Title: How bad writing destroyed the world
Description: Literary history meets economic policy in this entertaining polemic on the ethical and potentially destructive power of terrible literature. --Publisher.

"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."
Subjects: Moral and ethical aspects, Russian literature, Russian fiction, Egoism in literature, History and criticism, Influence, Economics and literature, Rationalism in literature, Economic aspects, Economics in literature, Russian fiction, history and criticism, Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.), Chto delatʹ? (Chernyshevsky, Nikolay Gavrilovich), Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers
Places: United States
People: Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), Ayn Rand (1905-1982), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)
Time periods: 19th century