A story in the Wall Street Journal illustrates some of the dictator’s incentives and trade-offs. It shows that it is not easy to be a dictator, how his country cannot be innovative and rich, and how it is not fun to live there even for somebody happy to serve the regime (Ann M. Simmons, “Spy Mania Sows Fear Among Russia’s Scientists,” October 2).
The illustration focuses on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. A dictator needs a powerful army, a fortiori if he intends to invade foreign countries. A powerful army has always required state-of-the-art technology, which is now based on advanced science. Recall the chilling 2018 video where Putin showcased his new hypersonic missiles with an animation of one whizzing around the earth to bring a nuclear bomb to what looked like Florida. Hypersonic missiles, which travel at more than five times the speed of sound—Putin even said 20 times, which is even more impressive if you don’t know that the cost of lying for a dictator is low. Hypersonic missiles have since been used in Ukraine. They don’t seem to be available to the American armed forces yet. Their development requires advanced physics in the field of high-speed aerodynamics or hypersonics. At the beginning of Putin’s reign, his regime financed research in this field and encouraged its scientists to participate in related scientific conferences in the Western world.
The dictatorial regime now claims that its scientific advances may have been partly leaked during these international conferences, although this is probably part of the two signals it wants to transmit: first, to external enemies, actual and potential, that the Russian government has new missiles more effective than any other in the world; second, to its scientists, academics, and apparatchiks, that any loyalty lapse will be severely punished.
Individuals being cheap and the rule of law inexistent, an easy way for the dictator to achieve these goals is to charge with treason the very scientists and academics who did the tyrant’s bidding. Since 2018 and especially since the invasion of Ukraine, a number of scientists who were involved in hypersonic research, even only at the theoretical level, have been arrested. Two pictures accompanying the WSJ story show two of the detained old men: physicist Anatoly Maslov, now 78 and recently condemned to 14 years in prison, looks with incomprehension and terror as a Russian praetorian manipulates his handcuffs; physicist Victor Kudryavstev looks despondent behind bars in a “court” hearing in 2019. Other documented cases are cited by the WSJ. Trials for treason are held in secret and their consequences are not pleasant.
The Wall Street Journal also reports another reason a dictator can arrest innocent individuals:
The suspicion among some observers is that the Russian security agencies are pursuing these arrests in part “to convince themselves, and to convince Putin, that Russia has really advanced scientific achievements and that spies from all over the world are trying to steal them,” [Russian lawyer] Smirnov said.
Within the deep state (the real deep state) of a dictatorial regime, information is unreliable and misinformation is an essential part of the game.
Note another consequence of these persecutions: Russian scientists are now afraid and have a strong incentive to avoid meaningful research in areas somehow related to military affairs. New scientific and technological developments are less likely to help Putin or his successor strengthen their military force and attack foreign countries, which would be a good thing, of course. Yet, future Russian dictators may, like Stalin or Kim Yong Un, continue to reign over poor and despondent subjects.
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A vision of the Stalin-Putin syndrome: Turning against those who served you
READER COMMENTS
David Seltzer
Oct 5 2024 at 12:12pm
Pierre: I suspect Putin will devolve into paranoia much like Stalin who initiated the Great Purge of 1937. Stalin accused, often with out evidence, many thousands of various political crimes. They were murdered or forced into labor camps. The purges included the Red Army high command which had a disastrous affect on his military. Seventy -two years after the October Revolution, the Soviet Union collapsed. How long will Putin’s tyrannical regime last?
MarkW
Oct 6 2024 at 7:57am
The best explanation of the purges I have heard is that precisely because those being purged were ideologically committed communists, they were potentially untrustworthy as Stalinists. I do not mean that the communist true believers were the ‘good communists’ — they were quite horrible too. But Stalin feared and purged those committed to the ideals because he wanted only those who committed to accept and follow the Party’s demands without question.
Craig
Oct 5 2024 at 12:39pm
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-five-cases-tied-disruptive-technology-strike-force
Nothing new under the sun. Russia protects military secrets, so too does the US government.
“Yet, future Russian dictators may, like Stalin or Kim Yong Un, continue to reign over poor and despondent subjects.”
Possible of course but make no mistake about it Putin’s rule has coincided with a major increase in Russia’s per capita GDP. They’re much poorer than the West but they are much wealthier than they were.
