Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: The Five Rules of Power Politics | Think big

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: The Five Rules of Power Politics Watch Big Think’s latest video: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: https://bigth.ink/Edge — — ———————————————– — ——————————– Democracy, says Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, is the worst form of government from the leader’s point of view. ————————————————– ——————————– Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Silver Professor of Politics at New York University. He is an expert on international conflict, foreign policy formation and nation building. His current research focuses on the links between political institutions, economic growth and political change. It also studies the causes and consequences of international conflicts as well as the forecasts and analyzes of national security policies. Using a proprietary mathematical formula that takes into account self-interest and alliances between actors on key economic and political issues (such as whether Iran will build nuclear weapons), de Mesquita predicts the future of companies and organizations such as the CIA. His most recent books include The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (PublicAffairs, 2011) and The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future (Random House, Inc., 2009 ). Additionally, he is the author of more than one hundred articles and fourteen books on politics, as well as a published novel, The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge (Ohio State University Press, 2001). ————————————————– ——————————– TRANSCRIPT: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: Machiavelli was a very intelligent guy who, by the way, passing, , writes Le Prince in the hope of attracting work. He failed to get the job. He was a little too nice, not tough enough. So, most people who know Machiavelli are familiar with the opinions he expressed in The Prince. Few people seem to have read his speeches in which he thought that the best form of government is a more republican form of government, that is, a democracy in our modern terms, and although I certainly agree on the fact that from the point of view of the people of the world In the streets, it is by far the best form of government, from the point of view of a leader, of someone who wants to retain power, it is the worst form of government because it puts you at the greatest risk of losing power. So in The Dictator’s Handbook we go well beyond Machiavelli’s understanding to expose precisely what it is that motivates you to hold on to power and what precisely ties the hands of a democrat who is trying to do what the dictators. Let’s start with what are the five rules of politics. First, you want to depend on as few people as possible to keep you in power. I’m going to come back to this because it is very linked to the second. Second, you want the pool of people that you could call upon to fill the role of this small group, this pool, to be as large as possible. This way, the people who are part of the small group that keeps you in power know that if they are skittish, if they start to support someone else, or if they are not willing to do the things that you, the leader, ask them to do, they will know. they are easily replaced. Often, journalists in particular make the mistake of looking at rigged election systems, like the one Lennon introduced in the Soviet Union, and mistakenly believing that somehow the fact that there Having elections confers legitimacy. This is a very stupid idea because, after all, everyone already knows the outcome of the election before it takes place, so how could it be legitimate? The function of universal suffrage in a rigged system is precisely to signal to the people in the inner circle, to the people you are rewarding, that hey, you’re easily replaced, you’d better do what I want. Third rule, so you have as small a group as possible drawn from as large a pool as possible. You want to tax people as much as possible because you want the revenue to enrich you and corrupt your cronies. By taxing citizens as much as possible, there are two constraints. You don’t want to tax so much that people would rather nap than work, because the purpose of the tax, of course, is to generate money for you. If people don’t work, they won’t generate money for the leader. And secondly, you don’t want to tax so much that people calculate that you know things are so bad that I might as well revolt, I can’t be in a worse situation. So we want to tax as much as possible as long as people continue to work and do not revolt. Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/the-five-rules-of-power-politics-2/

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