Harriet Martineau and Ayn Rand: Economics in the Guise of Fiction.

In its 200 years the profession of economics has produced few eminent women economists. Only two, in fact, Joan Robinson of and Rosa Luxemburg, a German Marxist scholar and revolutionary, have made contributions sufficient to win them places in recent histories of economic thought. The paucity of their contributions is not of course because women have been unable to master the intricacies of economic analysis. But while women have contributed little to the development of economic analysis, two of them, Harriet Martineau, a 19th century English-woman, and Ayn Rand, born in Russia but now an American citizen, have had great success in simplifying the esoteric ideas of economics and bringing them to the public in the form of fiction. Professional writers both, they make their living exclusively from their writings. But neither popularizes economic principles indiscriminately. For Ayn Rand, it is the people of the United States, and especially the new generation, who must assume the task of proving to the world that capitalism, the unknown ideal, could be a workable, viable system. While Harriet Martineau, after traveling extensively in foreign countries, including the United States during its period of high capitalism began to have doubts about the universal applicability of the capitalist system. Rand continues to see only the evils of interventionism, daily reconfirming her faith in the philosophy of unrestricted individualism.