Leaders facing domestic problems find it advantageous to blame outsiders, typically the United States, because casting blame elsewhere diverts attention from internal government failures — Chavez and Ahmadinejad use this to explain economic misery they would not want attributed to their own governance.

Autocrats can be more adventurous in war because they are judged on delivering goodies to cronies, not policy performance — so they fight in a broader range of circumstances, are less likely to add resources when losing if it would cost their cronies, and survive defeat as long as they keep paying cronies and aren't removed by a victorious foreign rival.

The median Chinese person does not have meaningfully more information access despite economic growth — gains accrue disproportionately to the urban wealthy, while most Chinese remain poor in remote areas; the real question is whether the growing information threat from urban centers exceeds the regime's ability to offset it through expanded corruption opportunities.

Putin allows fair vote-counting and multiple parties precisely because he is confident that controlling the media (manipulation of information) is sufficient to ensure his electoral victory — making fair counting unnecessary to suppress.

Democratic leaders are highly selective about wars, choosing fights they believe they will almost certainly win, because losing a war nearly guarantees they are deposed — and when a war goes badly they increase effort (double up) because winning is the public good that matters.

Genuine democracy requires three things beyond vote-counting: freedom of assembly, a free press, and ballots counted by a nonpartisan neutral mechanism — and a very large percentage of countries said to have moved toward democracy lack at least one of these, with international observers mistakenly certifying only the accuracy of counting while ignoring the information and assembly stages.

China would likely repeat a Tiananmen-style crackdown today because they learned that 'nothing happened' — foreign investors care about the predictability of governance, not its nature, so the economic consequences of repression were brief and quickly disappeared.

The World Bank is itself a small-coalition political entity whose loan decisions are made by representatives of guaranteed-risk banks and recipient-country governments who profit from continued flows — so it does what is incentive-compatible for its constituents rather than advancing welfare, and exists fundamentally to make loans.

Hitler did not fully mobilize the German steel industry early in WWII (unlike WWI) because he feared losing the loyalty of comfortable middle-class supporters if he stopped producing consumer goods — driving his need for slave labor and the Ukraine — and only cranked up the war effort late when defeat clearly meant being deposed, while the Allies mobilized fully from day one.

Iran's nuclear program is not a high-risk gamble because Ahmadinejad does not believe the US poses a credible force threat — the US military is stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, a strike would provoke hard-to-contain retaliation, and his statements are costless 'cheap talk' in game-theory terms, with North Korea serving as a model of building a device without being struck.

Genuine democracies tend to adopt policies that lead to prosperity, so locking in democracy in transition periods would also reduce the need for ongoing foreign aid and lower the prospect of war.

Japanese media obtain their information only from government ministries and are therefore not truly free, because they would lose access to government information if they reported independently.

The 'winning coalition' is the subset of the selectorate whose support is essential to keep a leader in office, in exchange for which they receive benefits — corruption opportunities, rent-seeking, and bribes.

The larger the winning coalition, the more efficient it is for leaders to rule by producing public goods rather than private rewards, because there are too many cronies to bribe individually — coalition size acts as the implicit price of private goods, which de Tocqueville observed.

The implicit tax rate is higher when the coalition is small: in North Korea, with per-capita income around $600, the average tax rate is about 10%, whereas in the US a person with comparable income pays nothing — so the comparable-income person in North Korea pays a much higher rate to feed the leadership's rent-seeking demands.

When the selectorate is very large relative to the winning coalition, the incumbent need not spend as much to keep supporters loyal, because a defector has a low probability of being essential to a rival — leaving more discretion for the leader to keep resources for himself or pursue clever or dumb policies.

The 'selectorate' is the set of people who have a meaningful say in choosing leaders, and it varies greatly in size — the electorate in a democracy, the generals and senior civil servants in a military junta, or roughly 300-400 essential people in North Korea.

Democracies cut aid to elected governments whose policies they dislike (e.g., Hamas in the Palestinian Authority) because voters prefer cutting money to inducing better policies over funding abhorrent ones — making it anti-democratic for a re-election-seeking leader to fund foreign agendas their constituents reject.

Foreign aid is given in exchange for policy concessions that benefit the donor government's democratic constituents, not the recipient's citizens — because if the recipient would follow those policies anyway, there'd be no need to pay them — making aid harmful to recipient citizens while helping autocrats supplement bribes.

Aid programs have actually been successful, not failures — but what they succeed at is keeping recipient policies aligned with donor desires and keeping autocrats in power, not the publicly stated goals like reducing poverty.