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Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith: The Dictator's Handbook (2011) 4 stars

The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics is a 2011 non-fiction …

Review of "The Dictator's Handbook" on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I read only the first few chapters. I had to stop because I felt a miscommunication with the author. I felt like I was reading some theorems that I hardly understood and then seeing those theorems used to prove some points. But because the theorem was not explained well enough for me to start believing, the rest of the story was just falling apart.

Okay, this review is now falling apart as well. I mean the core idea presented in the first chapters is that there are three groups that support a leader, the "essentials", the "influentials", and the "interchangeables". The size ratio of these three groups explains the politics of the place or organization. It is an okay theorem, but I feel like it's just thrown out there and then used to explain some real cases and derive some further conclusions from it. But was the theorem ever proven? Was it even put into a form that could be proven? (E.g. how to tell apart the groups objectively.) If it was, I missed that page.

I started reading the book after watching "Rules for Rulers" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs). Maybe the video just does too good a job of summarizing the book. I expected the book to explain, define, and clarify. Go from "sounds like a nice idea" to "scientific model supported by measurements". To be fair, maybe it does, just not in the first few chapters.

There is also the sad fact that it is written as a dry non-fiction. Just repeating the same ideas again and again. I wish non-fiction could be written in a captivating way like fiction is.