The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith
从管理一家公司、领导一个社会组织，到操纵一台政治机器，获得并保持权力的三个纬度、五个法则
引 言 统治的规则
政治核心：获得并保持权力
确保政治生存的最好方式是只依靠少数人来上位和在位。
最高统治阶层可以拥有如何花钱和如何征税的自由裁量权
第一章 政治的法则 Chapter 1 - The Rules of Politics
Three Political Dimensions
the nominal selectorate, the real selectorate, and the winning coalition
interchangeable, influential, and essential groups
Virtues of 3 - D Politics
Governments do not differ in kind. They differ along the dimensions of their selectorates and winning coalitions.
Change the Size of Dimensions and Change the World
Any leader worth her salt wants as much power as she can get, and to keep it for as long as possible. Managing the interchangeables, influentials, and essentials to that end is the act, art, and science of governing.
Rules Ruling Rulers
The answer, for any savvy politician, depends on how many people the leader needs to keep loyal—that is, the number of essentials in the coalition.
Taxing
As a result, heads of governments reliant on a large coalition tend not to be among the world’s best paid executives.
This means that the next step in explaining the calculus of politics is to figure out how much a leader can keep and how much must be spent on the coalition and on the public if the incumbent is to stay in power.
Shuffling the Essential Deck
Rule 1: Keep your winning coalition as small as possible. A small coalition allows a leader to rely on very few people to stay in power. Fewer essentials equals more control and contributes to more discretion over expenditures. Bravo for Kim Jong Il of North Korea. He is a contemporary master at ensuring dependence on a small coalition.
Rule 2: Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible. Maintain a large selectorate of interchangeables and you can easily replace any troublemakers in your coalition, influentials and essentials alike. After all, a large selectorate permits a big supply of substitute supporters to put theessentials on notice that they should be loyal and well behaved or else face being replaced. Bravo to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin for introducing universal adult suffrage in Russia’s old rigged election system. Lenin mastered the art of creating a vast supply of interchangeables.
Rule 3: Control the flow of revenue. It’s always better for a ruler to determine who eats than it is to have a larger pie from which the people can feed themselves. The most effective cash flow for leaders is one that makes lots of people poor and redistributes money to keep select people—their supporters—wealthy. Bravo to Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari, estimated to be worth up to $4 billion even as he governs a country near the world’s bottom in per capita income.
Rule 4: Pay your key supporters just enough to keep them loyal. Remember, your backers would rather be you than be dependent on you. Your big advantage over them is that you know where the money is and they don’t. Give your coalition just enough so that they don’t shop around for someone to replace you and not a penny more. Bravo to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe who, whenever facing a threat of a military coup, manages finally to pay his army, keeping their loyalty against all odds.
Rule 5: Don’t take money out of your supporter’s pockets to make the people’s lives better. The flip side of rule 4 is not to be too cheap toward your coalition of supporters. If you’re good to the people at the expense of your coalition, it won’t be long until your “friends” will be gunning for you. Effective policy for the masses doesn’t necessarily produce loyalty among essentials, and it’s darn expensive to boot. Hungry people are not likely to have the energy to overthrow you, so don’t worry about them. Disappointed coalition members, in contrast, can defect, leaving you in deep trouble. Bravo to Senior General Than Shwe of Myanmar, who made sure following the 2008 Nargis cyclone that food relief was controlled and sold on the black market by his military supporters rather than letting aid go to the people—at least 138,000 and maybe as many as 500,000 of whom died in the disaster.
Do the Rules Work in Democracies?
Why, for example, does Congress gerrymander districts? Precisely because of Rule 1: Keep the coalition as small as possible.
Why do some political parties favor immigration? Rule 2: Expand the set of interchangeables.
Why are there so many battles over the tax code? Rule 3: Take control of the sources of revenue.
Why do Democrats spend so much of that tax money on welfare and social programs? Or why on earth do we have earmarks? Rule 4: Reward your essentials at all costs.
Why do Republicans wish the top tax rate were lower, and have so many problems with the idea of national health care? Rule 5: Don’t rob your supporters to give to your opposition.
路易十四财政破产：无法用必要的资源继续收买核心支持者，不在于必须削减公共开支。只要支持他更加有利可图，那就会继续获得必要的忠诚！
The lessons from both extremes apply—whether you’re talking about Saddam Hussein or George Washington. After all, the old saw still holds true—politicians are all the same.
第二章 上台 Chapter 2 - Coming to Power
Damn the idea of good governance and don’t elevate the concerns of the people over your own and those of your supporters: That’s a good mantra for would-be dictators. In such a way any John Doe—even a Samuel Doe—can seize power, and even keep it.
Paths to Power with Few Essentials
To come to power a challenger need only do three things. First, he must remove the incumbent. Second, he needs to seize the apparatus of government. Third, he needs to form a coalition of supporters sufficient to sustain him as the new incumbent. Each of these actions involves its own unique challenges. The relative ease with which they can be accomplished differs between democracies and autocracies.
That is, the general rule of thumb for rebellion is that revolutions occur when those who preserve the current system are sufficiently dissatisfied with their rewards that they are willing to look for someone new to take care of them. On the other hand, revolts are defeated through suppression of the people—always an unpleasant task—so coalition members need to receive enough benefits from their leader that they are willing to do horribly distasteful things to ensure that the existing system is maintained. If they do not get enough goodies under the current system, then they will not stop the people from rising up against the regime.
Speed Is Essential
Once the old leader is gone, it is essential to seize the instruments of power, such as the treasury, as quickly as possible. This is particularly important in small coalition systems. Anyone who waits will be a loser in the competition for power.
This is why it is absolutely essential to seize the reins of power quickly to make sure that your group gets to control the instruments of the state, and not someone else’s.
Pay to Play
Paying supporters, not good governance or representing the general will, is the essence of ruling. Buying loyalty is particularly difficult when a leader first comes to power. When deciding whether to support a new leader, prudent backers must not only think about how much their leader gives them today. They must also ponder what they can expect to receive in the future.
Allaying supporters’ fears of being abandoned is a key element of coming to power. Of course, supporters are not so naïve that they will be convinced by political promises that their position in the coalition is secure. But such political promises are much better than tipping your hand as to your true plans. Once word gets out that supporters are going to be replaced, they will turn on their patron.
Leaders understand the conditions that can cost them their heads. That is why they do their level best to pay essential cronies enough that these partners really want to stay loyal. This makes it tough for someone new to come to power.
Mortality: The Best Opportunity for Power
Impending death often induces political death. The sad truth is that if you want to come to power in an autocracy you are better off stealing medicalrecords than you are devising fixes for your nation’s ills.
