Auden might have changed his mind about poetry making nothing happen had he read this. The "bad writing" refers to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Adam Weiner, and there's a fair share of bad writing in his book, maintains that her novel did make something happen: the 2008 global financial crisis. He reaches back to 19th-century Russian literature (Rand was Russian-born) and the popular 1863 novel What is to be Done?, whose sanctioning of greed and egoism Rand replicated a century later. It's nothing new to say the zealots of economic rationalism read Rand, but Weiner says that, in the case of the influential Alan Greenspan (a Rand disciple), she more or less programmed him and set him loose on the world, a key figure in creating modern, market capitalism with its "greed is good" slogans and unregulated egos.