Howard Roark versus Frank Lloyd Wright

In a senior seminar I have been teaching I introduce the students to some basic economics, namely that of Henry Hazlitt and Friedrich Hayek, and then discuss ideas about success in authors with varied ideological views such as Reinhard Bendix, David McClelland and David Riesman. We then discuss popular success literature including that of Benjamin Franklin, Elbert Hubbard, Dale Carnegie, Stephen Covey and Napoleon Hill. Then we analyze the character of Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's Fountainhead in light of economic, sociological and popular ideas about success.

If you haven't read Ayn Rand's novel, The Fountainhead, consider it.  As good is her novel Atlas Shrugged.  One point that students sometimes raise is whether Howard Roark is meant to be Frank Lloyd Wright.  What are the similarities and differences between Howard Roark and the real life Frank Lloyd Wright?

I checked out Great Buildings.com's page on Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright's architecture, such as that of the Edgar J. Kauffman residence, Falling Water pictured above, is unique. Wright's work lives up to Rand's euphoric descriptions of Howard Roark's. Like Roark, Wright left college without graduating (in the novel Roark is thrown out of architecture school, but Wright dropped out of the University of Wisconsin). From there, Roark goes directly to work for the Louis Sullivan character, Henry Cameron.  Louis Sullivan was the real life architect who said "form follows function," which Rand attributes to Cameron on page 45 of the novel.  The real life Wright went to work for the firm of J.L. Silsbee before going to work for Adler and Sullivan.

In the novel, Roark builds moderate income housing and invents new architectural forms and approaches in the Sullivan mode. According to the website:

"Wright evolved a new concept of interior space in architecture. Rejecting the existing view of rooms as single-function boxes, Wright created overlapping and interpenetrating rooms with shared spaces...Through experimentation, Wright developed the idea of the prairie house...

"...Wright responded to the need for low income housing with the Usonian house, a development from his earlier prairie house."

One quote from Wright on the site sounds something like something we might expect Roark to say:

"Our schools today, busy turning out 'the common man,' seem to be making conformity a law of his nature...and the old adage—'those who can, do, those who can't teach..'—was never more truly descriptive of purveyors of 'the higher education' in architecture. Life-long I have been shocked by the human deficiency capitalized by American education."

I think you will enjoy the photos at Great Buildings.com.  Rand describes Roark's designs in a way that sounds like Wright's. 

Like the fictional Roark, Wright built several temples and chapels, such as the Unity Temple in Oak Park Illinois and the Unitarian Meeting House in Madison, Wisconsin. However, unlike Roark, the temples were not destroyed by John Dewey or Lewis Mumford (in the novel Ellsworth Toohey, whose name rhymes with John Dewey but seems to be something like Lewis Mumford--an influential social and architectural critic who lived in the 1920s--has the Stoddard Temple reworked into a nursing home). Also, unlike Roark, Wright didn't build any New York City skyscrapers and did not live in New York City, which was Rand's adopted home. (Rand had emigrated from the USSR.) The only skyscrapers shown on the Great Buildings site are the Johnson Wax headquarters building in Racine, Wisconsin and the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. It is unfortunate that Wright did not design any of the major skyscrapers in New York City, although the Guggenheim Museum is ample testimony to Wright's imagination.

Here are some of my favorites:

Martin House, Buffalo, 1904

Guggenheim Museum 1959

Pfieffer Chapel 1938 and here

Walker Residence, Carmel California, 1948

Jacobs House, Madison, Wisconsin, 1936.

Several of these structures seem commonplace; recall that Wright designed them as early as 1904. Other architects have had more than a century to imitate Wright's designs, which look ultra-modern even today.  Wright's work resonates with the triumph of the human spirit, but he was criticized for excessive individuality.

Socialism in One Lesson

I just received this e-mail from Nancy Razik and Ralph Neil Doolin. I am going to try this on my class:

>An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. The class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little.. The second Test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for anyone else. All failed to their great surprise and the professor told them that socialism would ultimately fail because the harder to succeed the greater the reward but when a government takes all the reward away; no one will try or succeed.