Inheritance and the Problem of Relatives
Once an incumbent is dead, there is still the issue of fending off competitors for the dead leader’s job. Ambitious challengers still need to grab control of the state apparatus, reward supporters, and eliminate rivals.
In practice this meant grabbing the treasury and paying off the army.
Would-be autocrats must be prepared to kill all comers—even members of the immediate family.
If you are a prince and you want to be king, then you should do nothing to dissuade your father’s supporters of their chances of being important to you too. They will curry favor with you. You should let them. You will need them to secure a smooth transition. If you want them gone (and you may not), then banish them from court later. But the first time they need to know your true feelings for them is when you banish them from court, well after your investiture and not a minute before.
Papal Bull - ying for Power
But remember, what constitutes doing the right thing must be understood from the perspective of a potential supporter; it may have nothing to do with what is best for a community or nation. Anyone who thinks leaders do what they ought to do—that is, do what is best for their nation of subjects—ought to become an academic rather than enter political life. In politics, coming to power is never about doing the right thing. It is always about doing what is expedient.
Seizing Power from the Bankrupt
As it turns out, one thing that is always expedient is remaining solvent. If a ruler has run out of money with which to pay his supporters, it becomes far easier for someone else to make coalition members an attractive offer. Financial crises are an opportune time to strike.
His mistake was operating a democratic government, which necessitated a large coalition, and implementing an unpopular policy—continuing the czar’s war—thereby alienating his coalition right from the start. Lenin and the Bolsheviks made no such mistakes.
Successful leaders must learn the lesson of these examples and put raising revenue and paying supporters above all else
Silence Is Golden
We all grew up hearing the lesson that silence is golden. As it turns out, violating that basic principle is yet another path by which incumbents can succumb to their political rivals.
The incumbent’s advantage in offering rewards disappears as soon as coalition members come to suspect their long run access to personal benefits will end. An incumbent’s failure to reassure his coalition that he will continue to take care of them provides competitors with a golden opportunity to seize power.
Silence, as Ben Bella learned far too late, truly is golden. There is never a point in showing your hand before you have to; that is just a way to ensure giving the game away.
Institutional Change
There is a common adage that politicians don’t change the rules that brought them to power. This is false. They are ever ready and eager to reduce coalition size. What politicians seek to avoid are any institutional changes that increase the number of people to whom they are beholden. Yet much as they try to avoid them, circumstances do arise when institutions must become more inclusive. This can make autocrats vulnerable because the coalition they have established and the rewards they provide are then no longer sufficient to maintain power.
叶利钦要削减官僚特权，官僚担心丧失特权会反对改革。改革要确保政权稳固，不可贪功冒进。
Yeltsin was, as it turned out, much better at working out how to come to power than he was at governing well, but that is a tale for another time.
Coming to Power in Democracy
Challengers succeed when they offer better rewards than the government. Given that there are so many who need rewarding, this means coming up with better or at least more popular public policies. Unfortunately, because it is easy to erode the support of the incumbent’s coalition, it remains difficult for the challenger to pay off her own supporters.
Democratic Inheritance
Of course, dynastic rule is more common outside of democracy. Even if you don’t have the good fortune to be born into a political dynasty, you can come to power in a democracy if you have good, or at least popular, ideas. Good ideas that help the people are rarely the path to power in a dictatorship.
Democracy Is an Arms Race for Good Ideas
But past deeds don’t buy loyalty. When a rival appears with a cheaper way to fix the environment, or the rival finds policy fixes for other problems that people care about more, then the rival can seize power through the ballot box. Autocratic politics is a battle for private rewards. Democratic politics is a battle for good policy ideas. If you reward your cronies at the expense of the broader public, as you would in a dictatorship, then you will be out on your ear so long as you rely on a massive coalition of essential backers.
Coalition Dynamics
Divide and conquer is a terrific principle for coming to power in a democracy—and one of the greatest practitioners of this strategy was Abraham Lincoln, who propelled himself to the US presidency by splitting the support for the Democratic Party in 1860.
In democracies, politics is an arms race of ideas. Just as the democrat has to be responsive to the people when governing, when seeking office it helps to propose policies that the voters like and it pays to want to do more (as opposed to less)—even if the economic consequences are damaging down the road (when you’re no longer in office). Satisfy the coalition in the short run. When democratic politicians lament “mortgaging our children’s future,” they’re really regretting that it was not them who came up with the popular policy that voters actually want.
A Last Word on Coming to Power: The Ultimate Fate of Sergeant Doe
Although dressed up in many forms, successful challengers follow basic principles. They offer greater expected rewards to the essential supporters of the current leader than those essentials currently receive. Unfortunately for the challenger, the incumbent has a significant advantage because the members of the established winning coalition can be confident that their leader will keep on lining their pockets or providing the public policies they want. But if the incumbent is known to be dying, takes too much for himself, chooses the wrong policies, or is seen to have only weak loyalty from his critical backers, then the door swings wide open for a challenger to step in and depose the incumbent.
To achieve power means recognizing the moment of opportunity, moving fast, and moving decisively to seize the day. And, for good measure, coming to power also means seizing any opponents, figuratively in democracies, and physically in dictatorships. Coming to power is not for the faint of heart.
Politics, however, does not end with becoming a leader. Even as you take up the reins of power and enjoy its rewards, others are gunning for you. They want the same job that you so desperately sought! Politics is a risky business. As we will see, successful leaders manage these risks by locking in a loyal coalition. Those who fail at this first task open the door for someone else to overthrow them.
第三章 掌权 Chapter 3 - Staying in Power
What, then, must a newly minted leader do to keep his (or her) head? A good starting place is to shore up the coalition of supporters.
A prudent new incumbent will act swiftly to get some of them out of the way and bring in others whose interests more strongly assure their future loyalty. Only after sacking, shuffling, and shrinking their particular set of essentials can a leader’s future tenure be assured.
Governance in Pursuit of Heads
This is the essential lesson of politics: in the end ruling is the objective, not ruling well.
The Perils of Meritocracy
The three most important characteristics of a coalition are: (1) Loyalty; (2) Loyalty; (3) Loyalty. Successful leaders surround themselves with trusted friends and family, and rid themselves of any ambitious supporters.
Keep Essentials Off-Balance
The essence of keeping coalition members off-balance is to make sure that their loyalty is paid for and that they know they will be ousted if their reliability is in doubt.
Democrats Aren’t Angels
Leaders never hesitate to miscount or destroy ballots. Coming to office and staying in office are the most important things in politics. And candidates who aren’t willing to cheat are typically beaten by those who are.Since democracies typically work out myriad ways to make cheating difficult, politicians in power in democracies have innovated any number of perfectly legal means to ensure their electoral victories and their continued rule.
