The Dictator's Handbook (20 page)

From a leader's point of view, the most important function of the people is to pay taxes. All regimes need money. As a result, certain basic public goods must be made available even by the meanest autocrat, unless he has access to significant revenue from sources, like oil or foreign aid, that are not based on taxing workers. Public benefits like essential infrastructure, education, and health care, need to be readily available to ensure that labor is productive enough to pay taxes to line the pockets of rulers and their essential supporters. These policies are not instituted for the betterment of the masses, even though, of course, some members of the masses, especially workers, benefit from them.

Education, as a means for getting ahead in life, is a big deal for any country's citizenry. Indeed, a popular refrain among many liberalminded thinkers is to extol the quality of education in otherwise oppressive states like Castro's Cuba or even Kim Jong-Il's North Korea. And they have a good point. Both Cuba and North Korea have impressive primary education. For instance a 1997 UNESCO study finds that Cuban third and fourth graders far outperform their counterparts in other Latin American countries, As for North Korea, it has a 100 percent literacy rate. In contrast, only 81 percent of democratic India's people can read and write.
²
But these facts can be misleading, or even downright wrong. That basic education is mandatory and extensive in such places often is used to argue that autocracy isn't so bad.

Rarely do any of us stop to probe beneath these observations to find out why dictators pay to have well-educated third graders—but do not carry that quality of education forward to higher learning. The logic behind political survival teaches us to be suspicious. We cannot help but believe that these public goods are not intended to uplift and assist the people unfortunate enough to live in such places. The rules of politics, as we know, instruct leaders to do no more for the people than is absolutely essential to prevent rebellion. Leaders who spend on public welfare
at the expense of their essentials
are courting disaster.

These leaders, whether dictators or democrats, are all grappling with the same question: How much education is the right amount? For those who rely on few essential backers the answer is straightforward. Educational opportunity should not be so extensive as to equip ordinary folks, the interchangeables, to question government authority. A naïve person might look at any number of awful regimes and yet come to the conclusion that, because they provide such public benefits as nationalized health care or sound primary education, they're actually better to their people than many democratic states are to theirs. This is nonsense, of course—in the vast majority of cases autocrats are simply keeping the peasants healthy enough to work and educated enough to do their jobs. Either way, literate or not, they're still peasants and they're going to stay that way.

A far better measure of leaders' interest in education is the distribution of top universities. With the sole exceptions of China and Singapore,
no nondemocratic country has even one university rated among the world's top 200. Despite its size, and not counting universities in Hong Kong, which were established under British rule before Hong Kong's return to China in 1997, the best-ranked Chinese university is only in 47th place despite China's opportunity to draw top minds from its vast population. The highest ranking Russian university, with Russia's long history of dictatorship, is 210th. By contrast, countries with relatively few people but with dependence on many essential backers, like Israel, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada, have several universities ranked among the top 200.
³
That this uneven distribution of top-notch universities favors large-coalition locales is no accident.

Highly educated people are a potential threat to autocrats, and so autocrats make sure to limit educational opportunity. Autocrats want workers to have basic labor skills like literacy, and they want their
own
children—their most likely successors—to be truly well educated, and so send them off to schools in places like Switzerland, where Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Il's youngest son and designated successor, was educated. Dictators also like to have their children educated in leading universities in the United States, and especially at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. In fact, one might almost conclude that Oxford is a breeding ground for authoritarians. It certainly is the alma mater of many, including Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, the Bhutto family of Pakistan, kings of Jordan, Bhutan, Malaysia, and even little Tonga. England's big coalition system opens the door pretty broadly to give access to higher education.

When the leadership relies on few essentials, higher education is for the children of the powerful; when the bloc of essentials is big, it is for the betterment of everyone. One of the features of the old Soviet regime that Boris Yeltsin balked at, for instance, was exactly the privileged access that children of Communist Party leaders had to the best universities regardless of their ability. Kids of loyal families were helped to get ahead. The capable children of potentially dissident families were kept down by being excluded from broad access to the best schools.
⁴

One thing that both dictatorships and democracies have in common is the special advantage insiders seem to have when it comes to
the top universities. Even places with lots of essentials seem to work that way, although the privileged access is granted by the universities and not imposed on them by the government. The president of the United States doesn't get to tell Harvard who to admit. A closer look at the system demonstrates the reasoning—Harvard and many other prestigious universities favor “legacies,” that is, the children of alumni, because such students are likely to bring the university more donations from its wealthy graduates. What may seem like a case of privileged access in an otherwise open, large-coalition system, actually reflects the internal dynamics of universities themselves.

We shouldn't fail to notice that universities in their own right constitute small-coalition political systems with a pretty big batch of interchangeables. No surprise, then, that they behave like autocracies, favoring the rich and connected at the expense of those who lack political clout. If you doubt it, have a look one day at how many administrators university presidents like to hire compared to faculty. It seems you can never have too many supporting-cast administrators whose jobs depend on keeping the person at the top happy. Faculty, on the other hand, don't depend on keeping their “bosses” happy; they depend on keeping their colleagues happy long enough to get tenure and then they are pretty free to do whatever they want—why do you think we can write this passage! There is a delicate balance to be struck, to be sure, and so successful university leaders are especially skilled at doling out private rewards to anyone who could be a threat. People who raise money for the university frequently get a percentage of what they bring in to incentivize them. Faculty who are cooperative are likely to more readily be granted sabbaticals, get research funds, pick the classes (usually small) that they teach, and so forth. So we shouldn't be surprised by distortions in merit in universities; they really are small-coalition regimes.

