Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

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. Economic growth and success, in contrast, does not seem to be an assurance of improved governance and, indeed, may hinder it.1 This is a question worth exploring in greater depth, though for now 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 so as to pay just the right amount to one’s coalition while also paying just enough to keep the citizenry from making trouble.

Public Goods Not for the Public’s Good

From a leader’s point of view, the most important function of the people is to pay taxes. All regimes need money. As a result, certain basic public goods must be made available even by the meanest autocrat, unless he has access to significant revenue from sources, like oil or foreign aid, that are not based on taxing workers. Public benefits like essential infrastructure, education, and health care, need to be readily available to ensure that labor is productive enough to pay taxes to line the pockets of rulers and their essential supporters. These policies are not instituted for the betterment of the masses, even though, of course, some members of the masses, especially workers, benefit from them.

Education, as a means for getting ahead in life, is a big deal for any country’s citizenry. Indeed, a popular refrain among many liberalminded thinkers is to extol the quality of education in otherwise oppressive states like Castro’s Cuba or even Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea. And they have a good point. Both Cuba and North Korea have impressive primary education. For instance a 1997 UNESCO study finds that Cuban third and fourth graders far outperform their counterparts in other Latin American countries, As for North Korea, it has a 100 percent literacy rate. In contrast, only 81 percent of democratic India’s people can read and write.2 But these facts can be misleading, or even downright wrong. That basic education is mandatory and extensive in such places often is used to argue that autocracy isn’t so bad.

Rarely do any of us stop to probe beneath these observations to find out why dictators pay to have well-educated third graders—but do not carry that quality of education forward to higher learning. The logic behind political survival teaches us to be suspicious. We cannot help but believe that these public goods are not intended to uplift and assist the people unfortunate enough to live in such places. The rules of politics, as we know, instruct leaders to do no more for the people than is absolutely essential to prevent rebellion. Leaders who spend on public welfare at the expense of their essentials are courting disaster.

These leaders, whether dictators or democrats, are all grappling with the same question: How much education is the right amount? For those who rely on few essential backers the answer is straightforward. Educational opportunity should not be so extensive as to equip ordinary folks, the interchangeables, to question government authority. A naïve person might look at any number of awful regimes and yet come to the conclusion that, because they provide such public benefits as nationalized health care or sound primary education, they’re actually better to their people than many democratic states are to theirs. This is nonsense, of course—in the vast majority of cases autocrats are simply keeping the peasants healthy enough to work and educated enough to do their jobs. Either way, literate or not, they’re still peasants and they’re going to stay that way.

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. By contrast, countries with relatively few people but with dependence on many essential backers, like Israel, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada, have several universities ranked among the top 200.3 That this uneven distribution of top-notch universities favors large-coalition locales is no accident.

Highly educated people are a potential threat to autocrats, and so autocrats make sure to limit educational opportunity. Autocrats want workers to have basic labor skills like literacy, and they want their own children—their most likely successors—to be truly well educated, and so send them off to schools in places like Switzerland, where Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Il’s youngest son and designated successor, was educated. Dictators also like to have their children educated in leading universities in the United States, and especially at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. In fact, one might almost conclude that Oxford is a breeding ground for authoritarians. It certainly is the alma mater of many, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, the Bhutto family of Pakistan, kings of Jordan, Bhutan, Malaysia, and even little Tonga. England’s big coalition system opens the door pretty broadly to give access to higher education.

When the leadership relies on few essentials, higher education is for the children of the powerful; when the bloc of essentials is big, it is for the betterment of everyone. One of the features of the old Soviet regime that Boris Yeltsin balked at, for instance, was exactly the privileged access that children of Communist Party leaders had to the best universities regardless of their ability. Kids of loyal families were helped to get ahead. The capable children of potentially dissident families were kept down by being excluded from broad access to the best schools.4

One thing that both dictatorships and democracies have in common is the special advantage insiders seem to have when it comes to the top universities. Even places with lots of essentials seem to work that way, although the privileged access is granted by the universities and not imposed on them by the government. The president of the United States doesn’t get to tell Harvard who to admit. A closer look at the system demonstrates the reasoning—Harvard and many other prestigious universities favor “legacies,” that is, the children of alumni, because such students are likely to bring the university more donations from its wealthy graduates. What may seem like a case of privileged access in an otherwise open, large-coalition system, actually reflects the internal dynamics of universities themselves.

We shouldn’t fail to notice that universities in their own right constitute small-coalition political systems with a pretty big batch of interchangeables. No surprise, then, that they behave like autocracies, favoring the rich and connected at the expense of those who lack political clout. If you doubt it, have a look one day at how many administrators university presidents like to hire compared to faculty. It seems you can never have too many supporting-cast administrators whose jobs depend on keeping the person at the top happy. Faculty, on the other hand, don’t depend on keeping their “bosses” happy; they depend on keeping their colleagues happy long enough to get tenure and then they are pretty free to do whatever they want—why do you think we can write this passage! There is a delicate balance to be struck, to be sure, and so successful university leaders are especially skilled at doling out private rewards to anyone who could be a threat. People who raise money for the university frequently get a percentage of what they bring in to incentivize them. Faculty who are cooperative are likely to more readily be granted sabbaticals, get research funds, pick the classes (usually small) that they teach, and so forth. So we shouldn’t be surprised by distortions in merit in universities; they really are small-coalition regimes.