One counterintuitive strategy is for leaders to encourage additional competitors.
Bloc Voting集团投票
The raja understood that he could manipulate his bloc of backers to make and break governments and, in doing so, he could enrich himself a lot and help his followers a little bit in turn.
By rewarding supportive groups over others, individual voters are motivated to follow the choice of their group leader,
Of course, leaders can use sticks as well as carrots.Lee Kuan Yew ruled Singapore from 1959 until 1990, making him, we believe, the longest serving prime minister anywhere. His party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), dominated elections and that dominance was reinforced by the allocation of public housing, upon which most people in Singapore rely. Neighborhoods that fail to deliver PAP votes come election time found the provision and maintenance of housing cut off.
Leader Survival
Building a small coalition is key to survival. The smaller the number of people to whom a leader is beholden the easier it is for her to persist in office. Autocrats and democrats alike try to cull supporters. It remains very difficult to measure the size of coalitions precisely.
Staying in power right after having come to power is tough, but a successful leader will seize power, then reshuffle the coalition that brought him there to redouble his strength. A smart leader sacks some early backers, replacing them with more reliable and cheaper supporters. But no matter how much he packs the coalition with his friends and supporters, they will not remain loyal unless he rewards them.
第四章 窃贫济富 Chapter 4 - Steal from the Poor, Give to the Rich
贫富交换，换得支持，轻赏重罚，参考商鞅韩非
“Knowing where the money is” is particularly important in autocracies—and particularly difficult. Such systems are shrouded in secrecy. Supporters must be paid but there are no accurate accounts detailing stocks and flows of wealth. Of course, this lack of transparency is by design. 1 Thus does chaotic bookkeeping become a kind of insurance policy: it becomes vastly more difficult for a rival to promise to pay supporters if he cannot match existing bribes, or, for that matter, put his hands on the money. Indeed, secrecy not only provides insurance against rivals, it also keeps supporters in the dark about what other supporters are getting.
Secrecy ensures that everyone gets the deal they can negotiate, not knowing how much it might cost to replace them. Thus every supporter’s price is kept as low as possible, and woe to any supporter who is discovered trying to coordinate with his fellow coalition members to raise their price.
Little surprise, then, that we so often see looting, confiscations, extraction, and fire sales during political transitions, or conversely, and perhaps ironically, temporary liberal reforms by would-be dictators who are mindful that it is easier for a public goods–producing democrat than an autocrat to survive the first months in office.
Because democracies have well-organized and relatively transparent treasuries, their flow of funds is left undisturbed by leader turnover. There are two reasons for this transparency. First, as we are about to explore, democratic leaders best promote their survival through policies of open government. Second, a larger proportion of revenue in democracies than in autocracies tends to be from the taxation of people at work. Such taxes need to be levied in a clear and transparent way, because just as surely as leaders need money, their constituents want to avoid taxes
Taxation
Somewhere between these extremes there is an ideal tax rate that produces the most revenue the state can get from taxation. What that ideal rate is depends on the precise size of the winning coalition.
However, crucially, in democracies it is the coalition’s willingness to bear taxes that is the true constraint on the tax level.
Democrats tax heavily too and for the same reason as autocrats: they provide subsidies to groups that favor them at the polls at the expense of those who oppose them.
While all leaders want to generate revenue with which to reward supporters, democratic incumbents are constrained to keep taxes relatively low. A democrat taxes above the good governance minimum, but he does not raise taxes to the autocrat’s revenue maximization point.
In autocracies, it is unwise to be rich unless it is the government that made you rich. And if this is the case, it is important to be loyal beyond all else.
Tax Collectors
As for all the rules and exceptions that make the US tax code so complicated, these inevitably result from politicians doing what politicians inevitably do: rewarding their supporters at the expense of everybody else.
The first rule of office holding is to minimize the number of people whose support you need. To avoid becoming a slave of their own tax collectors, autocrats often use indirect taxation instead. With indirect taxes, the cost of the tax is passed on to someone other than the person actually paying it.
Privatized Tax Collection
Autocrats can avoid the technical difficulties of gathering and redistributing wealth by authorizing their supporters to reward themselves directly. For many leaders, corruption is not something bad that needs to be eliminated. Rather it is an essential political tool. Leaders implicitly or sometimes even explicitly condone corruption. Effectively they license the right to extract bribes from the citizens.
Extraction
The resource curse enables autocrats to massively reward their supporters and accumulate enormous wealth.
This effect is much less pernicious in democracies. The trouble is that once a state profits from mineral wealth, it is unlikely to democratize. The easiest way to incentivize the leader to liberalize policy is to force him to rely on tax revenue to generate funds. Once this happens, the incumbent can no longer suppress the population because the people won’t work if he does.
Effective taxation requires that the people are motivated to work, but people cannot produce as effectively if they are forbidden such freedoms as freedom to assemble with their fellow workers and free speech—with which to think about, among other things, how to make the workplace perform more effectively, and how to make government regulations less of a burden on the workers.
Borrowing
分摊成本，转移压力
A leader should borrow as much as the coalition will endorse and markets will provide. There is surely a challenger out there who will borrow this much and, in doing so, use the money to grab power away from the incumbent. So not borrowing jeopardizes a leader’s hold on power. Heavy borrowing is a feature of small coalition settings.
In an autocracy, the small size of the coalition means that leaders are virtually always willing to take on more debt. The only effective limit on how much autocrats borrow is how much people are willing to lend them.
Markets limit how much a nation can borrow. If individuals borrow too much and either cannot or will not repay it, then banks and other creditors can seize assets to recover the debt.
Nevertheless, this has a profound effect, as the ability to engage in borrowing in financial markets is valuable. For this reason nations generally pay their debt.
As in the Nigerian case, the discovery of exploitable natural resources provides one means to increase debt service and hence more borrowing. However, without such discoveries, the only way to increase borrowing is to increase tax revenue. For autocratic leaders this means liberalizing their policies to encourage people to work harder because they already tax at a high (implicit) rate. Only when facing financial problems are leaders willing to even consider undertaking such politically risky liberalization. They don’t do it frequently or happily. They liberalize, opening the door to a more democratic, representative and accountable government only when they have no other path to save themselves from being deposed today.
Debt Forgiveness
债务减免无效甚至有害
Even though debt-reduction programs vet candidates, these examples suggest that in many cases for-giveness without institutional reform simply allows leaders to start borrowing again.
That is, we turn for the moment to thinking about how we can use the logic of dictatorial rule to give autocrats the right incentives to change their government for the better. We wonder, can we create a desire by at least some autocrats to govern for the people as the best way to ensure their own political survival?