We might hope for a rosier picture when it comes to secondary education in places that need few essentials. Why wouldn't all political leaders favor open access to secondary school, where students learn higher levels of math, science, language, literature, history, and social thought? That's easy to answer. These are dangerous public goods that should be doled out carefully. It just isn't necessary to have lots of people
around with skills that are not absolutely required to produce revenue for the autocrat's regime. Why, for instance, would any autocrat eager to stay in power want to open the secondary schools to people who are not likely to contribute to the coalition's wealth and security? Math and science are great subjects for study in China; sociology and political science are the subjects of democracies.

The incentives to provide good health care are not so different from the incentives to provide basic education. Keeping the labor force humming is the primary concern for leaders of small-coalition countries—everything, and everyone, else is inessential. There is no point in spending lots of money on the health of people who are not in the labor force and who won't be in the labor force for a long time. One of the more depressing ways in which this can be seen is in the relation between the performance of health care systems for infants and the size of a government's winning coalition.

It seems that a lot of dictators and their essential backers don't love babies. This is true whether we think of seeming monsters like Saddam Hussein or the oft-praised Fidel Castro for his efforts to foster high quality health care in Cuba.

Saddam Hussein built lavish palaces while his people suffered under the impact of economic sanctions. The UN provided baby formula intended to offset the impact of this hardship on little children—however, Hussein allowed his cronies to steal it. The formula found its way to markets throughout the Middle East, yielding profits for Hussein, even as shortages in Iraq resulted in a doubling of the infant mortality rate. There is no doubt that Hussein was a miserable human being—it may be that his record is no better or worse than any other heartless brute. Alternately, it could be that dependence on a small group of cronies made him act as if he were a brute. Perhaps in a different place and circumstance he might have gone around kissing babies to garner political support. Perhaps Chemical Ali was right that Saddam was too merciful.
⁵
Indeed, it so happens that even in many autocracies with
reportedly good health-care systems, infant mortality is high. This may be because helping little children does not particularly help leaders survive in power. Not that they don't like a cute baby as much as the next guy, but they recognize that helping babies doesn't help them.

Cuba has the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America. It's a commendable accomplishment. However, the real question is whether we should attribute this to Fidel Castro's beneficence in building a quality health-care system, or whether he just inherited a good healthcare system from his predecessor, Fulgencio Batista.

Batista originally rose in prominence as a participant in Cuba's 1933 coup. Although a succession of other figures became president of Cuba, Batista, as army chief of staff, remained a key figure behind the “throne” throughout this transitional period. He defeated former president (under the coup regime) Ramón Grau San Martín in the free, democratic election of 1940. Batista then served as Cuba's democratically elected president from 1940 until his term ended in 1944. It is noteworthy that during this period Batista enjoyed the support of Cuba's communist party because of his strongly pro-labor and pro–labor union policies. Indeed, during his period as a democratic leader under the rules of Cuba's 1940 constitution, Batista proved to be an effective social reformer who also helped promote successful economic policies.
⁶
In short, he governed just the way we would expect a large-coalition leader to govern.

After his term expired, Batista moved to the United States. His preferred successor for the presidency lost to Grau in the 1944 Cuban presidential election. Although still in the United States in 1948, Batista was elected to the Cuban senate. He returned home to serve, and then ran again for the presidency in 1952, but was a distant third in the polls to Robert Agramonte, the front-runner, and Carlos Hevia. Seeing that he had no chance to be elected, and possessed of the backing of the United States government, pro-American Batista launched a coup before the election took place. Backed by the army, Batista now assumed the presidency as a small-coalition dictator rather than as a democratically elected large-coalition leader. Surely this is yet another example of power taking precedence over political principles.

The Cuban economy depended largely on agriculture, especially growing sugarcane, a highly labor intensive activity. As a result,
both Batista's and Castro's regimes, bereft of natural-resource wealth, had to rely on workers to generate revenue. Each did have the benefit of supplementing that revenue with a significant amount of foreign aid, from the United States in Batista's case and from the Soviet Union in Castro's. Nevertheless, to stay afloat, both needed to maintain a healthy and reasonably educated workforce. Therefore, both Batista's and Castro's Cuba needed good health care as well as good basic education.

We should not expect vast differences in the public goods provided by Batista after he became a dictator and those provided by Castro. To be sure, their ideological songs were radically different, but they both depended on a small clique to keep them in power. In both cases, the military was essential and so were loyal bureaucrats. So, putting aside the window dressing each used to justify their form of rule, stripping out the ideology, they were running similar regimes. The main difference in our terms was that Batista had a small coalition and a small selectorate once he overthrew the constitution. Castro ran a rigged-election regime, so he, like Batista, had a small coalition, but unlike Batista his nominal selectorate was pretty big. Of course, the real Cuban selectorate under Castro, the influentials, was probably no bigger than Batista's real selectorate. So we should anticipate that both of them were good at producing good health care and good primary education. And the facts bear out these expectations.

Although a headline fact is that Castro's Cuba has Latin America's best infant mortality rate, the details reveal that the relative quality of infant care has declined. Cuba had Latin America's best infant mortality rate under Batista as well as under Castro. In general, small-coalition regimes gradually run their economy into the ground through inefficiencies designed to benefit the leader and essentials in the short run, at the expense of longer term productivity. How quickly welfare would erode depends in part on what foreign aid comes in to offset the economic woes brought on by small-coalition governance. We should see trends indicating declining quality of health care in Cuba under Castro compared to Batista, not necessarily because one was more civic minded than the other, but because time inexorably diminishes the quality of life for ordinary people in most petty dictatorships.