The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith is not for the faint of heart. Mesquita and Smith present a cynical and pessimistic framework that explains the terrible behavior of leaders in power. They argue that a leader’s primary purpose is to retain power by cleverly manipulating the political landscape. The “quality” of any actions a leader takes can be seen through this lense. This framework generalizes well across different power structures: from corporations to governments and autocracies to democracies.

Here’s a good summary video by CGP Grey. In short, the key characteristics to staying in power:

1. Keep your winning coalition as small as possible
2. Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible
3. Control the flow of revenue
4. Pay your key supporters just enough to keep them loyal
5. Don’t take money out of your supporter’s pockets to make the people’s lives better

With this foundation, Mesquita and Smith then examine several key facets of leadership: coming and staying in power, revenue management, public goods, corruption, foreign aid, and revolt management. This leads to rational explanations for otherwise counterintuitive cause-effect relations. The authors draw upon atrocious behavior by some of the world’s worst (or best) leaders, demonstrating the proper application of these principles. These examples are undeniably relevant and strongly illustrative. They are also constant, dense little packets of depressing human behavior. This subject matter, combined with the questionable organization of each chapter, makes the book a fascinating but difficult read.

Many of the themes are deep-dives into common sense arguments. These ideas are presented in a way that remind me heavily of “hyper-rational economists” or “pirates and gold brainteasers.” Are leadership dynamics in the real world so rational? I doubt that many real-world tyrants think so lucidly about the meta-game of staying in power. Yet, many of them correctly made brutish decisions that this framework shows as shrewd, even rational. Did these tyrants actually intuit the rules during their ascent to power or are they examples suspect of selection bias? Are tyrants inherently brutish thugs or do the rules of the power system force tyrannical behavior?