We know that debt relief allows autocrats to entrench themselves in office. Debt forgiveness with the promise of subsequent democratization never works. An autocrat might be sincere in his willingness to have meaningful elections in return for funds. Yet once the financial crisis is over and the leader can borrow to pay off the coalition, any promised election will be a sham. For democrats, debt relief, while helpful, is unnecessary. By eliminating debt relief for autocrats we can help precipitate the sorts of rebellions seen in the Middle East in 2011, rebellions that, as discussed later, may very well open the door to better governments in the future.
Taxation, resource extraction, and borrowing are the foremost ways of acquiring funds for enriching a coalition.
Leaders tax because they need to spend on their coalition. Successful leaders raise as much revenue as they can.
Having filled government coffers, leaders spend resources in three ways. First they provide public goods. That is, policies that benefit all. Second, they deliver private rewards to their coalition members.
第五章 获取与花费 Chapter 5 - Getting and Spending
Any new incumbent who wants to be around for a long time needs to fine-tune the art of spending money. Of course, he can err on the side of generosity to the coalition or to the people—but only with any money that is left for his own discretionary use after taking care of the coalition’s needs. He had better not err on the side of shortchanging anyone who could mount a coup or a revolution.
Effective Policy Need Not Be Civic Minded
It is true, as Hobbes’s believed, that happy, well-cared-for people are unlikely to revolt. China’s prolonged economic growth seems to have verified that belief (at least for now). Keep them fat and happy and the masses are unlikely to rise up against you. It seems equally true, however, that sick, starving, ignorant people are also unlikely to revolt.
It is the great in-between; those who are neither immiserated nor coddled. The former are too weak and cowered to revolt. The latter are content and have no reason to revolt. Truly it is the great in- between who are a threat to the stability of a regime and its leaders. Therefore, a prudent leader balances resources between keeping the coalition content and the people just fit enough to produce the wealth needed to enrich the essentials and the incumbent.
Leaders who depend on a large coalition have to work hard to make sure that their citizens’ lives are not solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short. That doesn’t mean democratic rulers have to be civic minded, nor would they need to harbor warm and cuddly feelings for their citizens. All they need is to ensure that there are ample public benefits to provide a high quality of life. They just need to follow the rules by which successful leaders rule, adapting them to the difficult circumstances that any democrat faces: being stuck with dependence on an unruly crowd of essentials to keep them in power.
The most reliable means to a good life for ordinary people remains the presence of institutional incentives in the form of dependence on a big coalition that compels power-seeking politicians to govern for the people. Democracy, especially with little or no organized bloc voting, aligns incentives such that politicians can best serve their own self-interest, especially their interest in staying in office, by promoting the welfare of a large proportion of the people. That, we believe, is why most democracies are prosperous, stable, and secure places to live.
They resist the cry of people like us who demand improved governance before any bailout money is offered up to rescue a troubled autocratic economy.
Bailouts and Coalition Size
Therefore, financial crises and the need for a bailout are just about always bad news for democrats.
Is Democracy a Luxury?
Yes, the world has produced wise, well-intentioned leaders even among those who depend on few essentials, but it neither produces a lot of them nor does it ensure that they have good ideas about how to make life better for others. Indeed, a common refrain among small-coalition rulers is that the very freedoms, like free speech, free press, and especially freedom of assembly, that promote welfare-improving government policies are luxuries to be doled out only after prosperity is achieved and not before. This seems to be the self-serving claim of leaders who keep their people poor and oppressed.
No doubt it is good to be rich, and many of the world’s rich countries are democratic. But dependence on a large coalition of essentials is a powerful explanation of quality of life even when wealth is absent, just as it seems to be a harbinger of future wealth.
Public Goods Not for the Public’s Good
初级教育确保劳动力素质不至于太低
Highly educated people are a potential threat to autocrats, and so autocrats make sure to limit educational opportunity.
Math and science are great subjects for study in China; sociology and political science are the subjects of democracies.
Who Doesn’t Love a Cute Baby?
婴儿死亡率
Clean Drinking Water
Building Infrastructure
As we’ve demonstrated, even a nasty dictator provides the people with basic education and essential health care so that they can work at making the autocrat rich.
Shoddy infrastructure is often an intentionally designed feature of many countries, not a misfortune suffered unwillingly.
Public Goods for the Public Good
It is surely no coincidence that all but one (Singapore) of the twenty-five countries in the contemporary world with the highest per capita incomes are liberal democracies; that is, societies that enjoy rule of law, with transparent and accountable government, a free press, and freedom of assembly. These are places that foster rather than suppress or obstruct political competition. They foster such competition not out of civicmindedness but rather out of the necessity of assembling a large coalition of supporters.
And being dependent on many essentials, all of these regimes share in common the provision of the cheap and yet hugely valuable public good called freedom.
Earthquakes and Governance
When there are lots of essential supporters, rescue is swift and repair is quick and effective. If it isn’t as swift and effective as people expect—and in large-coalition systems they expect it to be remarkably swift and effective— then political heads role.
第六章 腐败使人有权 绝对的腐败绝对使人有权 Chapter 6 - If Corruption Empowers, Then Absolute Corruption Empowers Absolutely
用贪官反贪官
Power and Corruption
Private Goods in Democracies
Private Goods in Small Coalition Settings
Wall Street: Small Coalitions at Work
Dealing with Good Deed Doers
Cautionary Tales: Never Take the Coalition for Granted
Whistle-blowing is not the only way to get in trouble. Leaders can put themselves at dire risk if they take their coalition’s loyalty for granted. The rules governing rulers teach us that leaders should never underpay their coalition whether they do so to reward themselves or the common people. Those who want to enrich themselves must do so out of discretionary funds, not coalition money. Those who want to make the people’s lives better likewise should only do so with money out of their own pockets and not at the expense of the coalition. Leaders sometimes miscalculate what is needed to keep the coalition happy. When they make this mistake it costs them their leadership role and, very often, their life.
Caesar made the mistake of trying to help the people by using a portion of the coalition’s share of rewards. It is fine for leaders to enrich the people’s lives, but it has to come out of the leader’s pocket, not the coalition’s. The stories of Caesar and Castellano remind us that too many good deeds or too much greed are equally punished if the coalition loses out as a result.
