1.) People lie to you, and most of the time, you will never know that they're lying to you.
2.) There are 5 qualities necessary to be a successful entrepreneur: intelligence, integrity, courage, wisdom, and the capacity to see beyond. When you start, you should have intelligence, integrity, and courage. Wisdom can only come from experience, but you should have the ability to acquire wisdom. Finally, entrepreneurs need the ability to "see beyond", and only time will tell if they truly have that ability.
3.) Precision of language is important.
4.) Safe and comfortable is more dangerous than painful and real.
5.) Making wise decisions is perhaps the hardest task that someone can take on, so difficult that people will try to concentrate the burden in one individual. It shouldn't be concentrated, though. For the community to thrive, everybody needs to bear the burden.
6.) To accomplish anything, you need passion. Don't try to suppress it with a pill.
7.) The way things are is not always the way things should be.
8.) Sometimes, the greatest weight is the knowledge of what others have done before you.
9.) Find people like you, and pass them your memories. They're often the only ones who will understand them.
10.) There's more than one way to interpret the ending.
All this in a book that is shorter than John Galt's speech.
I thought Atlas Shrugged was a good book, but it wasn't a great book. The ideas are very seductive, but then you start trying to apply them, find you're being a jackass, and then realize there are subtleties to life that Ayn Rand didn't understand. Atlas Shrugged had a lot about how you should live your life, but very little about why. That's why I think that The Giver - and much children's literature, in general - is better and more mature.
>All this in a book that is shorter than John Galt's speech.
This is what happens when you don't have editors.
I would like to add 1984 and Animal Farm. I think the time that Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead capitalism was already (or soon to become) the de facto economic system of the world. I think that it is a good book for the time it was written when communism was still popular in some parts of the world. 1984 and Animal Farm were true when George Orwell wrote them and they still are today and in the foreseeable future.
I don't think it is a good idea to choose a fictional book as the greatest book on economics. The book in its greatest potential can persuade people to follow or accept the ideas expressed in the book but it is a means to an end. The end is the actual theory.