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 5 2024 at 1:35pm
Craig: One must be prudent with this. If you look at Russian GDP per capita in current US$, you’ll see that the fast and regular growth period under Putin stopped before 2010, and that today’s GDP per capita is lower than it was in 2013 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2023&locations=RU&start=1988&view=chart). The picture is a bit more favorable when you look at the data in constant US$, (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?end=2023&locations=RU&start=1988&view=chart), but we still see a much slower growth since Putin became an overt dictator. A similar picture is provided by the data in Purchasing Power Parity, which correct for prices of non-tradable goods (housing and many other services) (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?end=2023&locations=RU&start=1988&view=chart). Moreover, these data must be analyzed keeping three caveats in mind. The first one is the distribution of income, which likely favors the oligarchs and other friends of the regime as opposed to ordinary people. The second is the portion of GDP that is coercively transferred to the state (under the form of oil revenues or conscripted young men, for example). The third one is that dictators have an incentive to lie with GDP figures.
Craig
Oct 7 2024 at 10:38am
Interesting, as usual. I have often pondered why Germans might go along with Hitler or otherwise not object sufficiently to his rule and one thing I would suggest is that if its 8/31/1939 the average German, obviously not Jewish individuals, is probably better off.
Robert EV
Oct 12 2024 at 1:14pm
I presume that dictators lying with GDP figures would compound over time. How long can they keeps this lying going before it becomes obviously implausible?
Fazal Majid
Oct 5 2024 at 1:24pm
Not just scientists and engineers whose work has military applications. Stalin purged medical doctors (mostly but not exclusively Jewish) for a ludicrous “Doctors’ Plot” to assassinate Soviet leaders. Then there is the tragic fate of Nikolai Vavilov, who was imprisoned and ultimately killed for flouting the pseudo-scientific but ideologically favored theories of Lysenko.
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 5 2024 at 2:47pm
Fazil: You’re right to point that out. Dictators are always suspicious of their collaborators, minions, and allies. They always want to signal that disloyalty will be harshly punished– and it does not matter if the wrong man is punished provided it is not discovered. In my review of Friedrich Hayek’s The Mirage of Social Justice, I wrote:
Jose Pablo
Oct 5 2024 at 5:25pm
The worst get on top. That shouldn’t be surprising.
“Leader” is a dirty word. Zarathustra already warned us against the people bearing gifts. “No, thank you. Mind your own business, Sir”
As Hanno Sauer, puts it: “A species that kills its most [aggressive] members over hundreds of generations creates a strong selection pressure in favor of peacefulness, tolerance and impulse control. We domesticated ourselves.”
It’s a pity that our species “aggression management mechanism” shows so many failures.
Paraphrasing Sauer, Humans are to Putin as golden retrievers are to wolves.
Mactoul
Oct 6 2024 at 2:37am
Impulse control is not a quality lacking in leaders. I don’t think Stalin or Putin lack impulse control.
Leaders are defined by a will to power. To bend other people’s will to their own. It is not by force they pursue power but by fraud.
Jim Glass
Oct 7 2024 at 1:04am
As to “reactive” aggression, yes. Put 100 chimps in a subway car and watch the blood flow out from under the doors. For humans it’s just another day going to the office. But there’s another type of aggression, “predatory” aggression, and nobody tops us humans at that.
One can see reactive aggression in a cat when it feels threatened, hisses, and shows its claws; predatory aggression when it slinks low through the grass before putting its fangs in some prey creature’s neck. Predatory aggression is organized and calculated, and humans have been the unchallenged grand masters of that through our whole evolution (The Origins of War 500,000 BC–3,000 BC).
And William von Hippel tells us: ‘Remember, we humans have evolved through a history of unrelenting warfare, with victors killing and enslaving the losers — and all of us alive today are descendants of an uninterrupted chain of victors’.
Monte
Oct 7 2024 at 1:27pm
Yes, imperfect information is the x-factor that prevents an autocracy from fitting neatly into what Caplan described in his review of Ronald Wintrobe’s The Political Economy of Dictatorship, “a standard intermediate-microeconomics problem”:
Mactoul above asks if a dictator’s incentives and behavior can be modeled economically. Partially (as Pierre explains), but any model attempting to describe the behavior of a dictator, it seems to me, would be incomplete absent a psychological profile.