Discretionary Money
Discretion means leaders have choices. So far we have looked at leaders who use their discretion to enrich themselves but we do not mean to suggestthat people in power must be greedy louts like Marcos, Mobutu, Suharto, and Bashir. It is entirely possible for autocrats to be civic-minded, well-intentioned people, eager to do what’s best for the people they govern. The trouble with reliance on such well-intentioned people is that they are unconstrained by the accountability of a large coalition. It is hard for a leader to know what the people really want unless they have been chosen through the ballot box, and allow a free media and freely assembled groups to articulate their wishes. Without the accountability of free and fair elections, a free press, free speech, and freedom of assembly, even well-intentioned small-coalition rulers can only do whatever they and their coalition advisers think is best.
Most people think that reducing corruption is a desirable goal. One common approach is to pass additional legislation and increase sentences for corruption. Unfortunately such approaches are counterproductive. When a system is structured around corruption, everyone who matters, leaders and backers alike, are tarred by that corruption. They would not be where they were if they had not had their hand in the till at some point. Increasing sentences simply provides leaders with an additional tool with which to enforce discipline. It is all too common for reformers and whistle-blowers to be prosecuted for one reason or another.
Legal approaches to eliminating corruption won’t ever work, and can often make the situation worse. The best way to deal with corruption is to change the underlying incentives. As coalition size increases, corruption becomes a thing of the past.
But make political leaders accountable to more people and politics becomes a competition for good ideas, not bribes and corruption.
第七章 对外援助 Chapter 7 - Foreign Aid
The Political Logic of Aid
Yet the people in recipient nations often develop a hatred for the donor. And recipient governments (and donors too) often have different views about what the money should be for. As we will see, democrats are constrained by their big coalition to do the right thing at home. However, these very domestic constraints can lead them to exploit the peoples of other nations almost without mercy.
The fact is, aid does a little bit of good in the world and vastly more harm.
The Impact of Aid
Example after example highlight the simple fact that aid is given in exchange for policy concessions far more readily and in far larger quantities than to reduce poverty and suffering.
An Assessment of Foreign Aid
What aid does well is help dictators cling to power and withhold freedoms.
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have proven that they can effectively deliver basic health care and primary education.
Aid Shakedowns
Fixing Aid Policy
That’s probably true, but knowing how to fix local problems and having the will or interest to do so is quite another matter. This policy of giving money to recipients in anticipation of their fixing problems should stop. Instead the United States should escrow money, paying it out only when objectives are achieved.
Nation Building
Dictators are cheap to buy. They deliver policies that democratic leaders and their constituents want, and being beholden to relatively few essential backers, autocrats can be bought cheaply. They can be induced to trade policies the democrat wants for money the autocrat needs. Buying democrats is much more expensive. Almost every US president has argued that he wants to foster democracy in the world. However, the same US presidents have had no problem undermining democratic, or democratizing, regimes when the people of those nations elect leaders to implement policies US voters don’t like.
In case after case, the story is the same. Democrats prefer compliant foreign regimes to democratic ones. Democratic interventionists, while proclaiming to be using military force to pursue democratization, have a profound tendency to reduce the degree of democracy in their targets, while increasing policy compliance by easily purchased autocrats.
Aid is a tool for buying influence and policy. Unless we the people really value development and are willing to make meaningful sacrifices towards those ends then aid will continue to fail in its stated goals. Democrats are not thuggish brutes. They just want to keep their jobs, and to do so they need to deliver the policies their people want. Despite the idealistic expressions of some, all too many of us prefer cheap oil to real change in West Africa or the Middle East. So we really should not complain too much when our leaders try to deliver what we want. That, after all, is what democracy is about.
第八章 反叛中的人民Chapter 8 - The People in Revolt
A SUCCESSFUL LEADER ALWAYS PUTS THE WANTS OF his essential supporters before the needs of the people. Without the support of his coalition a leader is nothing and is quickly swept away by a rival. But keeping the coalition content comes at a price when the leader’s control depends only on a few. More often than not, the coalition’s members get paid at the cost of the rest of society.
To Protest or Not To Protest
If rule is really harsh, people are effectively deterred from rising up.
The answer to that question is the answer to when regimes choose the road to democracy rather than to sustained autocracy.
Nipping Mass Movements in the Bud
There are two diametrically opposed ways in which a leader can respond to the threat of a revolution. He can increase democracy, making the people so much better off that they no longer want to revolt. He can also increase dictatorship, making the people even more miserable than they were before while also depriving them of a credible chance of success in rising up against their government.
New leaders typically reshuffle their coalition, so key backers of the regime were uncertain whether they would be retained by the successor. Lacking assurance that they would continue to be rewarded they stood aside and allowed the people to rebel.
Revolutionary movements may seem spontaneous but we really need to understand that they arise when enough citizens believe they have a realistic chance of success. That is why successful autocrats make rebellion truly unattractive. They step in quickly to punish harshly those who first take to the streets.
A prudent dictator nips rebellion in the bud. That is why we have reiterated the claim that only people willing to engage in really nasty behavior should contemplate becoming dictators. The softhearted will find themselves ousted in the blink of an eye.
Protest in Democracy and Autocracy
In democracy, protest is about alerting leaders to the fact that the people are unhappy, and that, if changes in policy are not made, they’ll throw the rascals out. Yet in autocracy, protest has a deeper purpose: to bring down the very institutions of government and change the way the people are governed.
Shocks Raise Revolts
Dead people cannot protest.
Are Disasters Always Disasters for Government Survival?
We believe this is the case because democratic leaders are supposed to deliver effective public policies, and those effective policies include ensuring good building codes are enforced and excellent rescue and recovery is implemented following a natural disaster. The death of many in such a disaster is a signal to everyone else that the leadership has not done an adequate job of protecting the people and so out go the leaders.
Responding to Revolution or Its Threat
Power to the People
The expansion of freedoms is a sure sign of impending democratization. Economic necessity is one factor that produces such a concession. Another is coming to power already on the back of a large coalition.
An independent judiciary encourages entrepreneurial zeal, but it also protects the civil liberties of the people.
So the first policy recommendation for outside observers when a dictator faces national bankruptcy, and the protests likely to follow in its train is this: don’t save the dictator; don’t forgive indebtedness unless the dictator first actually puts his hold on power at real risk by permitting freedom of assembly, a free press, freedom to create opposition parties, and free, competitive elections in which the incumbent’s party is given no advantages in campaign funds, rallies, or anything else. Only after such freedoms and real political competition are in place might any debt forgiveness be considered. Even the least hint of a fraudulent election and of cutbacks in freedom should be met by turning off the flow of funds.
Just as with debt forgiveness or new loans, foreign aid should be tied to the actuality of political reform and not to its promise. When leaders put themselves at risk of being thrown out by the people, then they show themselves worthy of aid. When leaders allow their books to be audited to detect and publicize corruption, then they are good candidates for aid designed to improve the well-being of their people. Those who refuse to make politics competitive and to expose and correct corruption will just steal aid and should not get it if there is not an overwhelming national security justification for continuing aid.
