Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

Rutger Bregman, 2017

Rutger Bregman is a young Dutch writer (uncomfortably younger than me!) who has become prominent in recent years for his proposals for how developed nations can significantly improve living standards for both their citizens and, in fact, all of humanity.

Does he have a TED Talk you can watch? Of course he does.

In his book Utopia for Realists, Bregman advocates:

• Universal basic income (UBI). Wealthy countries should have implemented this years ago to alleviate poverty; in the future, as more and more of our jobs are automated, it will become even more important. 
• Shorter workweeks. You can’t make workers more productive by making them work longer, as you hit a point of severely diminishing returns. Additionally, less overworked people make better citizens, more engaged in the life of the community.
• Dramatically liberalized immigration. Open borders would be ideal, but if wealthy countries admit even a modestly higher number of immigrants from poor nations, it could pay impressive dividends in economic growth and poverty reduction.

This book is written to convince the layperson and does not presume any specialist knowledge, although that means many people will find it regurgitates the basics. I’ve already read a fair bit on UBI -- I think the best overall introduction is Dylan Matthews’ 2017 article on Vox. And as it happens, I was midway through reading Bregman’s book when Rose Eveleth put out an episode of her “Flash Forward” podcast also exploring the topic of UBI. It’s definitely in the zeitgeist these days.

So why read Bregman’s book when one could cobble together the same material from online articles?

Put simply, Bregman knows how to frame an issue, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he chose the title Utopia for Realists. Bregman feels that we have lost our ability to think big, to dream that the world could be better and to believe that we have the ability to make it so.

Frankly, I think his first chapter makes a few tone-deaf statements that could turn off some readers; writing of today’s politics, he says “what now separates right from left is a percentage point or two on the income tax rate” (p. 15), and I’m sure many of us would dearly love to live in a place where that’s true.

But he means well; his point is that policies that could dramatically improve our lives and forestall misery are out there, but just beyond the reach of the Overton window, a concept that he defines in the final chapter, and frankly should be in more people’s mental lexicons anyway.

He repeatedly makes the point that the policies he would like to see implemented are less radical than many of us imagine. Richard Nixon, no one’s idea of a leftist radical, would have liked to see some form of UBI implemented in the 1970s, and Bregman devotes a chapter to the idea’s slow death.

He blames the failure of basic income on our cultural reservations about giving poor people money, which he says are not based on any empirical foundation. We have this prejudice that people shouldn’t get money they haven’t worked for, but this is counterproductive if we want a society that functions for everyone.

In short, he thinks that we’re being held back by irrational prejudices and distrust of ideas that feel different from what we’re used to. This is, essentially, his core argument, which he also applies to some other issues that don’t fit neatly into the three biggies that I laid out above: the growth of the financial sector (he’s not such a fan), and foreign aid to developing countries (let’s do what’s been empirically shown to work, he says).

In the end, he calls on us to follow in the footsteps of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman -- not in terms of their ideas, but rather the confidence and willingness that these prominent economists had to reshape the world in the 20th century. As he writes, “ideas, however outrageous, have changed the world, and they will again” (p. 250).

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Taiwan's Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia

Taiwan's Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia

by Richard C. Kagan, 2007

This slim book (just 163 pages, not counting appendices) is an overview of the life and career of Lee Teng-hui, the man who was president of Taiwan from 1988 to 2000.

The man who climbed to the top of an authoritarian government, and retired as president of a democracy.

The man who headed the Republic of China, a political entity that he had no love for and would just as soon have seen abolished.

Lee Teng-hui is an immensely important figure in Taiwanese political history. It’s not too much to say that he is the most important and influential political figure ever to have been born and raised in Taiwan.

What is more, he is a fascinating personality to study. Either he dramatically shifted his political views and allegiances late in his career, or (as is more likely, and as Kagan believes) he concealed his fundamental beliefs for decades in order to rise to prominence in the ROC. Either way, I absolutely expect that for decades to come, historians for decades will study what made the man tick.

Richard C. Kagan, who interviewed Lee in person while researching this book, has done an excellent job explaining Lee’s importance to the reader. He has also clearly expressed his own great admiration for Lee. Unfortunately, I fear that this admiration has affected his ability to give a balanced portrayal of his subject. I learned a lot from Taiwan’s Statesman, but I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that I wasn’t getting the whole picture, and I wondered if there was material that could have been included but wasn’t because it showed Lee in a less flattering light.