A good starting point is to think of a dictator as a psychopath. But more nuance is needed to fully capture the authoritarian’s rationale, because he also tends to exhibit narcissistic behavior. Some psychologists believe that psychopathy and narcissism exist on a spectrum and that somewhere in between lies what they call “malignant narcissism”:
Understanding a dictator’s behavior ultimately requires an interdisciplinary approach that combines economics, psychology, and political science.
Robert EV
Oct 11 2024 at 8:09pm
This is absurd on its face. Slaves and psychophants both have living descendants, and people aren’t carbon copies of their parents in terms of motivations and values, and have never been so.
Mactoul
Oct 6 2024 at 2:07am
But why does a man want to become a dictator or a leader more generally?
What are his incentives that make a man want to exert power ie make other men obey his will and not their own wills?
Can these incentives and behavior be captured in an economic model?
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 6 2024 at 11:54am
Mactoul: The answer is yes: see https://www.econlib.org/the-economics-of-violence-a-short-introduction/.
Jim Glass
Oct 7 2024 at 12:35am
Why do people compete to achieve social status and economic wealth? It provides immense benefits as to survival and reproduction. It’s baked into our genes. Remember, the good side of such competition has driven the creation of everything we have in our world.
Because they want to be the best people they can be. And one must have power to do any good. With no power you can’t do anything. So you need to do whatever needs to be done to get and keep the power you need to do good. And it’s good to do it. Not kidding.
Stephen Kotkin, the author of the definitive biography of Stalin, tells us that the Soviet Communist leaders were true believers that they were making a better world all the way through. Starving the Ukrainians and filling the gulags were just what needed to be done to do it. He says Western leaders came to assume that the Soviet leaders were just cynical power mongers using Marxist propaganda to manipulate their masses. But after the USSR fell and the archives were opened we discovered they really believed their Marxism. They really thought they were the good guys. Kotkin reports that today Putin and his siloviki — murdering gangsters that they are, with their stolen million$ hidden in the West — when they face the flag at state functions, get genuinely weepy-eyed emotional, true patriots!
I’ve seen letters written 1939-1945 that are heart-rending as they describe the desperate sacrifices that the writers themselves and their most loved ones are willing to suffer to make the world a safer and better place — only to find they are signed by the Most Very Bad People. Yikes. Everybody thinks they’re the good guy. Nobody gets up in the morning and thinks: another day of doing evil.
Every human being has desire for status (influence, power), meaning & purpose, and respect from others. If you discover that via unique talent, hard work and good fortune you can get *all* of those in *great* amount by becoming The Leader, of course you are going to double down and do even more of whatever you are doing! And you are a good person. So what you do doubling down as The Leader is good. QED.
The road through all 12 Circles of Hell is paved with honest good intentions.
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 7 2024 at 10:50am
Jim: You write:
You are in good company. Hayek quotes Germain poet Höderlin to that effect: “What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.”
However, this is only true for the minority of individuals who are saints or those, more numerous, who have been conned into the rulers’ service as minions, praetorians, or perhaps compagnons de route. People who die for ideologies (including nationalism) come from there. The rulers who are killed die in the pursuit of their self-interests. From this perspective, ideologies are mainly rationalizations. Complete altruists exist (at least in certain roles, like the mother vis-à-vis her children), but explaining how the world works requires less romantic hypotheses.
Have a look at Hirshleifer linked to above. The power of economic analysis is that it explains the world by self-interest, without having to smuggler sainthood in. Individuals who have a comparative advantage in trade pursue their self-interest on the market, those who have a comparative in violence or intrigue become rulers or politicians.
It is true that, in a free society (or one becoming free), an ethic of reciprocity develops (see Buchanan on this) that can become part of most individuals’ preferences. See also de Jasay’s “ethics turnpike,” which goes in the same direction. But these attenuated forms of sainthood represent a minimum ethics that cannot be compared to run-of-the-mill political ideologies or state propaganda.
Matthias
Oct 6 2024 at 3:38am
I agree with most of what you said. However, you seem to imply that the hypersonic missiles are useful.
To clarify, those hypersonic missiles seem to be about as useful as the German Wunderwaffen as the end of WW2: relatively speaking pretty small bang per buck.
