Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

This book makes a whole lot of common sense points but pushes them way past most people’s comfort zones to the point where you may find yourself squirming and looking away and muttering surely, surely people aren’t all like that?

One big common sense basic here is that if you depend on the support of a lot of people (i.e. their democratic vote) you will be trying to please all those very people, whereas if you depend on the support of a few people (army chiefs, ministry of the interior, police) you can cheerfully ignore the starving millions, because they just don’t matter. Another big not so common sense point they make is that all leaders, democratic or despotic, want to stay in power FOREVER :

So we started from this single point : the self-interested calculations and actions of rulers are the driving force of all politics.

Does this mean that every time a politician spouts about improving housing, education, health services, care for the elderly, all those nice baubles, this is always based on finely calculating how much of this soup they need to ladle down our throats in order to secure our votes? Don’t they believe even a tiny bit of it?



Well, it seems the authors think that one main difference between democracies and dictatorships is that democracies make it tougher to siphon off the nation’s cash into their own accounts, but you should bet they will all try their best anyhow, because that’s why they’re politicians.
Because it’s not that power corrupts, it’s that, as another reviewer said, corrupted people are irresistibly attracted to politics like buzzy bees to pollen bearing flowers. And what has more pollen than the State Bank?

TINY LITTLE BABIES

So the level of cynicism here is severe :

A leader who can afford to keep the people isolated, uneducated, and ignorant and chooses not to do so is a fool.

And:

It so happens that even in many autocracies with reportedly good healthcare systems, infant mortality is high. This may be because helping little children does not particularly help leaders survive in power.

What about where the dictator happens to be sloshing around in a sea of oil? His overseas bank accounts all runneth over. Won’t there be some left for the people and their little babies?

It is ironic that while oil revenues provide the resources to fix societal problems, they create political incentives to make them far worse.

This part is explained by two incidents I remember from English history – the Bad King John (a tyrant) went broke and had to ask for money from his barons, and they wouldn’t give him any until he signed the Magna Carta, that founding document of liberty. And fastforwarding to 1640, likewise the Bad King Charles (a tyrant) had to convene parliament (which he’d avoided for 11 years), again to ask for money; and one thing led to another and the parliament chopped his head off in 1649. If King John or King Charles had have discovered oil on his royal estate, none of that would have happened. Well, they wouldn’t have known what to do with the oil, but you get the idea.



So, the more you have to rely on taxation, the more you will be pushed towards democratizing your country. The less you have to rely on taxation – say, if you have free money bubbling out of the ground – the more the people can get stuffed.

POL POT WAS AN IDEALIST



The rules for dictators explained in this book seemed to me pretty straightforward, even kind of obvious, but when the authors claimed that they fit anyplace anytime I couldn’t but disagree. They perfectly fit dictators like Saddam Hussein, Emperor Bokassa I, Robert Mugabe, Francisco Macias Nguema, Samuel Doe, Ferdinand Marcos and Augusto Pinochet. These ones seem to have had no concept of improving their nation, they just wanted to settle on it like a vampire bat and make sure all the other littler vampire bats got enough blood to suck on. But other dictators had notions of entirely rewriting human society for the good, that is, for what they considered to be the good. And they tried their best to crush and squeeze society into some new lunatic utopia – Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong. I admit, these are the unusual ones.

NATURAL DISASTERS

The authors ask : Why are the effects of earthquakes so much worse in autocratic regimes? Simple – because the leaders steal all the funds that could otherwise spend on better infrastructure, building regulations, etc. They examine earthquake outcomes in Chile and Iran and the deaths from comparable earthquakes are way higher in Iran. But I was dubious – we may profoundly disagree with the ayatollahs of Iran but can we put them on the same kleptocratic footing as all the other rascals? The authors clearly do. Again, their cynicism is breathtaking.

COULD DO BETTER. SEE ME AFTER CLASS.

The authors veer from specific examples which are always welcome to tiresome abstractions which aren’t – they love sentences like this :

Our subject is how variations in the size of the group of essentials and interchangeables determines how resources are allocated between public and private rewards

I couldn’t love that. Aside from the stylistic infelicities and the level of repetition you tend to find in books of arguments like this, I do kind of recommend The Dictator’s Handbook as an act of provocation.

Is the world really like this ?





*Whereby the religious might pipe up to say yes, they are, this is what we mean by the fallen state of man – read our book, not this one!