In reality, the strike would never work, because the actual leaders of industrial society aren’t all implicit Objectivists, and can’t be convinced even in one of John Galt’s three-hour conversations.
This doesn’t seem like an obstacle to me; in the story, there are plenty of ‘leaders of industrial society’ who stick around until the bitter end.
And worse, if it did work, I think it would be an utter disaster—society would collapse, and it would not be easy for the strikers to come back and pick up the pieces.
I do think Rand is pretty clear about this also, although I think she still undersells it. One of the basic arguments from Adam Smith is that specialization of labor is a huge productivity booster, and the size of the market determines how much specialization it could support. If you reduced the ‘market size’ of the Earth from roughly one billion participants to roughly one million participants, you should expect things to get way worse, and even more so if the market size shrinks to roughly one thousand participants. (Given the number of people who are mentioned working for the various named strikers, I think this is a better estimate for the number of the people in Galt’s Gulch than ten or a hundred, but she might have had a hundred in mind.) You can sort of get around this with imported capital, but then it’s a long and lonely road back up.
Time has also been very unkind to this; you’re not going to have a semiconductor industry with a thousand people, and I’m not sure about a million, either.
This doesn’t seem like an obstacle to me; in the story, there are plenty of ‘leaders of industrial society’ who stick around until the bitter end.
I do think Rand is pretty clear about this also, although I think she still undersells it. One of the basic arguments from Adam Smith is that specialization of labor is a huge productivity booster, and the size of the market determines how much specialization it could support. If you reduced the ‘market size’ of the Earth from roughly one billion participants to roughly one million participants, you should expect things to get way worse, and even more so if the market size shrinks to roughly one thousand participants. (Given the number of people who are mentioned working for the various named strikers, I think this is a better estimate for the number of the people in Galt’s Gulch than ten or a hundred, but she might have had a hundred in mind.) You can sort of get around this with imported capital, but then it’s a long and lonely road back up.
Time has also been very unkind to this; you’re not going to have a semiconductor industry with a thousand people, and I’m not sure about a million, either.