The Dictator's Handbook

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

Nobody rules alone. In order to rule you need to reward your supporters. Everyone who wastes money is likely to be replaced by those who don't. The more concentrated your supporting groups are, the more power is given to them.

🎨 Impressions

A bit of a sobering read, where the hunger for power sweeps away the good intentions displayed by people. There is some encouraging reading as well on how we can design good systems. One interesting effect is that the authors argue that foreign aid is just increasing the likelihood that dictators will stay in power. In order for dictators to lose power, they need to lose the money/go broke.

Rules for Rulers on YouTube by CGPGray is an interesting quick talk related to this book.

This book is interesting in that it looks at political science from almost a first principles type of thinking, which is quite different from a lot of other perspectives.

More able to understand the dynamics of power and use political science's first principles to create mental models of the political spectrum was definetly something that affected me when I read this book. I think that being more in line with what drives the power structures is quite interesting.

To be fair, it is a bit of a cynical book and do not take it too literary. It does not account for the irrationality of people, and it might be a useful and interesting book that gives a lot of the underlying principles it will never be good at predicting unique cases.

A good book to also consider is the Seeing Like a State which deals more with some of the technical problem of state systems.

✍️ My Top Quotes

Third, when the small group of cronies knows that there is a large pool of people waiting on the sidelines, hoping to replace them in the queue for gorging at the public trough, then the top leadership has great discretion over how revenue is spent and how much to tax.
L’etat, c’est moi: the state, it is me.
A simple way to think of these groups is: interchangeables, influentials, and essentials. In the United States, the voters are the nominal selectorate—interchangeables. As for the real selectorate—influentials—the electors of the electoral college really choose the president (just like the party faithful picked their general secretary back in the USSR). Still, the electors nowadays are normatively bound to vote the way their state’s voters voted, so they don’t really have much independent clout in practice. In the United States, the nominal selectorate and real selectorate are, therefore, pretty closely aligned. This is why, even though you’re only one among many voters, interchangeable with others, you still feel like your vote is influential—that it counts and is counted. The winning coalition—essentials—in the United States is the smallest bunch of voters, properly distributed among the states, whose support for a candidate translates into a win
Rule 1: Keep your winning coalition as small as possible.
Rule 2: Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible.
Rule 3: Control the flow of revenue.
Rule 4: Pay your key supporters just enough to keep them loyal.
Rule 5: Don’t take money out of your supporter’s pockets to make the people’s lives better.
First, taxes diminish how hard people work. Second, some of the tax burden inevitably will fall upon the essential backers of the leader. (In general, the first constraint limits taxes in autocracies and the second constraint sets the boundary on taxes in democracies.) The third consideration is that tax collection requires both expertise and resources. The costs associated with collecting taxes limit what leaders can extract and shapes the choice of taxation methods.
But people who argue for debt forgiveness construct their arguments in terms of how they think the world should operate, rather than how it actually works.
Financial crises are one of the important reasons leaders are compelled to democratize.
Oxford is a breeding ground for authoritarians. It certainly is the alma mater of many, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, the Bhutto family of Pakistan, kings of Jordan, Bhutan, Malaysia, and even little Tonga.
In 1957, not long before Batista was overthrown by Castro’s revolution, Cuba’s infant mortality rate was 32 per 1,000 live births. This was the thirteenth best in the world at the time. To put this impressive record in perspective, Cuba was outperforming Austria, Belgium, France, Israel, Japan, Spain, Portugal, and West Germany. Today, all of these countries outrank Castro’s Cuba in infant mortality rates. Yet, until the demise of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s economic growth rate was one of the highest in Latin America and its high abortion rate—which terminates difficult, at-risk pregnancies—is 58.6 per 100, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Though private rewards can be provided directly out of the government’s treasury, the easiest way to compensate the police for their loyalty—including their willingness to oppress their fellow citizens—is to give them free rein to be corrupt. Pay them so little that they can’t help but realize it is not only acceptable but necessary for them to be corrupt. Then they will be doubly beholden to the regime: first, they will be grateful for the wealth the regime lets them accumulate; second, they will understand that if they waver in loyalty, they are at risk of losing their privileges and being prosecuted.
Indeed, the word kleptocrat, meaning rule by theft, was coined to describe Mobutu’s style of governance.
Mr. Suharto, referred to by The Economist magazine as the king of kleptocrats, is alleged by Transparency International to have stolen up to $35 billion from his country. His late wife, Madame Tien, was often known as “Madame Tien percent.”
The truth is, foreign aid deals have a logic of their own. Aid is decidedly not given primarily to alleviate poverty or misery; it is given to make the constituents in donor states better off. Aid’s
The truth is, foreign aid deals have a logic of their own. Aid is decidedly not given primarily to alleviate poverty or misery; it is given to make the constituents in donor states better off.
“Aid offers an easy way out for Egypt to avoid reform.”
Half of the Cambodian government’s budget is made up of foreign aid. Rather than supplementing government programs, these donor funds are largely directed toward the bank accounts of government officials.
In a telling 2005 account of how unhappy the people are, a journalist for the Economist magazine recalls how they were continually asking him how the United States could be prevailed upon to invade: “the prospect of a foreign invasion is a fond hope, not a fear.”
Georges Clemençeau, leader of France during the later stages of World War I famously declared, “war is too important to be left to the generals.”
A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason. —J. P. MORGAN