Warren Platts
Oct 9 2024 at 5:24pm
Hypersonic missiles were invented by the USA in the 1960’s. Then we called them “fractional-orbit vehicles.” If the U.S. chooses not to deploy them, that’s because there is no need to. Nor is it the case that hypersonic missiles can’t be shot down. Russia’s vaunted hypersonic missiles are being shot down in Ukraine by old school American Patriot missile defense systems. It is interesting to note that the arrests of the Russian scientists were announced the same week that the first Russian hypersonic missiles were destroyed.
Ahmed Fares
Oct 9 2024 at 8:07pm
The story you linked to has been debunked as Ukrainian propaganda. There is no defense against a hypersonic missile.
Fact Check: Ukraine Didn’t Shoot Down Russia’s Kinzhal Hypersonic Missile
Recently, Iran fired roughly 180 ballistic missiles at Israeli air bases. The Israeli media reported that most had been shot down. Then people started posting cellphone videos of missile strike after missile strike. Then came the satellite data.
Nevatim airbase, the mostly highly protected military installation in the world, showed 32 missile strikes. Those missiles went through 4 layers of defense.
Ahmed Fares
Oct 9 2024 at 8:19pm
After I posted my comment, this came up as the next article in my RSS reader.
I posted the whole article but here is the link which contains a video:
Patriots Have A Very Bad Time…
Warren Platts
Oct 10 2024 at 12:45pm
Sputnik and Scott Ritter?!? Good Lord, Ahmed.. I’m no expert, but I’ve attended a couple of aerospace conferences — the kind where certain sessions are only open to proven American citizens — but I know experts in the field whom I trust. In truth, it’s not hard to shoot down a hypersonic missile: it’s just a matter of predicting the possible locations at a given time. This is called the battlespace. Hypersonic missiles are fast, but that’s also a curse because it makes them less maneuverable. Thus if you know the velocity at t = 1, then the faster the missile goes, the smaller the keyhole it can fly through at t = 2. Then it’s just a matter of getting your interceptor in front of that window in time. I have no doubt that these Russian scientists are getting arrested not for spying for the Americans but because they overpromised Putin and sold the Russian military a super-expensive, pretty much worthless bill of goods!
Ahmed Fares
Oct 11 2024 at 3:39am
A 9-minute CBC video explaining the difficulty of shooting down a hypersonic missile. The quote below the link from the video is around the 3-minute mark.
Russia’s new hypersonic missile: impossible to shoot down? | About That
Warren Platts
Oct 11 2024 at 5:11am
And I could point you to a long twitter thread written by Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA, that explains in detail how to shoot down hypersonic missiles, except it’s been deleted, no doubt because it was an ITAR violation. And even if you were right that hypersonic missiles are invisible to radar (which I don’t believe), they’d still show up as bright as the Sun on infrared sensors. Please stick to economic theory & Islamic theology & leave the missile stuff to the rocket scientists!
Monte
Oct 7 2024 at 1:31pm
Yes, imperfect information is the x-factor that prevents an autocracy from fitting neatly into what Caplan described in his review of Ronald Wintrobe’s The Political Economy of Dictatorship, “a standard intermediate-microeconomics problem”:
Mactoul above asks if a dictator’s incentives and behavior can be modeled economically. Partially (as Pierre explains), but any model attempting to describe the behavior of a dictator, it seems to me, would be incomplete absent a psychological profile.
A good starting point is to think of a dictator as a psychopath. But more nuance is needed to fully capture the authoritarian’s rationale, because he also tends to exhibit narcissistic behavior. Some psychologists believe that psychopathy and narcissism exist on a spectrum and that somewhere in between lies what they call “malignant narcissism”:
An interdisciplinary approach, I believe, serves us best in trying to understand the
Understanding a dictator’s behavior ultimately requires an interdisciplinary approach that combines economics, psychology, and political science.
Ahmed Fares
Oct 7 2024 at 2:09pm
Being that discretion is the better part of valor, I was debating whether or not to wade into this Putin hate fest. But wade in I must.
Those of you who support Ukraine should know that you have common cause with ISIS insofar as ISIS has been supporting Ukraine since at least 2015. That’s apart from the whole Nazi thing.
