Campaigning in the World
of Atlas Shrugged
 

To describe that setting, I needed to work out the history of the intervening years, at least in outline. But that raised a larger question: what had been happening in the rest of the world? Even after economic and political collapse, the United States would still have been much wealthier than the rest of the world; would any of the various People's States have taken advantage of the collapse to loot the survivors? The answer to that demanded a more detailed picture of world political history before the events of Atlas Shrugged, and working out that history turned out to involve a different but equally important question: defining the technological aspects of Rand's fictional world.

The world of Atlas Shrugged looks like the world of the Cold War after the continued advance of communism. People's States are everywhere; only the United States pays lip service to private property. But technologically, the United States is more like the world of the 1930s. There are no atomic bombs and no computers. Aircraft have propellers rather than jets, and land transport is by rail, not by interstate highway. The crucial industries are steel and the railroads. And economically, the entire world is bitterly poor, except for the United States.

The most economical immediate explanation for all this was that the United States had not become involved in World War II. This accounted for the lack of technological spinoffs from the war. Without the wartime inflation, the aftereffects of the Great Depression could still be lingering on. And without American military forces, the war could have gone on until all combatants were exhausted, with ruined economies that would easily fall victim to Marxist revolution. In the present-day world, the American economy has about 25% of the world's output; immediately after World War II, the figure was closer to 50%; but in the world of Atlas Shrugged, it might be 75%.

At a deeper level, why didn't the combatant powers develop atomic weapons? Note that Rand portrays government-funded scientific research as ineffective; all the vast budget of the State Science Institute cannot duplicate to work of Hank Rearden's private metallurgy lab. It seems to be either a law of nature, or a stylization of reality, that rational minds cannot function under compulsion. So I was free to assume that the rest of the world lacked the technology and the industrial base for full-scale conquest.

The GURPS rules system includes a system of technical levels, or TLs, in which the post-World War II era is TL7, while stone age tribes are TL0. I decided that the residents of Galt's Gulch were at a variant TL7, which lacked computers and nuclear reactors but had Rearden Metal and Galt motors. Enclaves of civilization elsewhere were at TL6, roughly pre-World War II; blighted areas had fallen back to TL4, Renaissance / Colonial; and the barbaric People's States were generally at TL3, Medieval.
  

© 2001 William H. Stoddard