Rulers for rulers transcript excerpt: 12:12 to 16:53

Rulers for rulers transcript excerpt: 12:12 to 16:53
https://www.youtube.com/embed/rStL7niR7gs?start=733&end=1013&version=3

Democracies are better places to live than dictatorships, not because representatives are better people, but because their needs *happen* to be aligned with a large portion of the population.

The things that make citizens more productive also make their lives better. Representatives want everyone productive, so everyone gets highways. The worst dictators are those whose incentives are aligned with the fewest citizens, those who have the fewest keys to power.

This explains why the worst dictatorships have something in common.
Gold or oil or diamonds or similar. If the wealth of a nation is mostly dug out of the ground: it’s a terrible place to live because a gold mine can run with dying slaves, and still produce great treasure.

Oil is harder, but luckily foreign companies can extract and refine it without any citizen involvement. With citizens outside this cycle, they can be ignored while the ruler is rewarded and the keys to power kept loyal.
Thus we live in a world where the best, smartest democracies are stable,
the worst, richest dictatorships are stable, and in between is a valley of revolution.

The resource-rich dictators build roads only from their ports to their resources and from their palace to the airport, and the people stay quiet not because this is fine or even because they’re scared, but because the cold truth is: starving, disconnected, illiterates don't make good revolutionaries.

Now a middling dictator without resources must, as mentioned before, take a large amount of wealth directly from his poor farmers and factory workers.
Thus two roads won't do, and so he must maintain some minimums of life for the citizens.

But keeping the work-force somewhat connected and somewhat educated and somewhat healthy makes them more able to revolt.

Now understand: the romantic image of the people storming the gates and overthrowing their dictator is mostly a fantasy. If you run a middling dictatorship, the people only storm the palace when the army *lets them* to remove you, because you lost control over your keys and are being replaced.

This is why after 'popular revolts’ in middling dictatorships, the new ruler is often the same as the old, if not worse. The people didn't replace the king, the court replaced the king, using the peoples' protest they let happen to do it.

The very things a benevolent dictator wants to build to cross this valley take treasure away from the keys to power and make the citizens more able to revolt, often ending in a stronger ruler less likely to build bridges and more loyal to his keys.

On the other side, the best democracies are stable not just because the large number of keys and their competing desires makes dictatorial revolt near-impossible to organize, but also because the revolt would destroy the very wealth it intended to capture: the high productivity of the citizens.

Plus: those helping the would-be dictator in a democracy know he plans to cull key supporters once in power. That’s what’s a coup is.

So potential key supporters must weigh the probability of surviving the cull and getting the rewards, versus the risk of being on the outside of a dictatorship they helped create.

In a stable democracy, that’s a terrible gamble: maybe you'll be incredibly wealthy, but probably you'll be dead and have made the lives of everyone you know worse. The math says no.

Being on the right side of a coup in a dictatorship means having the resources to get you and your family what the peasants lack. Health care, education, quality of life — this is what make the competition for power so fierce.

But in a democracy most already have these things, so why risk it? So the more the wealth of a nation comes from the productive citizens of the nation, the more the power gets spread out and the more the ruler must maintain the quality of life for those citizens.

The less, the less.

Now if a stable democracy becomes very poor,  or if a resource that dwarfs the productivity of the citizens is found, the odds of this gamble change, and make it more possible for a small group to seize power.

Because if the current quality of life is terrible or the wealth not dependent on the citizens, coups are worth the risk. When democracies fall, these are usually the reasons.