Kagan’s book is a tough one to summarize. So I take a blank piece of paper and I draw two perpendicular lines on it, dividing it into quarters. I label the upper left quadrant “Small things I liked”, and then I label the other quadrants “Small things I didn’t like so much”, “Big things I wasn’t sure about”, and “Big things I liked”.

My review of Richard C. Kagan’s Taiwan’s Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia will follow this pattern. That means I’m going annoy everybody by burying the important stuff down in the second half of this post.

To begin with small things I liked, I learned many things about 20th century Taiwanese history that I had not known before.

But there’s one in particular that I’d like to mention here -- it’s not exactly a small thing, but it’s not directly connected to Lee Teng-hui, and it was news to me.

Apparently in 1971, amid the departure of the ROC from the United Nations, Vice Foreign Minister Yang Hsi-kun made a proposal to Chiang Kai-shek to rebrand the country as the “Chinese Republic of Taiwan”, with “Chinese” specifically said to be an ethnic/cultural term rather than a political one. Chiang was said to be receptive to this idea. Judging by a US State Department telegram by Ambassador Walter McConaughy (printed as Appendix A), the key obstacles were Chiang’s need for more assurances that US support would be forthcoming -- and the opposition of his wife and his wife’s family.

In other words, in 1971 Chiang Kai-shek was open to the idea of declaring an independent Taiwan. This was the first I’d heard about this incredibly interesting “what-if” scenario, and while it doesn’t make me re-think my impression of Chiang as a nasty dictator, it does suggest he may have had pragmatic depths that I hadn’t given him credit for.

Next, the small things I didn’t like so much. This is going to be nitpicky. Hold on tight.

Chapter 1 starts by describing the 1996 Presidential election, and on page three we have the remarkable sentence “It was the first democratic election in Taiwan since the country’s establishment in 1911”. I can think of two different ways that sentence could have been edited so as not to make readers familiar with Taiwan stop and stare for several seconds, then shake their heads and move on. An editor should have caught this.

In Chapter 2, Kagan gives a quick overview of Taiwan’s ethnic mix, and when discussing the Hakka, he says they are not Han Chinese, which is a questionable assertion but I’ll let it slide because “Han” is hardly a rigorously defined term. But then he says “their language was not related to the Sinitic language group”, which as far as I know is just plain incorrect -- Hakka is indisputably a Sinitic language just as much as, say, Spanish is a Romance language. (Note that I’m hardly an authority here -- if I’m clearly wrong, somebody say so please.)

Finally, I’m used to, shall we say, creative Romanization when it comes to Taiwanese names, but Kagan’s book still made me stumble. On page 61, he writes of Ng Yu-jin, apparently a very prominent Taiwanese emigre and critic of the regime in the 1960s. I think this is the same person as Ng Chiau-tong, but putting “Ng Yu-jin” into Google gets me nowhere, Kagan never gives us the Chinese characters for anyone’s name, and I’m frustrated that I’m still not sure one way or another.

Okay, now let’s get to the meat of this review. Here are the big things I wasn’t sure about. Let’s just put it this way: Kagan’s book inspired me to look up the pronunciation of “hagiography”, a word I had never had to say out loud before.

Look, my overall impression of Lee Teng-hui is generally positive. The man inherited an authoritarian government that, although it was becoming more free, still curtailed basic freedoms that we take for granted today. Twelve years later, he retired as leader of a free democracy. This is very impressive and I do not deny that Lee’s accomplishments are admirable.

But that doesn’t mean Lee should be treated as a saintly figure above any criticism. I found two points where Kagan makes tentative criticisms of Lee Teng-hui. On pages 78-79, he criticizes Lee’s keeping detailed dossiers on city council members when he was Mayor of Taipei from 1978 to 1981, and on page 112, he says Lee’s failure to hold the military and secret service accountable for attacks on dissidents “hampered reform efforts and policy innovations throughout his presidency”.

I found literally no other place this book is critical of him. Otherwise Lee is held up as this brilliant man who navigated his way through the ROC government, first as governor and then as vice president, because he saw that doing this was the best way to help his beloved country of Taiwan.

Unfortunately, I’m not knowledgeable enough to point out many ways in which Kagan should have treated Lee more critically. Someone better-informed about the period might be able to do a better job. But I do have one specific observation.

Cheng Nan-jung (also romanized as Nylon Deng, among several other ways) dramatically committed suicide on April 7, 1989, when facing imminent arrest for publishing banned political commentary. It’s easy to forget this now, but when Cheng killed himself, Lee Teng-hui had already been President for more than one year and two months.

