Going Galt

Reprising my earlier skepticism, here's the current Google Search Insights trends on objectivist libertarianism versus communism, with searches on "recession" given as a benchmark. Embedding these charts still not working right (why can't Blogger integrate with Google Insights for Search in Chrome? Where is John Galt?)

Blue gives total searches on any of ("Das Kapital", "Das Capital", "Communist Manifesto", Marxism, Communism, "Karl Marx", "Carl Marx").

Red gives total searches on any of ("Atlas Shrugged", Objectivism, "Ayn Rand", "Ann Rand", "The Fountainhead", "Virtue of Selfishness", "John Galt", "Going Galt"). The last term added just for Alex.

Yellow gives searches on "recession" as a scaling term. Note that I didn't put in "depression" because then I have to figure out all of the keywords to exclude to knock out searches on psychiatric disorders.

A slight up-blip around February of this year. Top ten countries for the Objectivist searches? USA, India, Canada, Phillipines, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, New Zealand, Sweden, Australia. In none of those ten countries are the Objectivist search terms more popular than the Communist ones, though this surely is affected by the number of schools requiring reports on communism (huge seasonality in the Communist searches that corresponds to Northern Hemisphere school year, no such seasonality in Objectivist searches.)

Of course, we wouldn't expect a true "Going Galt" moment to be evidenced by lots of Google Searches on objectivism. Rather, we'd see lots of Google searches on things like "Where did Sergey Brin disappear to?" "Going Galt" was always meant to be something for the top 0.1% anyway: Eddie Willers isn't invited. But continued evidence against a mass surge of interest in Objectivism.