The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
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https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
2. Corollary of #1: never take a client providing over 10% of your annual revenue, or table personal assets to grow
3. keep your legal positions clear: talk with contract, copyright and trademark lawyers early
4. keep your tax strategy clear: talk with regional corporate accountants, and customs brokers early
5. Prioritize revenue: without a profit-mode your project is not a business
6. Corollary of #5: provide _paying_ customers value they are happy with, or cull the project
7. Manage or be managed: you are running a business, and not a charity. There are several styles for doing this, and no way is perfect. Often hiring friends is a mistake, as when serious money starts to flow people often revert to their primordial rodent brains.
8. Marketing: your conversion rate is below 1.7% ? than adapt/cull the project…
9. low hanging fruit is usually rotten: if it is something some kids can _appear_ to copy to make a quick buck, than the market will quickly fragment. a.k.a. “chasing the long tail” of market distributions is financial suicide
10. admit you can’t know every scam, and accept as a business there are always losses. As a small entity you are vulnerable to all sorts of legal, technological, and personal attacks. Technical people often think being smart somehow immunizes them from cons some sociopaths mastered... it doesn’t... talk with people, and you will see this is a very common bias.
11. With shareholders one must acknowledge the structures of power: https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
12. post failed projects on your website as bait, so when the business-intelligence people show-up looking for soft-targets... they too can enjoy the losses... nothing more enjoyable than watching irrationally competitive opportunists go bankrupt pumping money into something you wisely abandoned. ;-)
I wouldn’t call my entities successful by “startup” standards, but they have remained profitable for over 14 years... and they are mine.
Of note is the required number of supporters can be quite low when you have a government supported by resource extraction.
[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Pol...
“and” is pulling a lot of weight in your sentence, given I’ve not made a claim about general human rights on this thread.
Also? “Common cause” is very different from “has a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding”, which I consider important in this context.
You might enjoy The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
The TL;DR is selectorate theory and popular policy is not the same thing as good policy.
Have a read through The dictators handbook sometime. While it's a cynical look at modern politics, it puts forward an interesting thesis as to why democracy leads to better outcomes overall.
Basically, all leaders want to stay in power as long as possible. In order to do this, they need to convince a majority of their selectorate (all those who have a say in who the leader is) that they're the best option for their interests. In a dictatorship this usually means paying off the army and police force. But in a democracy, the leader has to convince a majority of the populace that the opportunity cost of another leader is negative. Because it's practically impossible to convince everyone that things are great when they aren't, democracy therefore produces the best outcomes, even with a disinterested and uninformed populace
Take a look at this book: Dictator's Handbook
Or, in shorter form, Rule for Rulers.
The Chinese government's "essential coalition" to stay in power is very small, likely in the order of thousands (less than 0.01% of the population), whereas in democracies it's a bit bigger (25% - half the people don't vote). When you only need to appease such a small number of people to stay in power you end up granting them a lot of luxuries while doing your best to suppress the rest of the people that don't matter.
Eat this book https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845
I was a fan of The Dictators Handbook.
Kissinger's On China was also very good.
>Oil revenues constitute more than 98% of the government of South Sudan's budget according to the southern government's Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning
wiki
So I think you have it backwards!
They also have a lot of metals. So resources are available to theoretically sustain a 10 fold population.
According to prominent political theory(the dictators handbook), HIGH resources that can be extracted with dying slaves or just outright use foraigners to extract complicated resources like oil will lead to a higher chance of a dictator arrising due to a coup leading to policies that make the people poor, keep them stupid and unhealthy. Which in turn leads to the main survival tool of ppl beeing manual agreculture which needs a lot of ppl. All of this will then lead to high birth rates (and death rates).
> I think you're not understanding me because I'm not referring to campaigning. I'm referring to the actual policies that the presidents will be pushing.
No, I'm talking about both campaigning and platforms/policies.
> One example of this might be the California rail project recently that was canceled. Had the presidency been decided by popular vote then nobody in their right mind would cancel funding for that. They wouldn't have a choice but to give it more funding. Otherwise they would basically be throwing away the chance at reelection. This would be the case for all the big states and what they want.
Why, though? California has 10% of the US population, and it's not like any sizeable fraction of Californian voters are single-issue in favor of the high-speed rail. ...and if you pander to California visibly enough, you'll piss off the 90% of voters who aren't Californians.
As I understand it, your hypothesis is that in a world without the Electoral College, campaigns would pander exclusively to high-population states like CA and TX, ignoring all of the smaller population states, and their campaign platforms would reflect that.
...but in a world without the Electoral College, those states only have votes in proportion to their population. In the current world with the Electoral College, voting power is concentrated way beyond proportion of the population in the swing states -- FL, NC, PA, OH, MI, etc. The vote rests on a smaller proportion of the population, so you should see more pandering. (This is basically straight out of The Dictator's Handbook.)
So, we should be seeing vastly more pandering to specific states in this world with the Electoral College than we'd see in one without it.
...at least, that's how it looks to me. Could you help me understand why pandering would be more pronounced in a world where voting power is evenly distributed by population?
I recently read The Dictators Handbook
While it's a good book, I must say it has made me depressed and cynical. But it does explain a lot. If you have any interest in politics, give this one a chance.