There is no mention of this incident in Kagan’s book, even though it is very well-known and Cheng has become a widely recognized martyr for Taiwanese democracy. There are mentions of government repression and state-sponsored assassinations during the presidency of Chiang Ching-kuo, but not after Chiang’s death on January 13, 1988. But we do hear about Lee being magnanimous towards protestors in March 1990 (heavily contrasted with the Tiananmen Square protests of the previous year).

I don't think Lee is personally to blame for Cheng’s death, and this incident is not the moral equivalent to the government-approved killings that went on under the Chiang Ching-kuo regime. But it shows that the ROC government continued to act as a repressive authoritarian regime well into Lee’s presidency, and here Kagan’s book is largely silent, apart from the brief criticism (p 112) that I mentioned above.

This kind of whitewashing is a serious flaw in Kagan’s book. It’s not so much about omitting Cheng specifically, but rather the impression that we’re getting a very one-sided portrayal of Lee, where inconvenient facts and narratives are sidelined.

I understand that Kagan strongly respected Lee, whom he interviewed in person several times. But I don’t want to read about only the good things. Denny Roy’s 2003 book Taiwan: A Political History takes a much more cynical view of Lee’s time in power, but it isn’t even necessarily cynicism that I want; I would just like to see more balance.

The hagiographic treatment of Lee, the frequent mentions of Lee’s Christianity and the occasional comparisons of Taiwan to Israel, which, he writes, “also faces a dogmatic enemy that claims rights to the soil and lives of its population” (p. 16) made me wonder if Kagan’s target audience was politically conservative Americans (and those of similar political sympathies) with the intent to build up Lee Teng-hui as a great man that we should all look up to and respect, and put forward his vision of a free and democratic Taiwan as something we should all support.

But despite the sanitized portrayal of Lee Teng-hui, there are still some big things I liked about the book, apart from just picking up odd facts I didn’t know.

First, hagiography it may be, but Kagan still got to know Lee Teng-hui personally during the process of researching and writing, and so even if it’s incomplete, what we’re getting here is a vivid portrait of the man -- one side of him, at least. Kagan traces the development of Lee’s political views and beliefs and stresses the intellectual influences of both Zen Buddhism and Presbyterian Christianity -- for instance, he notes that Faust is one of Lee’s favorite books and then uses Faust as a metaphor for Lee’s relationship with the KMT (p. 85-86). Even if Kagan’s repeated references to Lee’s intellectual diet are a bit over-done (I'm not sure if I think so or not), the presumably authentic look inside Lee’s mind is still interesting.

Kagan can’t help but describe Lee in such colorful prose as: “If one painted his vision, it would not hang in a picture frame. It would be splashed all over the neighborhood with expressions of creativity, chaos, unpredictability, strings of relationships, and loose threads for future connections.” (p. 133)

Second, the closing chapters give us a vivid look at Lee’s conception of nationhood.

My wife Jenna took this picture in the National Museum of Taiwan History in Tainan. It says: People from all parts of the world who once visited Taiwan used different languages to name this island and its inhabitants. But how do those who live there regard themselves? Taiwan is composed of different ethnic groups with disparate languages and cultures. Thus the term "Taiwanese" is a form of self affirmation impossible to define with a particular language or ethnicity. All those who identify with and are concerned about Taiwan, who love and accept Taiwan, and who wish to live together in this land can declare with a loud voice "I am a Taiwanese." Contrast this with the racial basis of nationhood that you see in China, in Korea, in Japan. It also fits perfectly with Lee’s ideas, at least as interpreted by Kagan.

“For Lee”, Kagan writes, “Taiwanese identity arises from a natural ecological relationship among individuals from different ethnic, language, and immigrant groups who must try to benefit each other in order to survive and create a future for their descendents.” (p. 137)

Kagan goes on to write, “Lee is an islander who views his realm . . . as a place of exile for all the immigrants who have sought their own small place in a world apart from the chaos and exploitation of outsiders. This mentality stands in contradiction to the self-consciousness of the rulers of an empire, who see outsiders as a threat and a source of physical and cultural invasion. . . . the mentality of an islander, such as Lee, is to reject constructing the nation in terms of ethnic or national identity.” (p. 138)

This is obviously an ideal to strive towards, rather than a fact that exists on the ground today. Present-day Taiwan has a long way to go when it comes to reducing discrimination against foreigners -- and I’m not talking about white folks like me, I’m talking about the Southeast Asians who come to Taiwan seeking work opportunities and a better life and are often treated horribly by their employers.