第九章 战争，和平与世界秩序 Chapter 9 - War, Peace, and World Order
War Fighting
Two thousand five hundred years ago, Sun Tzu literally wrote the book on how to wage war. Although his advice has been influential to leaders down through the centuries, leading American foreign policy advisers have contradicted his war-fighting doctrines.
To Try Hard or Not
Remember that large-coalition leaders must keep a broad swath of the people happy. In war that turns out to mean that democrats must care about the people and, of course, soldiers are people. Although conflict involves putting soldiers at risk, democrats do what they can to mitigate such risk. In autocracies, foot soldiers are not politically important. Autocrats do not waste resources protecting them.
Autocrats don’t squander precious resources on the battlefield. And elite well-equipped units are more for crushing domestic opposition than they are fighting a determined foreign foe.
When they need to, democracies try hard. However, often they don’t need to. Indeed they are notorious for being bullies and picking on weaker states, and negotiating whenever they are confronted by a worthy adversary.
Sun Tzu’s advice to his king predicts the behavior of autocrats in World War I: they didn’t make an extraordinary effort to win. The effort by the democratic powers in that same war equally foreshadowed what Caspar Weinberger and so many other American advisers have said to their president:if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
When it comes to fighting wars, institutions matter at least as much as the balance of power. The willingness of democracies to try harder goes a long way to explaining why seemingly weaker democracies often overcome seemingly stronger autocracies.
Fighting for Survival
Autocrats and democrats, at one level, fight over the exact same thing: staying in power. At another level, they are motivated to fight over different things. Democrats more often than autocrats fight when all other means of gaining policy concessions from foreign foes fail. In contrast, autocrats are more likely to fight casually, in the pursuit of land, slaves, and treasure.
Who Survives War
Democrats are much more sensitive to war outcomes than autocrats.
Military success helps democrats retain power while defeat makes removal a near certainty for democrats.
Naturally the common people don’t want war. . . . But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship…. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
The US military operates on the principle of no soldier left behind.
The Peace Between Democracies
Democracies hardly ever (some might even say never) fight wars with each other. This is not to say they are peace loving. They are not shy about fighting other states.
Democratic leaders need to deliver policy success or they will be turned out of office. For this reason they only fight wars when they expect to win.
Democracies don’t fight with each other, true. Rather, big democracies pick on little opponents whether they are democratic or not, with the expectation that they won’t fight back or won’t put up much of a fight. Indeed, that could very well be viewed as a straightforward explanation of the history of democracies engaged in imperial and colonial expansion against weak adversaries with little hope of defending themselves.
Defending the Peace and Nation Building
Unfortunately, actions have not matched the rhetoric. More unfortunately still, the problem lies not in a failure on the presidential level, but with “we, the people.”
In democracies, leaders who fail to deliver the policies their constituents want get deposed. Democrats might say they care about the rights of people overseas to determine their own future, and they might actually care too, but if they want to keep their jobs they will deliver the policies that their people want. Earlier we examined how democrats use foreign aid to buy policy. If that fails, or gets too expensive, then force is always an option. Military victory allows the victors to impose policy.
Democrats remove foreign leaders who are troublesome to them and replace them with puppets. The leaders that rise to the top after an invasion are more often than not handpicked by the victor.
Democratic leaders profess a desire for democratization. Yet the reality is that it is rarely in their interest.
Democratization sounds good in principle only.
The big problem with democratizing overseas continues to lie with we, the people. In most cases we seem to prefer that foreign nations do what we want, not what they want. However, if our interests align then successful democratization is more likely. This is particularly so if there is a rival power that wishes to influence policy.
We have seen that larger coalition systems are extremely selective in their decisions about waging war and smaller coalition systems are not. Democracies only fight when negotiation proves unfruitful and the democrat’s military advantage is overwhelming, or when, without fighting, the democrat’s chances of political survival are slim to none. Furthermore, when war becomes necessary, large-coalition regimes make an extra effort to win if the fight proves difficult. Small-coalition leaders do not if doing so uses up so much treasure that would be better spent on private rewards that keep their cronies loyal. And finally, when a war is over, larger coalition leaders make more effort to enforce the peace and the policy gains they sought through occupation or the imposition of a puppet regime. Small-coalition leaders mostly take the valuable private goods for which they fought and go home, or take over the territory they conquered so as to enjoy the economic fruits of their victory for a long time.
第十章 怎么办？Chapter 10 - What Is To Be Done?
扩大致胜联盟的人数 However, the inherent problem with change is that improving life for one group generally means making at least one other person worse off, and that other person is likely to be a leader if change really will solve the people’s problems. If the individual harmed by change is the ruler or the CEO—the same person who has to initiate the changes in the first place—then we can be confident that change is never going to happen.
Wishful thinking is not a fix and a perfect solution is not our goal and should not be any well-intentioned person’s goal. Even minor improvements in governance can result in significant improvements in the welfare of potentially millions of people or shareholders.
Rules to Fix By
The group whose desires are most interesting from the perspective of lasting betterment is the set of essentials. More often than not, they are the people who can make things happen.
What political insiders want when it comes to institutional change is complex, but to understand the reforms they can be expected to support and those they will oppose we need to understand their wants.
So, there are two times when the coalition is most receptive to the urge to improve life for the many, whether those are the people or shareholders: when a leader has just come to power, or when a leader is so old or decrepit that he won’t last much longer. In these circumstances coalition members cannot count on being retained. At the beginning and the end of an incumbent’s reign the danger of being purged is greatest and so, at these times, coalition members should be most receptive to reform. Effective reform means expanding the coalition and that means that everyone, including the current essentials, has a good chance of being needed by tomorrow’s new leader.
A wise coalition, therefore, works together with the masses to foster an expanded coalition. The people cooperate because it will mean more public goods for them and the coalition cooperates because it will mean reducing the risk of their ending up out on their ear.
What are the lessons here for change? First, coalition members should beware of their susceptibility to purges. Remember that it ticks up when there is a new boss, a dying boss, or a bankrupt boss. At such times, the essential group should begin to press for its own expansion to create the incentives to develop public-spirited policies, democracy, and benefits for all. Purges can still succeed if they can be mounted surreptitiously, so wise coalition members who are not absolutely close to the seat of power would do well to insist on a free press, free speech, and free assembly to protect themselves from unanticipated upheaval. And should they be unlucky enough to be replaced, at least they will have cushioned themselves for a soft landing. Outsiders would be wise to take cues from the same lessons: the time for outside intervention to facilitate democratic change or improved corporate responsibility is when a leader has just come to power or when a leader is near the end of his life.