It gets worse.
On August 21, 2024, Putin walked into a mosque in Chechnya and kissed a Qur’an. The man handing him the Qur’an was Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the Chechen Republic.
That means that by being against Putin, you are against the people fighting Islamic terrorism.
It gets worse.
Ramzan Kadyrov is also a follower of Sufism, which is my religion. We are the Jedi.
That means that if you are against Putin, by extension, you are against the Jedi. Which means you are anti-Jedites.
As an aside, you know that Jedi are real. Right?
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 8 2024 at 10:58am
Ahmed: You write:
Absolutely not! This would only be true in a collectivist, tribal, or sectarian perspective–with no rational foundation. Perhaps there is something in your reasoning that I don’t understand, but the following syllogism is invalid:
I am against X doing A.
X also does B.
Therefore I am against doing B.
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 8 2024 at 12:00pm
Ahmed: Allow me to add one principle, still in the works, that explains in large part why the West grew rich and why, nowadays, so many people want to immigrate to the West instead of to Russia or Muslim countries. Putin or anybody may kiss or burn the book he wants, provided the copy of the book belongs to him or its owner agrees. An interesting book in this context is Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth. I recommend reading the whole book, not only my review.
Ahmed Fares
Oct 8 2024 at 1:25pm
Worldly people emigrate in one direction, spiritual people emigrate in the other direction.
The American Men Seeking the American Dream—in Russia
MAGA voters are moving to Russia ‘because it feels like America during the 1950s and 20% of local women look like supermodels’
Ahmed Fares
Oct 8 2024 at 2:00pm
Enrichment is a function of divine providence, and the people who experienced the Great Enrichment would find it harder to see the kingdom of God, which is the whole point of Christianity, i.e., Jesus’ injunction to seek the Kingdom of Heaven. And you think that is a good thing?
From an Islamic perspective, this Hadith (Tradition):
Hadith on Wealth: I do not fear poverty for you, rather riches
As an aside, I was raised in poverty. There were a couple of years in my life when my first meal of the day was at 5:30 or 6:00 in the evening (that’s in Canada, by the way). I consider those years to be a blessing because when money came to me later in life, it had no effect on me.
Poverty leads to spiritual enrichment. It’s how God draws you closer. Also, bad health. This from Rumi:
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 10 2024 at 11:15am
Ahmed: I think it’s even better than you think. Since “spiritual people” emigrate on magic carpets, they don’t even bid up the price of flights. (My apologies for offering only Wikipedia as a citation.)
Ahmed Fares
Oct 10 2024 at 2:13pm
As usual, Pierre, you miss the obvious.
The carpets weren’t flying through the air, that was added for people who don’t understand how travel actually works, including travel by plane. Here’s the relevant quote from the Wikipedia article:
Here’s the Qur’anic reference to the teleportation of the throne of the Queen of Sheba from Yemen to Jerusalem in the twinkling of an eye:
Ibn Arabi spends three pages in his book making sure you understand that the phrase “twinkling of an eye” is just a figure of speech. There was no passage of time from when the throne disappeared in Yemen and when it appeared in Jerusalem.
In case you forget, neither time nor motion exist. This from a Calvinist:
A quote from some philosophers on continuous creation:
Creation and Conservation
So no, objects don’t travel through space, they’re just being created in a different place which looks like motion. When the jump is large, people call it a miracle. We say it is the “rupturing of the habit” because God normally makes the jumps small.
Ahmed Fares
Oct 10 2024 at 2:31pm
As an aside, we Sufis were doing physics, and you thought we were talking about flying carpets.
The following link opens a pdf file:
Causality Then and Now: Al Ghazali and Quantum Theory
Robert EV
Oct 11 2024 at 11:43pm
But Putin supports Iran who attack Israel, the land of the chosen people of Yahweh. Which means that Putin hates Allah.
As a non-serious aside, were I a religious person who believed in Yahweh, I’d assume that both Christianity and Islam were created by Yahweh as Tests of Job for the entire Jewish people.
Ahmed Fares
Oct 12 2024 at 3:01pm
Philosophers argue that the ideal state is one run by a king, i.e., a dictator, because you only have to educate one person instead of having to educate the rabble.
Further down in the same article is democracy:
A reference from another article:
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