I believe that Lee’s ideal, of a pluralistic society of people engaged in mutually beneficial relationships, is one worth striving for.

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Inversions

Inversions
by Iain M. Banks, 1998

Readers of Inversions may be divided into two groups.

Some readers, in their purity and innocence, will be new to the novels of Iain M. Banks. As far as they can tell, the scope of this book is limited to two fictional countries in a medieval world.

The Kingdom of Haspidius has a king named Quience, and King Quience has a royal court and royal torturers and everything you need for grand medieval drama. Here, we follow young Oelph, assistant to the enigmatic Doctor Vosill. The Doctor has become one of Quience’s closest advisors despite (a) having the enmity of most of the powerful men at court, and (b) being a woman in a very male-dominated society.  

Doctor Vosill claims to be from an obscure faraway land several months’ sailing away, but her high self-confidence as an independent woman in this patriarchal society, and her oddly modern medical sensibilities for a doctor in medieval times, suggest that she’s actually even further from home than she lets on.

Meanwhile, the Protectorate of Tassasen does not have a king. It used to, but he was just overthrown and replaced by UrLeyn, an officer who has abolished the monarchy and taken the title of Protector. This new military dictator, when he’s not lounging with concubines in his harem, preoccupies himself with planning war and doing on his young, innocent son. Our viewpoint character in these chapters is UrLeyn’s uber-competent personal bodyguard DeWar.

Now, I imagine the readers who encounter Inversions with no idea of what to expect will still bring some assumptions to the narrative. Generally speaking, works of fiction that take place in worlds with completely invented geographies and politics also feature events that bend or break our rules of consensus reality. Not always, but usually.

But this isn’t a world of magic -- no wizards casting spells, no curses or other supernatural events.

And yet, strange, enigmatic events are prone to happen when Doctor Vosill is around. Particularly to her enemies.

If this is your first Iain M. Banks novel, I wouldn’t blame you for echoing that one guy from Disenchantment who complained, “While I am a fan of such worlds, I just feel some more clearly set out rules for what can and cannot happen would help us…”

Putting myself in the head of a pure and unspoiled reader, I wonder if it’s annoying that Inversions barely sets out rules for what can and cannot happen. And we hear of many small-c cultures, but Inversions never explicitly states that Haspidius and Tassasen and all of their neighboring states are in fact merely minor, backwards entities on the periphery of a powerful capital-C Culture.

Of course, other readers will already know from the start that this novel is set in the remote hinterlands of the Culture universe, where Iain M. Banks had already set four novels and would go on to set several more. Or, if they didn’t already know, readers familiar with Banks will be able to guess in the early chapters.

We get heavy doses of premodern politics and statecraft, and see King Quience and Protector UrLeyn at work, and there’s a sort of conceptual title drop because while Banks seems to be setting up one ruler to be more competent than the other, these expectations are Inverted by the end. The setting of Inversions sustains the book well enough, though it’s not so interesting that I’m filled with regret Banks never returned to it. It resembles late medieval Europe in many respects, though religion has no role as a force in society (people pay lip service to something called Providence, but that’s about it). Within recent memory, a powerful hegemonic power was apparently wiped out by a meteorite, and now the international balance of power is still unbalanced. Haspidius and Tassasen are enemies, but never comes to blows directly.

Similarly, Vosill and DeWar, the two mysterious figures at the heart of their respective stories, never quite cross paths, but they clearly have a shared history with each other. Inversions is a slow-moving, atmospheric novel, the kind where you get halfway in and wonder if perhaps the proper plot has yet to actually begin. I can imagine some readers may be frustrated with the slow pace and the fact that the two plots never really intersect.

However, I personally have a fondness for slowly paced SF novels that take their time to set up their characters and universe -- Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor and Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey are two very different examples that come to mind. Banks aficionados might not consider Inversions to be an essential, top-tier work of his, but I enjoyed it.

The Dictator's Handbook

The Dictator’s Handbook

by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, 2011

I was impressed with this book. Its tone is very cynical, which I enjoyed, but in the end it is strongly pro-democracy. This book clearly explains why authoritarian regimes tend to be unpleasant places for the common people to live, and democracies are far preferable.

Bueno de Mesquita and Smith’s main argument boils down to the importance of coalition size.

In any regime, there are three groups of people. There are the “interchangables”, basically anyone with a modicum of political power, whether they are voters in a democracy or potential officials in a dictatorship. Then there are the “influentials”, the people with actual influence. In a democracy, these are the people who actually vote. (Or, if there’s bloc voting going on, these are the people who control the votes.)