Lessons from Green Bay
Fixing Democracies
A simple fix that lifts everyone’s longer term welfare is to grandfather in immigrants. Amnesty for illegal immigrants—a dirty word in American political circles—is a mechanism to choose selectively those who demonstrate over a fixed period their ability to help produce revenue by working, paying taxes, and raising children who contribute to the national economy, national political life, and national social fabric. Give us your poor and let’s see if they can make a better life. Give us your tired and let’s see if they can be energized by participating in making a more public-goods oriented government work better. Give us your huddled masses longing to be free and let’s see if their children don’t grow up to be the foundation of a stronger, more peaceful, and more prosperous society than they first came to. For generation after generation, the waves of immigrants to the United States have made our winning coalitions bigger and better. They have turned from poor, tired, huddled masses into modern America’s success story. This was no happenstance of time or place. This is the straightforward consequence of easy citizenship and, with it, an expanded winning coalition that makes for better governance.
Removing Misery
iven such circumstances, a smart dictator will look ahead and work out that he is better off liberalizing now than risk being exiled, jailed, or killed later.
Certainly there is little justice in letting former dictators off the hook. But the goal should be to preserve and improve the lives of the many who suffer at the hands of desperate leaders, who might be prepared to step aside in exchange for immunity.
The incentives to encourage leaders to step aside could be further strengthened if, in exchange for agreeing to step down quickly, they would be granted the right to retain some significant amount of ill-gotten gains, and safe havens for exile where the soon-to-be ex-leadership and their families can live out their lives in peace. Offering such deals might prove self-fulfilling. Once essential supporters believe their leader might take such a deal, they themselves start looking for his replacement, so even if the leader had wanted to stay and fight he might no longer have the support to do so. The urge for retribution is better put aside to give dictators a reason to give up rather than fight.
Free and Fair Elections: False Hope
True, meaningful elections might be the final goal, but elections for their own sake should never be the objective.
Ultimately, elections need to follow expanded freedom and not be thought of as presaging it!
Sometimes the problems of the world seem beyond our capacity to solve. Yet there is no mystery about how to eradicate much of the world’s poverty and oppression. People who live with freedom are rarely impoverished and oppressed. Give people the right to say what they want; to write what they want; and to gather to share ideas about what they want, and you are bound to be looking at people whose persons and property are secure and whose lives are content. You are looking at people free to become rich and free to lose their shirts in trying. You are looking at people who are not only materially well off but spiritually and physically, too. Sure, places like Singapore and parts of China prove that it is possible to have a good material life with limited freedom—yet the vast majority of the evidence suggests that these are exceptions and not the rule. Economic success can postpone the democratic moment but it ultimately cannot replace it.
A country’s relative share of freedom is ultimately decided by its leaders.
But before we shift blame onto our “flawed” democratic leaders for their failures to make the world a better place, we need to remember why it is that they enact the policies that they do. The sworn duty of democratic leaders is to do precisely what we, the people, want.
Our individual concerns about protecting ourselves from unfriendly democracies elsewhere typically trump our longer term belief in the benefits of democracy. Democratic leaders listen to their voters because that is how they and their political party get to keep their jobs. Democratic leaders were elected, after all, to advance the current interests at least of those who chose them. The long run is always on someone else’s watch. Democracy overseas is a great thing for us if, and only if, the people of a democratizing nation happen to want policies that we like. When a foreign people are aligned against our best interest, our best chance of getting what we want is to keep them under the yoke of an oppressor who is willing to do what we, the people, want.
Yes we want people to be free and prosperous, but we don’t want them to be free and prosperous enough to threaten our way of life, our interests, and our well-being—and that is as it should be. That too is a rule to rule by for democratic leaders. They must do what their coalition wants; they are not beholden to the coalition in any other country, just to those who help keep them in power. If we pretend otherwise we will just be engaging in the sort of utopianism that serves as an excuse for not tackling the problems that we can.
We have learned that just about all of political life revolves around the size of the selectorate, the influentials, and the winning coalition. Expand them all, and the interchangeables no more quickly than the coalition, and everything changes for the better for the vast majority of people. They are liberated to work harder on their own behalf, to become better educated, healthier, wealthier, happier, and free. Their taxes are reduced and their opportunities in life expand dramatically. We can get to these moments of change faster through some of the fixes proposed here but sooner or later every society will cross the divide between small-coalition, large-selectorate misery to a large coalition that is a large proportion of the selectorate—and peace and plenty will ensue. With a little bit of hard work and good luck this can happen everywhere sooner, and if it does we all will prosper from it.
被删减内容
查询关键词：China、Chinese，英文粗体部分为被河蟹的部分。
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The second stratum of politics consists of the real selectorate. This is the group that actually chooses the leader. In today’s China (as in the old Soviet Union), it consists of all voting members of the Communist Party; in Saudi Arabia’s monarchy it is the senior members of the royal family; in Great Britain, the voters backing members of parliament from the majority party.
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Strange as it may seem, the same ideas and subtle differences that held true in San Francisco can be applied to illiberal governments like Zimbabwe, China, and Cuba, and even to the more ambiguous sorts of governments like current-day Russia or Venezuela or Singapore.
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For example, a married couple in the United States pays no income tax on the first $17,000 they earn. At that same income, a Chinese couple’s marginal tax rate is 45 percent.
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A few civic-minded autocrats slip a little into secret accounts, preferring to fend off the threat of revolt by using their discretionary funds (the leftover tax revenue not spent on buying coalition loyalty) to invest in public works. Those public works may prove successful, as was true for Lee Kwan Yew’s efforts in Singapore and Deng Xiaoping’s in China. They may also prove to be dismal failures, as was true for Kwame Nkrumah’s civic-minded industrial program in Ghana or Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, which turned out to be a great leap backwards for China.
中文版P45：处理方式删除，Great Leap Forward 即大跃进。
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Equally, he and many others must have known that it was much better to cross swords with Gorbachev, an intellectual reformer, than with such contemporaries as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire or even Deng Xiaoping of China. Deng, after all, used ruthless force to end the prodemocracy uprising at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
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In the United States, for example, a couple with one child and an income under about $32,400 pays no income tax. If their income were, say, $20,000 they would receive $1,000 from the federal government to help support their child. In China, a family with an income of $32,400 is expected to pay about $6,725 in income tax.
