term benefits of free trade and open markets outweigh the short-term costs. But he counseled workers that they must have the skills to compete. “By far, the greatest contribution during the past half-century to our average annual real GDP growth of three-quarter percent has been the ideas embodied in both our human and physical capital.” And he warned that if workers don’t get the skills required by a changing economy, the result will be growing inequality of incomes.
Greenspan’s gospel is simple, and backed by hard numbers: “Over the long sweep of American generations and waves of economic change we simply have not experienced a net drain of jobs to advancing technology or to other nations.” That was Clinton’s faith, too, and it gave him the discipline to resist politically popular policies that would have undermined economic growth.
Democrats are right to challenge the poor economic record of the Bush administration, which has squandered many of the gains of the 1990s. But they should base their critique on sound economics and honest advice to America’s working people — not on the false hope that the United States can somehow opt out of a world that is growing more competitive by the day.

See the full article for more details.

Capitalism: The Cure for Education Failures

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

In a review of Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools (Hoover Press, 362 pages, $15) for the Chicago Sun-Times, Jonathan Hoenig writes:

[Authors Herbert Walberg and Joseph Bast] present a compelling and thoroughly researched argument for introducing market-based reforms into public schools.
The vast majority of children in the United States attend public schools, and in a methodic and disciplined fashion, the authors make a comprehensive case why the free market can better educate more students at a lower cost.
The authors begin by describing the horrible condition of public education, which, make no mistake, is a complete mess nationwide. Although government schools maintain a monopoly on public funds, they’ve failed miserably by almost every conceivable benchmark.
Even more depressing is that even as results have dropped, the size and cost of the government school bureaucracy has soared.

The solution?

The solution is capitalism, the same incredible force of productive change that brought civilization out of the Dark Ages and propelled this country to the highest standard of living, for rich and poor alike, in all of human history.
The authors’ thesis, built on the groundwork laid by the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman, is that just as the free market has created unparalleled innovation in medicine, agriculture and communication, so could it vastly improve education. The ability for parents to choose their schools, and for schools to compete for their attendance, would raise standards and lower cost, just as it has in every other area of our lives.

Walberg and Bast devote a good deal of space to refuting common misconceptions and criticisms of capitalism, and describe how a free market in education might work. But they go beyond that:

[I]n the tradition of economist Ludwig von Mises and philosopher Ayn Rand, they ground their arguments in moral as well as practical terms. Capitalism isn’t simply the most efficient social system ever devised, but the most just as well.

Read the full article for more details!

In Praise of Wal-Mart

Posted on by Heather Wagenhals

ARI op-ed columnist (and industrial psychologist) Ed Locke has written an editorial in defense of Wal-Mart stores:

Wal-Mart is one of the most impressive success stories in the history of business.
Founded some 50 years ago as a single five and dime store in a small Arkansas town, it has grown into a world-wide behemoth under the leadership of its brilliant founder, the late Sam Walton, and his able successors.
It is the largest corporation in America in terms of sales, $245 billion. Wal-Mart has over 4,000 stores worldwide, employs 1.3 million people, and serves 100 million customers per week.
It is quite true that Wal-Mart has been successful in outcompeting other stores which sell the same products, such as toys, clothing, and groceries.
But how has it been able to do this? By discovering new ways of using computer systems and other technology to better manage its inventory and costs and reap the benefits of economy of scale.

Read the full article.

India's First Woman Astronaut

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

Kalpana ChawlaKalpana Chawla was on the space shuttle Columbia during its fatal re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere on February 1, 2003.
An inspiration to millions of Indians, she is now the subject of her own biography, Dilip M Salwi’s Kalpana Chawla: India’s First Woman Astronaut.
In an extended excerpt published on rediff.com, we learn that Ayn Rand was one of her favorite authors:

In college, Kalpana showed total dedication to her subject because she enjoyed what she was doing. In fact, she was always dissatisfied with her performance and felt she could have done better. Always dressed in trousers, she used to come to college on a bicycle. As there was no girl’s hostel, initially she stayed in Mata Gujri Hall in the Punjab University campus. In fact, she changed several hostels as she found the hostel environment very noisy and distracting for studies. Later, she lived alone in one room above a garage in a bungalow.
Kalpana had a few select friends and would restrict herself to them and her studies. She learnt karate and became a black belt. She was mentally prepared to fight if any man tried to act smart with her. She also had an aesthetic sense in clothes, was fond of eating simple food and collecting precious stones. She loved a quiet environment and reading books. During those days, her favourite writers were Ayn Rand, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Salman Rushdie, Richard Bach and Oriana Fallaci. She would even persuade other friends to read these writers. Besides helping her friends in studies, she regularly paid the fees of one poor batch mate out of her pocket money without the girl’s knowledge. Although she believed herself to be no less than any boy and could do any task that they could, she disliked the more aggressive women’s liberation movement of the West.