Finally, there are the “essentials”, also called the winning coalition. This is the smallest possible number of people whose support the leader actually needs, in order to stay in power. In a democracy, the coalition is a sizable fraction of the population. In an authoritarian regime, it is a very small fraction of the population. This is the primary difference between democratic and authoritarian governments and for this reason the book generally refers to large-coalition and small-coalition regimes to describe the two types.

According to The Dictator’s Handbook, every difference between the behavior of democracies and authoritarian governments can be explained by the differing incentives in place for large-coalition and small-coalition leaders. In the authors’ words, “when the coalition of essential backers is small and private goods are an efficient way to stay in power, then the well-being of the broader population falls by the wayside”. (p 13) What does this mean?

In a small-coalition regime, the leader can buy the loyalty of the essentials through extravagant salaries, gifts, or encouraging them to use corruption to extract money where they can. In a large-coalition regime, the leader cannot possibly afford to buy the support of enough individual people this way. Instead, the government must spend money on public goods to gain enough support. If the coalition is large enough, these goods benefit all the people, whether they are actually in the winning coalition (in other words, they voted for the leader) or not.

In a small-coalition regime, leaders are incentivized to provide primary-school education and enough health care to keep workers in shape, but not to fund quality higher education (You don’t want to give the unwashed masses any dangerous ideas! The elites send their children abroad to be educated) or good health care for babies and elderly people (they don’t work). In a large-coalition regime, these things must be funded to keep the large number of essentials happy. This is why clean drinking water is far more widely available in democratic countries than in autocracies of similar economic status.

In a small-coalition regime, corruption takes the bite out of regulations designed to minimize the impact of natural disasters, and leaders are primarily incentivized to make sure the influentials are not harmed -- for instance, neighborhoods where favored constituencies live tend to be better protected against flooding. In a large-coalition regime, these regulations are actually followed -- this is why earthquakes tend to produce far higher death tolls in authoritarian regimes than democracies. Also, if there’s a perception that the government’s response to a disaster was feeble or incompetent, this could severely damage a democratic leader’s standing (see Bush and Hurricane Katrina), but not an autocrat’s (see Myanmar’s military leaders and Cyclone Nargis, which killed far more people than Katrina). Democrats have incentives to minimize damage and relieve the common people’s suffering. Authoritarian leaders, generally speaking, do not. Heck, if a leader is really lucky, a huge death toll might mean loads of foreign aid payments!

In a small-coalition regime, the leader can tax the people extortionately (through a variety of formal and informal means) and then turn around and provide subsidies to favored groups. In practice, this usually means a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. In a large-coalition regime, people might feel heavily taxed, but that’s because every cent they pay in tax is through official channels. What’s more, they benefit from far superior public services.

The authors make a spirited argument that democracies provide far better public services and are just plain nicer to live in than authoritarian regimes.

Several months ago, I read Democracy for Realists by Achen and Bartels (towards the bottom of the linked post), which convincingly argues that elections in democracies do not necessarily result in good governance. But the book’s authors still prefer democracy to the alternative, and in the last chapter they list some of the benefits of democracy as they see it (which I summarize in that post’s last bullet point).

Frankly speaking, I think that what Achen and Bartels come up with with pale in comparison with the defense of democracy in The Dictator’s Handbook, which gives one well-supported reason after another why a government that is forced to be accountable to the people is far nicer to live under, even when factors such as differing levels of economic development are accounted for.

The authors hold that it is advantageous for the coalition size to be very large -- in other words, they think as many people ought to be involved in selecting leaders as possible. They are not fans of gerrymandering or the Electoral College in the USA. They also think it’s a bad idea for a democracy to have large numbers of long-term residents who can’t vote, and so they strongly support all democracies liberalizing immigration laws to give immigrants a plausible path to citizenship.

None of this is meant to imply politicians in democracies are morally better! Democracies are far nicer places for the common people to live, but democratic leaders are just as cynical as despots; they just have different incentives in place.

Look at the use of foreign aid. We may have this idealistic image of aid going to help poor individuals in developing countries, but democracies know very well that most of the aid given to authoritarian regimes gets skimmed off. That’s fine with them, because the real purpose of aid is to persuade the recipient to adopt policies favored by the donor. During the Cold War, Western governments spent substantial sums of money to persuade small-coalition regimes to tilt toward them and away from Communist countries.

