CGP Grey
15 HN recommenders · recommended in 19 months, 2016–2025
18:13 · 26M views · Oct 24, 2016
CGP Grey's animated adaptation of The Dictator's Handbook, explaining how rulers stay in power by keeping a small group of key supporters happy rather than ruling fairly. It lays out selectorate theory and how resources shape regimes.
HN treats it as the standard short summary of how power and political incentives work, applied to governments, companies and workplaces.
20 comments from Hacker News
Our government has no incentive to retain them. Their main source of money is not small / medium / innovative business taxation - it's oil and other natural resources. And you don't need higher education and talent to extract oil. Actually, you don't need any population at all. As I see it, their real incentive would be to shut down the higher education system, because it a) costs money, b) sends a good part of produced talent to other countries, and c) produces educated citizens which are harder to manipulate. Sadly, I hear quite a few confirmations of this from friends who work in education. BTW, here's a great video, Rules for Rulers, which is basically a video TL;DR of "The Dictator's Handbook" that explains incentives of democratic and autocratic rulers: this video
Negative? It's how the world works. Those in resource-driven countries enjoy very little comfort, because you don't need very comfortable/educated people to extract resources. Our economies are more based on knowledge, so we get better lives. CGPGrey's rules for rulers is a very good outline of this and other related topics: this video
An excellent primer on modes of Government, how they arise, and how this perpetuate is this CGP Grey video, Rules for Rulers : this video
I feel like this comment thread needs a link to CGP Grey's excellent Rules for Rulers video, too: this video
This article is an interesting case study in the difference between "monarchy" and "dictatorship". The way I think about it, the differences are as follows: * Under monarchy, one person is chosen to rule "at random". Under dictatorship, there is a competition where the most ruthless person gets to rule. * Under monarchy, the people believe the monarch rules by divine right. Under dictatorship, the dictator rules by fear. * Monarchies are more stable, meaning the ruler can plan with a long time horizon. Dictators are more likely to siphon resources while the siphoning is good, since they fear a coup. * Lacking popular legitimacy, a dictator is forced to consider the self-interest and loyalty of their underlings. This leads to extractive and regressive policy. See this excellent video explaining the game theory: this video * Under monarchy, criticism is kept in check while maintaining rule of law, via lèse-majesté laws which make it illegal to criticize the monarch. Under dictatorship, criticism is kept in check via repression. That same repression makes the dictator less popular, which triggers more criticism, and thus more repression, in a doom loop. Monarchy is an imperfect system. A lot comes down to the person who is "randomly" chosen to rule. But I do wonder if monarchy should be considered an option in countries where democracy has been consistently dysfunctional and the population is poorly educated -- Haiti perhaps? Most successful democracies were monarchies at some poin