How Bad Writing Destroyed the World

<p>Literature can be used to disseminate ideas with devastating real-life consequences. In <i>How Bad Writing Destroyed the World</i> 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. <p/> 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 <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> Objectivism sprouted from the Rational Egoism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's <i>What Is to be Done? </i>(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 <i>How Bad Writing Destroyed the World </i>combines literary and intellectual history to uncover the danger of hawking the virtues of selfishness even in fiction.</p>