The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis

The book's title should give you a clue that polemics follow—there's nothing wrong with a good polemic. But this work sells polemics as hard fact and ineffectively asserts that correlation equals causation. The title's three-part structure begins with a biography of Ayn Rand (1905–82). Cunningham (Psychiatric Tales) highlights hypocrisies in Rand's personal life and cruelty to her followers, painting her as a dark prophet of things to come. Next, the author argues, convincingly, that the 2008 financial crash was brought on largely by the unfettered capitalism of players such as Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, one of Rand's acolytes. The final, weakest section, which should tie Rand's philosophy to finance today, becomes little more than a laundry list of liberal complaint, plodding through a long lineup of "conservatives are this way, liberals are this way" that feels irrelevant and unfounded. Though Cunningham's simple, nervous illustrations are well done, they become repetitive. The text is so clearly the focus here that you wonder what is gained by using the graphic novel format.