Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…What's going on there? A smart guy who's read all this literature, all these different things, never even questions Marxism. What do you think? I think the culture he came out of had a lot of dogmatism to begin with. I mean both Leninism, which is extremely dogmatic—Lenin was his mentor. Like Patrick's thing about the Nobel laureates, it happens in insidious ways, too. So, Lenin is the mentor of Stalin. Soviet culture, communist culture, and then Georgian culture, which, appealing and fun-loving and wine-drinking and dance-heavy as it is, there's something about it that's a little, you know, you pound the fist down and you tell people over the table how things are. He had all those stacked vertically. Then we got this bad genetic luck of the draw on Stalin, and it turned out obviously pretty terrible. And if you buy Hayek's explanation that the reason he rose to the top is just because the most atrocious people win in autocracies, what is that missing?…

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