The Best Novels and Plays About Business: Results of a Survey

Ed Younkins shares the following with AEL readers:

The Best Novels and Plays About Business: Results of  a Survey

My Koch Research Fellows, Jomana Krupinski and Kaitlyn Pytlak, and I conducted a survey of 250 Business and Economics professors and 250 English and Literature professors. Colleges and universities were randomly selected and then professors from the relevant departments were also randomly selected to receive our email survey. They were asked to list and rank from 1 to 10 what they considered to be the best novels and plays about business. We did not attempt to define the word “best” leaving that decision to each respondent. We obtained sixty-nine usable responses from Business and Economics professors and fifty-one from English and Literature professors. A list of fifty choices was given to each respondent and an opportunity was presented to vote for works not on the list. When tabulating the results, ten points were given to a novel or play in a respondent’s first position, nine points were assigned to a work in the second position, and so on, down to the tenth listed work which was allotted one point. The table below presents the top twenty-five novels and plays for each group of professors. Interestingly, fifteen works made both top-25 lists. These are noted in bold type.

The Best Novels and Plays about Business

Business and Economics Professors		English and Literature Professors
1.   Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand	457	1.   Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller	282
2.   The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand	297	2.   Bartleby: The Scrivener, Herman Melville	259
3.   The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald	216	3.   The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald	231
4.   Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller	164	4.   The Jungle, Upton Sinclair	143
5.   Time Will Run Back, Henry Hazlitt	145	5.   Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis	126
6.   The Jungle, Upton Sinclair	136	6.   Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet	121
7.   The Gilded Age, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner	95	7.   The Rise of Silas Lapham, William Dean Howells	98
8.   Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet	89	8.   American Pastoral, Philip Roth	85
9.   God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.	57	9.   The Confidence Man, Herman Melville	75
10. Other People’s Money, Jerry Sterner	57	10. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand	75
11. Bartleby: The Scrivener, Herman Melville	55	11. A Hazard of New Fortunes, William Dean Howells	66
12. A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe	48	12. The Octopus, Frank Norris	65
13. Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis	47	13. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand	62
14. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Sloan Wilson	43	14. Nice Work, David Lodge	62
15. Rabbit is Rich, John Updike	41	15. The Big Money, John Dos Passos	59
16. Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw	39	16. The Gilded Age, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner	58
17. Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens	33	17. Rabbit is Rich, John Updike	55
18. The Goal, Eliyahu M. Goldratt	33	18. Seize the Day, Saul Bellow	55
19. The Driver, Garet Garrett	32	19. Mildred Pierce, James M. Cain	54
20. Executive Suite, Cameron Hawley	32	20. The Financier, Theodore Dreiser	53
21. The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope	32	21. Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens	51
22. American Pastoral, Philip Roth	29	22. Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey	45
23. The Octopus, Frank Norris	29	23. The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald	44
24. Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey	28	24. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy	43
25. North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell	27	25. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.	39

Arts Funding Debate at The Economist

The Economist is hosting a debate on Arts Funding. It begins with Alan Davey discussing how Keynes set up Britain's art council and arguing that, apparently, there was no art funding at all prior that, and that therefore there was no art being produced to speak of (how else is one to interpret phrases such as "Britain after the second world war didn't have much by way of arts provision" or defining Keynes' goal as being "essentially an attempt to address market failure"?) Mr. Davey is apparently unaware of the appearance of the distinctly anti-establishment Modernist movement that arose at the time and the fact that the artists without any public support were in fact the most productive and most creative of all the artists working. Pete Spence takes up the other argument, pointing out that government spending on art tends to crowd out competitive funding, support safe (conservative in the worst sense) art, and undermine market signals that drive artistic innovation and creativity. In the end, "No elite panel of experts should decide what art is best for us. We should decide what is best for ourselves. The dead hand of the state doesn't have much going for it—we should put it to rest and embrace the messy, diverse, vibrant tapestry of commercial funding."