A year after publishing this essay, I still think this is an important and useful idea, and I think back to it whenever I try to analyze or predict the behavior of leaders and the organizations they lead.
Unfortunately, I didn’t end up writing any of the follow-up posts I said I wanted to write, like the one reviewing the evidence for the theory, which I think would have made this post a lot stronger. (if you want to help with these posts send me a message, though I might only have time to work on it in February)
I wrote to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, one of the authors of the book, to ask if there was any progress with the theory since this post was published, here’s his response:
We now have a paper under Review, written with one of our PhD students (Justin Melnick) in which we show theoretically that the longer a leader is in office the less is spent on the coalition, the less on public goods, and proportionately more on private goods. Additionally we show that the probability of coup or revolution decreases the longer a leader is in office. We test these new results and they are all supported in the data. The key is that leaders now gradually learn who they can or cannot trust rather than instantly as in the original theory.
That’s cool, though not as important as progress on the empirical side of estimating Selectorate and Coalition sizes.
I’d love to read reviews of this essay, both because I think it’s an important idea that’s worth discussing more, and because it’s the thing I wrote that I’m most proud of and would like to see more people engage with it.
A year after publishing this essay, I still think this is an important and useful idea, and I think back to it whenever I try to analyze or predict the behavior of leaders and the organizations they lead.
Unfortunately, I didn’t end up writing any of the follow-up posts I said I wanted to write, like the one reviewing the evidence for the theory, which I think would have made this post a lot stronger. (if you want to help with these posts send me a message, though I might only have time to work on it in February)
I wrote to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, one of the authors of the book, to ask if there was any progress with the theory since this post was published, here’s his response:
That’s cool, though not as important as progress on the empirical side of estimating Selectorate and Coalition sizes.
I’d love to read reviews of this essay, both because I think it’s an important idea that’s worth discussing more, and because it’s the thing I wrote that I’m most proud of and would like to see more people engage with it.