It’s far more cost-effective to influence small-coalition regimes than large-coalition regimes in this way. In the 2003 Iraq war, the USA would have liked to use Turkey as a base to invade northern Iraq, but Turkey was just democratic enough that the government’s price was simply too high. Letting the Americans invade Iraq from Turkey would have been highly unpopular among the Turkish people, and the government would have had to spend far too much to keep its winning coalition together. Authoritarian Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, with fewer people who needed appeasing, were much cheaper.

The authors supply plenty of case studies taken not only from governments (the rise and fall of Liberia’s Samuel Doe) but also corporate politics (the rise and fall of HP’s Carly Fiorina). There is a rich variety of other examples.

Unfortunately, I don’t know just how trustworthy these examples are. When they wrote a paragraph on Taiwan’s democratization, something I actually know something about, I found their description to be insultingly dumbed-down and inaccurate. This, in turn, caused me to wonder what other problems were lurking in other examples which I don’t know so much about. As the book relies heavily on these historical examples to illustrate its points, this is a significant flaw. That said, the main themes of the book still stand.

My description above doesn’t come close to covering the whole book. Some other bits of note:

• When we hear about authoritarian leaders borrowing huge sums of money and spending it lavishly on their families or their supporters, we might condescendingly think they are foolish and ignorant when it comes to money, but in fact they are acting entirely rationally. Debt can be left for future regimes, but their small coalition needs to be kept happy in the short term or they may find themselves thrown out of power. 

• And speaking of money, debt relief for developing countries sounds like the morally right move in theory, but in practice it tends to merely extend a financial lifeline for authoritarian governments. In the authors’ opinion, it is better for the affected countries in the long term to force profligate autocracies into financial crises that are likely to bring about their ultimate downfall.

• Autocrats do not necessarily have an incentive to provide good infrastructure for the people. It’s enough to maintain the absolute minimum to keep local economies grinding along. If the country has natural resource wealth, that’s a different story; the government of course has to keep those extraction industries humming along, but they’re there to enrich the leaders, not help the people. (Large infrastructure projects that could legitimately help the people do have their use: they are prime opportunities for large-scale corruption.)

• Encouraging government officials and business leaders to be corrupt not only makes them fat and happy, but it’s also a way to enforce compliance and loyalty. If everyone is guilty of corruption to some extent, anti-corruption drives (which are, of course, selectively enforced) become a very useful tool to eliminate whatever potential troublemakers the regime sees as a threat.

• We often hear that democracies do not go to war with other democracies. But apparently what’s actually going on is that democracies are extremely reluctant to go to war unless they are certain of winning, and will try to exhaust all diplomatic solutions first. Authoritarian governments are far more willing to go to war, and are much more likely to cut their losses and quit when things go badly. This is because a loss in a war (or just suffering significant casualties) can bring down a democratic government, but is less likely to end an authoritarian regime. Also, democracies tend to go to war to achieve policy goals; autocrats tend to fight for land or treasure. This does not necessarily give democracies the moral high ground; there are many examples of democracies picking on weak opponents, some of which have large-coalition regimes of their own. “War for democrats is just another way of achieving the goals for which foreign aid would otherwise be used.” (p 237)

• It’s awfully risky for the boss to have competent people close to him, because they could be potential rivals. In pre-modern times, employing competent eunuchs was often the solution, as they would never be acceptable leaders in their own right. That doesn’t work so well nowadays, but there are other ways around the problem; note that Saddam Hussein’s right-hand-man Tariq Aziz was a Christian, which meant he was never a plausible replacement for the boss.

• There’s an inverse correlation between the straightness of the road connecting the capital city and its major airport, and how democratic the government is. In a dictatorship, you don’t need to worry so much about the people you displace when you build a major highway. Also, a nice straight highway to the airport is useful if your regime is collapsing and you need to leave the country in a hurry.

• The process of democratization is an inherently good thing -- it’s a shame established democracies so often pay lip service to it but don’t actually mean it. Democratization doesn’t necessarily mean having a benevolent leader -- for instance (if I can trust the book’s example), Jerry Rawlings of Ghana was an authoritarian ruler who led his country down the path to democracy because it was the best option open for him to stay in power. Also, simply holding elections is a much less meaningful step on the road to democratization than is often assumed, and free elections should not be seen as the main objective. (Joshua Kurlantzick also makes this point in Democracy in Retreat.) The authors write, “Ultimately, elections need to follow expanded freedom and not be thought of as presaging it!” (p 278)