‘Who is John Galt?’ Redux

‘Going Galt’ has taken a new meaning in today’s times. The media is taking snippets and references from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and its fictional characters to a new level with their slogan: ‘War on Success’ similar to the out-of-control government, in the novel, that siphoned profits out of the rich. According to The Economist, sales of the book have risen sharply since Obama’s election to office and keeps rising everytime Obama announces a new spending plan. The book has seen the biggest sales in 2008 since its release in 1957. The first three months alone in 2009 have had more sales than those in the same period last year.

People are buying the book coz there are uncanny similarities in the plotlines of the book and the events happening today. (if you haven’t read it already, i’d suggest dropping whatever you are doing and give the book a good read. Of course: Hats off to you if you got to the point of Galt’s speech. If you further made sense – in ONE reading – of the 60 long pages of his expatiation praising selfishness, then you’re my personal hero).

Having read her philosophy ‘Objectivism’  (and most of her literature including her earlier works .. heck, one of my short essays in my admission application for Booth was built around it as well) I have had difficulty in  subscribing to her views in their entirety but the current comparison in today’s economy that the media is trying to project, calls for raising your right eye-brow followed by an intriguing mutter of ..’interesting’.

So what does one make of all this?
I liked Stephen Colbert’s interpretation on Colbert Nation the other night. I quote him verbatim: “when millions are losing homes, jobs and hope, there is nothing more important than putting yourself first”. Of course, here, ‘yourself’ is the Type A me-first personality types. Yep ..this sits well with what Atlas Shrugged captured (If you are not convinced, read Ayn Rand’s Virtue of Selfishness where altruism takes on a different meaning). But dear Mr. Colbert did not consider the other pillars of philosophy viz. ethics and epistemology. And what about other social goals ? Do you subordinate society’s social agenda for the progress of humanity to fixing the financial mess ?

I think its only hard economic times that lead people to consider more extreme philosophies which may explain the recent increase in embracing Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. Further, do we have to look up to such fictional archetypes to creating a utopian working system thus ’saving the world’ or as Rand put it: ‘prevent the stopping of the motor’ ?

Tut-tut ! Take philosophical lessons from the DC Comics miniseries Watchmen. Alan Moore, the creator, probably had it right. Humans don’t really know what they want so they pass off this responsibility to someone else .. call them superheroes or John Galt and the like.

course bidding at Booth

Its been four rounds of bidding already for the spring quarter and I haven\’t been enrolled yet in the courses I truly badly wanted this quarter. Blame it on the new and inefficiently designed ‘efficient market’ style course bidding system. Highly desired courses (taught by professors like Jim Schrager/ Richard Thaler) are going for a premium only because the graduating students are throwing their points around. If not them, then blame it on the extra premium that these courses go for only because you have to now bid individually on courses. Bottomline is: I am unable to afford the courses I really want especially those taught by certain professors.

While we have gone from the search of universals (rules that govern the way all of us behave) to understanding variability within humans, I wish we could go back to the obsession with universals. The understanding of variability is doing a great disservice to me when it comes to bidding on courses at Booth.

PS: of course, its possible to manipulate iBid (the current bidding system) given a few boundary conditions. You could collude with another student who has also enrolled in the same course and have him/her drop the course just minutes before the round is about to end. This way you get to bid for a steal than if it had been open. Naturally, this idea is moot if the course has even a single vacancy. By having your friend drop the full-capacity-course minutes before you bid, you eliminate the possibility of opening it to the student population. This is where the boundary conditions come into play: a few minutes/seconds before the round ends, the course being completely full and more importantly you have a fellow student who will do this for you. Not that tough a condition.

Sure enough, in my attempts to being an ideal Boothie, I did not implement my own hack else I would not be venting here. Hopefully the designers of iBid are listening.

stalemate !

Time, certainly, has strange ways of playing games.  Last year, around this time,  with a couple of internships lined up, I was excited and  felt confident that it would only be downstream from there on. For once.. complacency was groveling with me and begging to creep in.

Fast forward to a year later, things look so different. I have yet another internship offer. But at this point I have to be true to myself. I don’t need another internship. Getting a job seems to be more important especially if you are going to put in so much effort into finding either one of them. I never quite imagined that I would be using the on-campus recruiting as crutches to find a job. Networking is not paying off much. All the goodwill I built up during my internships last summer is lost as I realized (when I reached out to my friends and bosses) that they don’t work there anymore.

Still ruminating what to do.

If the passing year has taught me anything,  it is this:  linearity as a concept has limited appeal in real life.
Especially with the headwind in the economy.