Try to Rule Fairly and You'll Be Overthrown
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN treats it as the standard short summary of how power and political incentives work, applied to governments, companies and workplaces.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 15 HN commenters across 15 different months, 2016 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec VladimirGolovin · 2016-12 · on “Russia’s Creepy, Innovative Internet [video]”
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 Ha
Strong rec abandonliberty · 2018-07 · on “A Drop of 4 Degrees Made a Big Difference for a Garment Maker's Bottom Line”
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]
Strong rec mtgx · 2018-09 · on “Former Columnist Jailed for Facebook Criticism of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi”
I feel like this comment thread needs a link to CGP Grey's excellent Rules for Rulers video, too: [this video]
Strong rec fredley · 2019-11 · on “You can fool some of the people, all of the time”
An excellent primer on modes of Government, how they arise, and how this perpetuate is this CGP Grey video, Rules for Rulers : [this video]
Recommends nickik · 2017-06 · on “Venture investors blast US decision to withdraw from Paris Climate Accord”
You are correct for the most part, but I think you are drawing the wrong implications. Yes, they are resistant to swings based on mood changes in the population. However, this does not hold for changes of mind or strategy by elected people themselves. They might promise something at some point and then not do it. US history is full of broken promises. A counterpoint is that Trump and Obama are elected directly and specially on foreign relations they have a huge power to do whatever they like. Obama promised some stuff, Trump retracted it. > In contrast, a dictatorship is unreliable, because all decisions are made by one person, whose mood swings can result in lots of unpredictability. That i
Recommends afarrell · 2018-12 · on “An Estonian company developing unmanned weaponized ground vehicles”
I've read the book The Dictators Handbook (watch the CGP Grey video Rules for Rulers[1] for a good summary) and I can imagine a number of really clear and compelling Job Stories for this technology: * As a ruler facing large-scale protests, I want to clear the crowds of people from the streets without deploying soldiers who might choose to actually side with the protestors. * As a ruler who is afraid of a coup, I want to reduce the personnel-management costs of maintaining my military so that I can reduce the number of officers needed to maintain the same level of force lethality. This will let me purge my officer corps of possibly-disloyal members and lavish rewards on those who remain. * A
Recommends derefr · 2020-07 · on “With oil cheap, Arab states cannot balance their books”
> It's not strictly a "wrong leaders" problem. It's much more systemic than that. Elect a good leader and the oil will provide the impetus to tear that leader down. See also, The Dictator's Handbook , summarized well by CGP Grey's video "The Rules for Rulers" ( [this video] ). It's an unstable equilibrium to run a country on a wide power base, if it has centralized resource-extraction economy; as any dictator who just plans on staging a coup to take the oil and then reward their few revolutionaries with it, will be able to win over pretty much anyone from the previous wide-base government, who was previously getting a much-smaller slice of the pie.
Recommends rrsmtz · 2021-03 · on “Legislative Performance Futures – Incentivize Good Laws by Monetizing the Future”
You would probably enjoy CGP Grey's video Rules for Rulers, which covers very reasonable arguments for why politicians don't enact "good" legislation: [this video]