CGP Grey made a youtube video about it, which you should watch.
I also read Fear: Trump in the White House. You know if you're interested in this one or not -- it's well written and an easy read. Go for it.
I'm also reading What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, by the XKCD guy. It's very funny and informative. I think I'm going to buy his other books after I finish this one.
> I'm left wondering why a mandatory political understanding class isn't thrown in there with it, or at least teach it in high schools or something.
Because an ideological view of politics would be useless, and a practical view of politics would be suicide to the career of the person who introduced it. Parents would be horrified.
Fortunately, we have the internet. In my personal opinion, here's a good quick video about how politics must work from CGP Grey. He starts with dictators, but addresses how it'd be in democracies as well. The ideas seem largely taken from The Dictator's Handbook, which again suggests that you can explain a lot about any political system by noticing that to stay in office, you have certain supporters that you must keep content- this applies to a dictator and it applies to an elected congressman. Hell, it applies to the leader of any organization of any sort.
https://www.amazon.ca/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Pol...
And a general +1 for GEB. If you read that as a teenager, you are different for it.
If governments and corporations haven't already started buying influence, I'd be shocked.
(1) https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
[https://toptalkedbooks.com/amzn/0143122010) (mostly for an overview of how systems of society drive behavior for better or worse)
[https://toptalkedbooks.com/amzn/1610391845)
[https://toptalkedbooks.com/amzn/0750916036) (mostly for the understanding on how economics developed into political power in the context of taxation to pay soldiers)
[https://toptalkedbooks.com/amzn/B007AIXLIS)
​
And given the context, probably Hobbes.
I think a model that takes a few variables into account could perform pretty well over time and space. Central in this model would be history of being occupied. Also important is harshness of environment encouraging cooperation. Another aspect would be whether or not a Dictator's Handbook scenario is in effect. Often this takes the form of a local leader allowing a foreign power to provide skilled labor and capital equipment to help the country extract resources. In this scenario, the local government's primary job is to use payoffs and/or threats to prevent the local population from interfering or demanding a cut.
Both direct occupation and DH quasi-occupation would create a conflict between the best interests of the citizenry and the best interest of its rulers. Any increase in power of the government could result in decreases of leverage of the population. In this scenario, paying taxes, cooperating with onerous regulations, and providing information to the government could be legitimately seen as a betrayal. This would explain Seoul's unusually high anti-social punishment rate (Japanese Occupation).
I would be very curious how 1760 Boston would have scored on this test. The Boston Tea Party sometimes confuses children because it is a stark example of authorities praising anti-social punishment. Also note Greece's 20th century hardships and Omman's precarious sovereignty given Iran and SA's machinations in the area.
From wikipedia on the ongoing Qatar diplomatic crisis:
> Trump's public support for Saudi Arabia emboldened the kingdom and sent a chill through other Gulf states, including Oman and Kuwait, that fear that any country that defies the Saudis or the United Arab Emirates could face ostracism as Qatar has.
I'll have to put it on my list. I would also recommend "The Dictator's Handbook " by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.
I would say that countries are really complex systems that cannot be simplified with a couple of variables into developed and underdeveloped.
I always thought that this oversimplification made sense but then I migrated from India to the US and realized that the United States is actually archaic in a lot of things that India is good at. A big example would be mobile payments and mobile internet in general - Even the poorest of Indians are comfortable using mobile wallets and more Indians have mobile wallets than they have credit cards. I think India sort of skipped the plastic money phase and went straight to mobile.
Planet Money has an excellent podcast on the topic of how and who determines the variables that make a country developed or underdeveloped - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/01/31/582233478/episode-821-the-other-davos Essentially it works just like how an inefficient, political system works - The powerful and well networked get to make the decision on what matters
Another thing to factor in is democracy and functioning of the government. There is and there never will be truly altruistic leaders. Every individual is essentially motivated by self interest. So lets a leader comes into power in a developing country, he will have a cohort of individuals whom he has to keep satisfied for him to stay in power longer. This cohort will consist of people who have the most resources in the country - Industrialists, people who own the media etc. The smaller the number of people he has to please, the better it is for him. If the country becomes developed, then there will be more people to keep satisfied and thus it becomes harder for the leader. So development is actually counter-intuitive for someone who wants to stay in power.
There are some interesting exceptions - Saudi Arabia, China etc. It would be really good if someone can explain the rationale of leaders in these countries and how they stay in power. It's difficult to rely on stats such as the Gini coefficient in these authoritarian countries - cause they may be manipulating it.
A really good book on this topic - https://toptalkedbooks.com/amzn/1610391845
There is a video that explains the book perfectly. Could not find it. sorry.
Deviating a bit to reply to one of the comments....
One of the comments here say that knowledge comes at the charity of developed countries - nothing could be further from the truth. Developed countries invest in developing countries purely for utilitarian purposes. China for rare earth minerals and manufacturing, Inda and Bangladesh for clothes etc. There is nothing wrong with this. Capitalism at work. I think one thing that badly affects developing countries is "Interventionism". That is rich people thinking they exactly know what a kid in Kenya needs. This has historically lead to more inequalities and even civil wars in Africa. If you really want to help someone, just give them a small loan, they will know what to do with it.