Lets not blame Ayn Rand for the riots. Her magnum opus is Atlas Shrugged, a 1,068 page novel. The initial rioters aren’t scholars so it’s impossible they read Atlas. .. The inculcation of Magical Belief begins in infancy when key words are repeated endessly. Black people thereby learn to have an inner outrage against a system that is innocent of persecuting them yet they persist in the false belief that it can be changed by revolution. While the ‘right’ amount of ‘wrong’ beliefs can sometime achieve a socially efficient outcome it can also worsen the plight of people who protest agaisnt unchangable nature.
OTOH, study illustrates magical belief systems that are likely false are able to persist, even when they involve very high stakes, namely death. Across human societies, one sees many examples of deeply rooted and widely-held beliefs that are almost certainly untrue. Examples include beliefs about witchcraft, magic, ordeals, and superstitions. Why are such incorrect beliefs so prevalent and how do they persist? One study provides an explanation for their persistence based on cultural evolution. Within economics, they generally assume individuals are rational utility maximisers holding consistent beliefs that are updated through logical processes, like Bayes’ rule. It is possible that in many settings, like in the one studied here, false beliefs and a lack of rational updating result in better outcomes at the group level. We view the role of group-level selection and the importance it plays in determining which beliefs emerge as important avenues for future research within economics. HERE.
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