Free Trade Petition

Nigel Ashford of the Institute for Humane Studies has sent me the following e-maill about a Free Trade Petition for academics:

>The Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace and Prosperity is circulating an international petition in support of free trade available in over 20 languages. The petition will be launched on April 1 at the G20 summit in London. The organizers hope that academics of all disciplines will sign the petition to help avoid an era of harmful economic nationalism. For more details and to sign the petition, see the links below.

http://atlasnetwork.org/tradepetition/

The petition reads as follows

>Free Trade Is the Best Policy

>The specter of protectionism is rising. It is always a dangerous and foolish policy, but it is especially dangerous at a time of economic crisis, when it threatens to damage the world economy. Protectionism’s peculiar premise is that national prosperity is increased when government grants monopoly power to domestic producers. As centuries of economic reasoning, historical experience, and empirical studies have repeatedly shown, that premise is dead wrong. Protectionism creates poverty, not prosperity. Protectionism doesn’t even “protect” domestic jobs or industries; it destroys them, by harming export industries and industries that rely on imports to make their goods. Raising the local prices of steel by “protecting” local steel companies just raises the cost of producing cars and the many other goods made with steel. Protectionism is a fool’s game.

>But the fact that protectionism destroys wealth is not its worst consequence. Protectionism destroys peace. That is justification enough for all people of good will, all friends of civilization, to speak out loudly and forcefully against economic nationalism, an ideology of conflict, based on ignorance and carried into practice by protectionism.

>Two hundred and fifty years ago, Montesquieu observed that “Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who differ with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities.”

>Trade’s most valuable product is peace. Trade promotes peace, in part, by uniting different peoples in a common culture of commerce – a daily process of learning others’ languages, social norms, laws, expectations, wants, and talents.

>Trade promotes peace by encouraging people to build bonds of mutually beneficial cooperation. Just as trade unites the economic interests of Paris and Lyon, of Boston and Seattle, of Calcutta and Mumbai, trade also unites the economic interests of Paris and Portland, of Boston and Berlin, of Calcutta and Copenhagen – of the peoples of all nations who trade with each other.

>A great deal of rigorous empirical research supports the proposition that trade promotes peace.

>Perhaps the most tragic example of what happens when that insight is ignored is World War II.

You can sign the petition here.

Hamilton on Pecuniary Bounties

Pecuniary bounties or direct subsidies to private firms have been a hot topic under the Bush and Obama administrations. In his Report on Manufactures of December 5, 1791Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton advocated subsidies or bounties as a useful tool to promote manufacturing. He proposed bounties in the first Congress. But Jefferson's Democratic Republicans opposed them, as did Madison, Hamilton's erstwhile Federalist ally (see Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, for a careful description).

Hamilton believed that bounties can subsidize domestic manufacturers with a smaller price increase than tariffs alone. The reason is that while a $1 tariff raises prices of imports by $1, a 50 cent tariff coupled with a 50 cent bounty provides the same subsidy to the manufacturer (the tariff being transferred to the manufacturer) but raises prices by only 50 cents.

He writes* "Bounties are sometimes not only the best but the only proper expedient for uniting the encouragement of a new object of agriculture with that of a new object of manufacture. It is the Interest of the farmer to have the production of the raw material promoted, by counteracting the interference of the foreign material of the same kind. It is the interest of the manufacturer to have the material abundant and cheap."

However (p. 171), "the continuance of bounties on manufactures long established must almost always be of questionable policy. Because a presumption would arise in every such Case, that there were natural and inherent impediments to success. But in new undertakings they are as justifiable, as they are oftentimes necessary."

Thus, while Hamilton would probably have supported the current banking system in accordance with his views on funded debt to stimulate economic activity and his support for other government policies that subsidize business, he might have opposed the bailout as a subsidy to a lost cause, long established businesses like Citigroup and Bank of America that are not capable of managing themselves.

*Alexander Hamilton, "The Reports of Alexander Hamilton", edited by Jacob E. Cooke. New York, Harper and Row, 1964. p. 169.