Ayn Rand’s novels are quite popular in India. In fact, the Atlasphere currently contains 71 profiles from India [update 10/14/04: now more than 250 profiles from India] ? more than any other country but the United States.

Christina Ricci on The Fountainhead

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

Christina RicciIn an interview with Movieline Magazine from 2001, Christina Ricci mentions that she’s an admirer of The Fountainhead and would like to remake the movie:

Q: What’s your favorite novel? A: The Fountainhead because the writing is so beautiful.
Q: What about The Catcher in the Rye? A: I hate The Catcher in the Rye. It’s so whiny and incredibly self-involved. The fact that it was supposed to represent what we were going through in our teen years – I was just like, fuck you. I can take responsibility for my emotions and actions. […]
Q: If you could have three wishes connected to the movies, what would they be? A: I’d want to remake The Fountainhead. I’d like to run a studio. I want to have the capacity and ability to make films – I don’t have it right now.
Q: Would you say you have a large ego? A: Yes.

Check out the full interview.
PS. In case you didn’t notice, that’s a copy of The Fountainhead she’s holding, in this poster. It looks as if she was approached about participating in a pro-reading poster campaign, and she chose The Fountainhead as the theme for her poster. Copies of this poster are available for purchase online. -Editor

TOC Spring Conference in Nevada

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

The Objectivist Center has announced its Spring Conference, to be held on April 17, 2004 in Las Vegas, Nevada. From the announcement:

Join the Objectivist Center for a weekend in Las Vegas to experience the wild side of Capitalism and explore the values that achievement and business require. In addition to social and entertainment opportunities, the program highlights include:

  • Attorney and former law professor Bruce Dalcher assessing the PATRIOT act
  • Barbara Lehman, chief marketing strategist with HMI Advertising,
    explaining the art of entrepreneurial living

  • TOC Washington Director Ed Hudgins diagnosing the Republicans’ betrayal of small government
  • TOC Director of Programs William Thomas weighing the ethical state of corporate America

The conference brochure and registration materials will be available soon.

World Socialists Onto Greenspan's Tactics

Posted on by s1e2t3u4p5

In a recent editorial, the World Socialists Web Site predicts a deepening U.S. fiscal crisis ? which is nothing particularly new.
It is a kick, however, to see them grouse so loudly about Alan Greenspan’s admiration for Ayn Rand’s ideas:

As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan has to at least give the impression of political neutrality, claiming to base himself on the findings of economic analysis. But, as his history shows, he is flesh of one with some of the most aggressive defenders of the ?free market? and private property and wealth within the American ruling class.
These views were clearly set out in an article published in 1966 defending the gold standard as the real basis of all finance, and subsequently reprinted in the book Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal by extreme right-wing philosopher Ayn Rand. According to Greenspan, ?chronic deficit spending? was the hallmark of the welfare state, while the welfare state itself was ?nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.?
Asked in 1993 if he still agreed with the conclusions of his article, Greenspan replied: ?Absolutely.? That basic agreement seems to have been underlined once again by his insistence that the answer to the growing fiscal crisis in the US is to make permanent the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy while slashing domestic government spending.

Keep reading, if you’re not scared of scare quotes.

Alan Greenspan Cites Math Gap

Posted on by Heather Wagenhals

Federal Reserve chairman (and former Ayn Rand associate) Alan Greenspan warns a Senate committee about the “math gap”:

Alan Greenspan has added a new twist to the ongoing debate on jobs outsourcing. Last week, the U.S. Federal Reserve chairman told the Senate Banking Committee that the real threat to the standard of living in the United States came not from jobs leaving for cheaper Asian locations. The bigger worry, he said, was a drop in U.S. educational standards.
U.S. students ranked 19th in a 1999 study of mathematical ability among eighth-graders in 38 countries. Four years earlier, as fourth-graders, the same cohort of U.S. students had ranked seventh. Students from Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan completed the Top 5 list of 1999. China and India did not participate in the study.
“What will ultimately determine” the “standard of living of this country is the skill of the people,” Greenspan told the Senate committee. “We do something wrong, which obviously people in Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan do far better. Teaching in these strange, exotic places seems for some reason to be far better than we can do it.”

Also amusing is Andy Mukherjee’s observation that because of the education system in Singapore, Greenspan’s own career choices might not have been possible in that country.

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