What other fictional book from the 1900s forward would you recommend? Personally, I considered myself quite liberal until I began reading this book. I just kept finding the themes resonating with me, and I realized that she was really describing my philosophy and half the reasons behind the messes in society today. It hasn't changed my morals so much as realigned my politics to agree with them. The book has been singlehandedly responsible for converting me from a liberal to a libertarian. Perhaps if more people read it, they would be less inclined to "ride the system" and would do some good for society. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking....

The Giver by Lois Lowry. Seriously, it has everything you need to know about entrepreneurship, namely:

1.) People lie to you, and most of the time, you will never know that they're lying to you.

2.) There are 5 qualities necessary to be a successful entrepreneur: intelligence, integrity, courage, wisdom, and the capacity to see beyond. When you start, you should have intelligence, integrity, and courage. Wisdom can only come from experience, but you should have the ability to acquire wisdom. Finally, entrepreneurs need the ability to "see beyond", and only time will tell if they truly have that ability.

3.) Precision of language is important.

4.) Safe and comfortable is more dangerous than painful and real.

5.) Making wise decisions is perhaps the hardest task that someone can take on, so difficult that people will try to concentrate the burden in one individual. It shouldn't be concentrated, though. For the community to thrive, everybody needs to bear the burden.

6.) To accomplish anything, you need passion. Don't try to suppress it with a pill.

7.) The way things are is not always the way things should be.

8.) Sometimes, the greatest weight is the knowledge of what others have done before you.

9.) Find people like you, and pass them your memories. They're often the only ones who will understand them.

10.) There's more than one way to interpret the ending.

All this in a book that is shorter than John Galt's speech.

I thought Atlas Shrugged was a good book, but it wasn't a great book. The ideas are very seductive, but then you start trying to apply them, find you're being a jackass, and then realize there are subtleties to life that Ayn Rand didn't understand. Atlas Shrugged had a lot about how you should live your life, but very little about why. That's why I think that The Giver - and much children's literature, in general - is better and more mature.

The Giver is a good choice. I would also say that it is better written than Atlas Shrugged as well. All the characters are one-dimensional characters and Rand keeps beating us over the head with her ideas and doesn't allow us to make our own conclusions when all her "good guys" do no wrong and everyone else is a parasite. I read The Giver in the 8th grade and put it in my list of books that have influenced me.

>All this in a book that is shorter than John Galt's speech.

This is what happens when you don't have editors.

I would like to add 1984 and Animal Farm. I think the time that Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead capitalism was already (or soon to become) the de facto economic system of the world. I think that it is a good book for the time it was written when communism was still popular in some parts of the world. 1984 and Animal Farm were true when George Orwell wrote them and they still are today and in the foreseeable future.

I don't think it is a good idea to choose a fictional book as the greatest book on economics. The book in its greatest potential can persuade people to follow or accept the ideas expressed in the book but it is a means to an end. The end is the actual theory.

Wow. In my original post I edited out the last line, which was "I just hope the libertarians don't show up and fill up the site with Ayn Rand conversations, like every other social news site." Amazing!