Atlas Summit 2016

Robert Bradley, Jr. - Ayn Rand and Best Business Practices—Atlas Summit 2016

Session recorded 7/12/16 at the Atlas Summit, Planet Hollywood, Las Vegas, NV, as part of the Symposium on Success in Business.

The heroes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are successful businessmen. All readers of the novels can agree that the heroes behave heroically. But do they behave in ways that characterize successful businessmen?

This lecture compares the behavior of Rand’s heroes with the insights of four authors in the classical-liberal tradition whose works identify key aspects of free-market business success: Samuel Smiles, Joseph Schumpeter, Ronald Coase, and Friedrich Hayek. Along the way, it demonstrates that the classical liberal capitalist Charles Koch has adopted and updated all of these insights. It then argues that Rand thoroughly understood the insights of two of these authors but slighted the insights of two others. And it suggests that her moral and aesthetic philosophy may have been responsible for her oversights.

Listen to part one here

Release date: 12 September 2016

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