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His Chinese counterpart, Huang Guangyu, also known as Wong Kwong Ku, fared little better. Starting with nothing but $500 and a street cart, Guangyu created Gome, the largest electrical retailer in China. He was repeatedly ranked as China’s richest individual—until he was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for bribery. It is likely that he was guilty since bribery is commonplace in Chinese business dealings. It is also likely that he and others who have been prosecuted for corruption in China were “chosen for political reasons.”
中文版P135：处理方式整段删除，本段”黄光裕被选择执法”本在“2004年霍尔多科夫斯基”与“在独裁国家，做个富人是不明智的”两段之间。
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Hobbes was only half right. It is true, as Hobbes’s believed, that happy, well-cared-for people are unlikely to revolt. China’s prolonged economic growth seems to have verified that belief (at least for now). Keep them fat and happy and the masses are unlikely to rise up against you.
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Indeed, a common refrain among small-coalition rulers is that the very freedoms, like free speech, free press, and especially freedom of assembly, that promote welfare-improving government policies are luxuries to be doled out only after prosperity is achieved and not before. This seems to be the self-serving claim of leaders who keep their people poor and oppressed. The People’s Republic of China is the poster boy for this view. When Deng Xiaoping introduced economic liberalization to China in the 1980s, experts in wealthy Western countries contended that now China’s economy would grow and the growth would lead to rapid democratization. Today, more than thirty years into sustained rapid growth we still await these anticipated political reforms. Growth does not guarantee political improvement but neither does it preclude it. The Republic of China (aka Taiwan) and the Republic of Korea (aka South Korea) are models of building prosperity ahead of democracy. Needless to say, the People’s Republic of China certainly is not fond of promoting either of those countries’ experiences.
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A far better measure of leaders’ interest in education is the distribution of top universities. With the sole exceptions of China and Singapore, no nondemocratic country has even one university rated among the world’s top 200. Despite its size, and not counting universities in Hong Kong, which were established under British rule before Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997, the best-ranked Chinese university is only in 47th place despite China’s opportunity to draw top minds from its vast population. The highest ranking Russian university, with Russia’s long history of dictatorship, is 210th.
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A smart democrat, of course, tries to avoid such troubles, using eminent domain only when it benefits many people, especially members of the democrat’s constituency (the influentials). It is incredible to see how easily leaders can take people’s property in the People’s Republic of China and how hard it is to do the same in Hong Kong. When essentials are few, pretty much anything goes.
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Massive construction projects, like the Aswan Dam in Egypt and China’s Three Gorges Dam, are very much like Mobutu’s power grid.
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The comparison of Iran and Chile is far from unusual. China, like Chile, suffered a 7.9 earthquake of its own. It struck in May 2008, bringing down many shoddily constructed schools and apartment buildings, killing nearly 70,000. Even accounting for variations in Chile’s and China’s populations and incomes, it is impossible to reconcile the difference between China’s death toll and Chile’s, except by reflecting on the incentives to enforce proper building standards in democratic Chile—incentives missing in autocratic China and Iran. And lest it is thought these are special cases, it is worth noting that democratic Honduras had a 7.1 earthquake in May 2009, with 6 deaths and Italy a 6.3 in April 2009 with 207 deaths.
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Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping in China mirrored Khrushchev and Gorbachev, but with an important difference. All of these leaders seem to have been initially motivated by the sincere desire to improve their economy. All seemed to have recognized that failing to get their economy moving could pose a threat to their hold on power. But unlike Mao, Mikhail, and Nikita, Deng belongs squarely in the hall of fame. Like them, he was not accountable to the people and, like them, he was not hesitant to put down mass movements against his rule. The horrors of Tiananmen Square should not be forgotten. But unlike his fellow dictators, he actually had good ideas about how to improve economic performance.
Deng and Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew are surely among the contemporary world’s two greatest icons of the authoritarian’s hall of fame. They did not sock fortunes away in secret bank accounts (to the best of our knowledge). They did not live the lavish lifestyles of Mobutu Sese Seko or Saddam Hussein. They used their discretionary power over revenue to institute successful, market-oriented economic reforms that made Singaporeans among the world’s wealthiest people and lifted millions of Chinese out of abject poverty.
中文版P228：处理方式第一段整段被张冠李戴删节为一句话“但与他们不同的是，李光耀确实知道如何改善经济”，实际是讲邓；紧接下来的一段原文邓李并举删节为只讲李一个人。
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At first, a few especially bold individuals may rise up in revolt. They proclaim their intention to make their country a democracy. Every revolution and every mass movement begins with a promise of democratic reform, of a new government that will lift up the downtrodden and alleviate their suffering. That is an essential ingredient in getting the masses to take to the streets. Of course, it doesn’t always work.
The Chinese communists, for instance, declared the formation of a Chinese Soviet Republic on November 7, 1931. They said of their newly declared state,
It is the state of the suppressed workers, farmers, soldiers, and working mass. Its flag calls for the downfall of imperialism, the liquidation of landlords, the overthrow of the warlord government of the Nationalists. We shall establish a soviet government over the whole of China; we shall struggle for the interests of thousands of deprived workers, farmers, and soldiers and other suppressed masses; and to endeavor for peaceful unification of the whole of China.
Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of Kenya’s independence movement and its first head of state, likewise declared during a meeting of the Kenya African Union (KAU) on July 26, 1952:
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Many revolutions end up simply replacing one autocracy with another. On some occasions the successor regime can actually be worse than its predecessor. This might well have been the case with Sergeant Doe’s deposition of Liberia’s True Whig government or Mao’s success against Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang government in China.
中文版P280：处理方式删除，Chiang Kai Shek 即蒋介石。
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As might be expected, given these facts and the incentives they suggest, instances of 200 or more people dying in earthquakes is much more common in autocracies than democracies.
Not all disasters are equal in the eyes of autocrats. Dictators are particularly wary of natural disasters when they occur in politically and economically important centers. Disaster management in China emphasizes this point. When an earthquake struck the remote province of Qinghai in 2010, the Chinese government’s response was, at best, halfhearted. In contrast, its handling of disaster relief in the wake of a 2008 earthquake in Sichuan won the approval of much of the international community. The differences are stark and driven by politics. The Sichuan quake occurred in an economically and politically important center where a massed protest could potentially threaten the government. Qinghai is remote and of little political importance. Protest there would do little to threaten the government. The government did much less to assist people who could not threaten them.
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Common threads run through each of these democratizers—common threads that are absent from revolutions that replaced one dictator with another, such as occurred under Mao Zedong in China, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Porfirio Diaz in Mexico, and Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya.
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Sure, places like Singapore and parts of China prove that it is possible to have a good material life with limited freedom—yet the vast majority of the evidence suggests that these are exceptions and not the rule. Economic success can postpone the democratic moment but it ultimately cannot replace it.
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