David L. Blond

Who is John Galt is the premise of Ayn Rand's most important novel, Atlas Shrugged? I must have read it more than one time as I was growing up. I started writing stories just after I learned to type in 6th grade. I liked the idea of creating and living into characters in the stories. After my father died, when I was 14, writing long novel length stories was a way to forget the loss.

I started out as a physics major but switched within a week to economics, two more degrees beyond the bachelors at NYU between 1969-73, then I worked in New York for a company that had access to the top of the largest most important global companies. It was a good first job, from there my wife and I went to Geneva working for the UN when OPEC raised the price of energy and sent the world into an ever greater economic crisis of debt and financial imbalances. Geneva is a pleasant place, removed from the real world, and UN bureaucrats live a "good life by the lake". It was there that I started writing what today morphed into the three novels collected in the Phoenix Agenda Trilogy. From Switzerland, we went back to Washington as the Senior and for a long time, only, practicing economist in the Office of the Secretary of Defense where I rebuilt economic analysis at the Pentagon (The Rings of Armageddon is my novel about nuclear war and terrorism) for seven years leaving behind a dynamic model measuring the impact of defense on the industrial economy that is still in use today. From there to DRI/McGraw-Hill and later to other consulting firms building commercial models of the global economy and trade at DRI and other economic consulting firms, ending up with my own company, QuERI-International. Over the years I have built and left behind some of the largest and most successful global economic models of trade, industry, and macroeconomics including the QuERI Integrated Global Model covering 72 countries and more than 150 industrial and service sectors. But over all this time, the question in my mind has been -- why does the conventional model of how capitalism and markets should work no longer solves the problems we face as a nation and as a world -- from the gaps between rich and poor within a country and globally to the inability to deal with climate change due to social and political gridlock.

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand suggested that the solution was self-interest and greed, individualism. She hated socialism, she hated government giving away her money to people who she felt were leeches. The capitalists in the book leave society to destroy government. In her mind they are the chosen ones, the golden warriors of individualism when they return will -- help the poor, not likely, put them in workhouses, starve them, we are left guessing at the end of the story. But Rand had an influence on our thinking. I think Joe Manchin and most Republicans think that it is a waste of money to help poor people, but they might be left with the poor choice that Galt and his friends would have when they return to the world from Happy Valley, how do you keep the lights on and the people fed.

The Trilogy lays out another path. The ultra-rich capitalists who set out to play the Wall Street Masters of the Universe and collapse the world market at the end of the first book "The Ancient and Honorable Society of the Phoenix" are like the men and woman who leave for Happy Valley, they destroy the underlying basis of market-based capital by wiping out stock values and gaining control of the companies on the cheap. They have no plan, however, for what comes next, no roadmap as to how to rebuild it into something more useful for the world as a whole. It is left to the second and third books to finish my tale, to try to see if you could take personal greed and profits out of the equation of what's important to companies, then could you organize a cooperative version of capital, a post-competitive economy whose goals are to solve, not put off, what needs to be done to cut carbon and meet the challenges of a warming planet and massive wealth inequality.

Donald Trump has played a role in my fiction and in my non-fiction in so many ways. In the first book of the Trilogy he initially was just the brash real estate developer whose real estate portfolio is manipulated to help crash the stock markets of the world. After it was published in 2014 as The Phoenix Year to good reviews and few sales (I think, the publisher never gave an accounting), it was during the pandemic shutdown that I decided it would be fun to revise the story and in this version, there were two unique versions of Trump. The original Trump sent to prison for killing his wife and daughter, and now a second version as the President of the United States during a global pandemic. During this period of economic collapse I finished the trilogy. Also during this period I spent a good amount of time trying to piece together what would be the impact of both the shutdown and his tariffs on the US and world economy.

With Trump's return as President and with his rather self destructive agenda of retribution on the economy through layoffs, judicial retribution (economies depend upon a firm belief in fairness and the rule of law), and the tariffs that he is using to go to war with the world, I don't think running more simulations on my global models is necessary. Economies work on trust and the American economy may stand at the center of the global trading system, but choosing autarky rather than globalization will be the downfall of Trump and if the Republicans cowering in the wings in Congress and the State Houses, of the Republican brand.

A recession in 2021 and 2022 and 2023 that the Wall Street economists and economic forecasters predicted (my own model hit the 2023 GDP growth of 2.2% in the 2021 baseline forecast) will finally arrive once retailers and companies choose to leave the clothing and shoes on the docks rather than pay the 100 % duty that Trump is applying to China and to other countries. If I were to write an economic thriller with a President choosing to destroy the prosperity of his nation for reasons of his own hubris and ignorance, I doubt I would find a publisher who would think that such a story was too far from reality to be saleable.