It’s nice to think that leaders who provide peace and plenty rule for long, happy years, beloved by the people and content to do good for them day and night. But in fact those who want to run a country for a long time are ill advised to go around promoting peace and prosperity. Not that making people well off is inherently bad for leaders; it isn’t. It’s just that promoting corruption and misery is better. That was well understood by Leopold and Mobutu in the Congo, and is clearly understood today by the governments in places like North Korea, Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan, Chad, Syria … sadly, the list goes on.
It so happens that leaders who are really good at giving their people life, liberty, and happiness are, overwhelmingly, democratically elected and therefore face organized political competition. It also so happens that they are routinely thrown out after only a short time in office.
It’s true that Leopold ruled Belgium for forty-four years, but he was a constitutional monarch who had to work within the constraints of the democratic system that governed Belgium if he was to remain in power. Yet in looking at modern democratic governments, we see that doing right by the people is no guarantee of political longevity. During Golda Meir’s period as prime minister, Israel enjoyed a 9 percent average annual growth rate. She held office for just four years. Japan’s Eisaku Sato presided over a 9.8 percent growth rate, surviving as prime minister for less than eight years. Perhaps most famously, in 1945, after five years in office and less than two months after Germany’s surrender in World War II, Winston Churchill was tossed out as prime minister of Great Britain and replaced by Clement Attlee, despite having (allowing for slight exaggeration) saved the United Kingdom itself.
Why, in contrast, do those leaders who make their subjects’ lives miserable typically die in their sleep or live out their retirement years lounging on a luxurious beach after being in office twenty, thirty, or forty or more years? It’s my claim, and it may seem controversial, that kleptocratic leaders are not inherently evil—at least not necessarily so—and that those who do a great job for their people in hopes of reelection are hardly fit for sainthood. They’re all doing the right things if they want to stay in power as long as possible. Leopold, despicable as he was, did what worked best for him in the politically unconstrained environment of the Congo, and he did what worked best for him in the constitutionally limiting environment of Belgium.
The difference between doing a good job and doing a lousy job is driven by how many people a leader has to keep happy. Why doesn’t every leader allow cronies to loot and steal the way the Force Publique did? Large-scale democratic leaders can’t—they have to reward too many people to make theft and corruption work for them. In other words, the system does not effectively incentivize that strategy. Virtually all long-lasting (read authoritarian) leaders, however, really depend only on a very small number of generals, senior civil servants, and their own families for support. Because they rely on so few people to keep them in power, they can afford to bribe them handsomely. With such big paydays, those cronies aren’t going to risk losing their privileges. They’ll do whatever it takes to keep the boss in power. They will oppress their fellow citizens; they’ll silence a free press and punish protesters. They will torture, maim, and murder to protect the incumbent as long as the incumbent delivers enough goodies to them.
The rub is that even when crony-dependent leaders want to do good deeds, they dare not pay for them with money promised to their essential supporters. Taking money from their cronies’ pockets is a sure way to get overthrown. Spend too much on helping the people, and the cronies will find someone new to take over the top spot, someone who will pay them reliably instead of “dissipating” money on the masses.5
Like autocrats, elected officials are held accountable by people who want to know, What have you done for me lately?—except, for elected leaders, there are millions of such potential backers (or detractors, if not made happy), as opposed to hundreds. Democratic leaders have to act as if they care about the masses. Their campaigns are always an arms race in policy ideas: which candidate has (or appears to have) the best ideas about health care, about taxes, about national security, about education, and on and on. When a seemingly fit democratic leader is thrown out of office, it’s generally because his or her opponent is perceived to be just a little bit better—a remarkably positive condition, particularly when the alternatives are considered.
So the explanation for Leopold the Builder King and Leopold the Monster has begun to fall into place. When rulers need the support of many—as was Leopold’s situation in Belgium—the best way to rule is by creating good policies. When leaders rely only on a few to stay in control—as was the case for Leopold in the Congo—their best bet is to make the few fat and happy, even if that means making everyone else miserable. But let’s take this a step further.
Leopold, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Golda Meir were all powerful leaders, but (to state a most obvious but important fact) they were all people, too, and no different from the rest of us. Whether in government or business, we all want to keep our jobs, we all seek advantage in the accumulation of wealth or influence, and we all evaluate our self-interest, often ahead of such lofty ideas as the national interest or notions of corporate well-being.
With this in mind, if we were to turn back the clock, could we not have made some educated predictions that Leopold, the very same man, would behave differently as the head of the Belgian and Congolese states? Could we not have surmised that Mobutu Sese Seko would rule in the fashion that he did? Or that Churchill would lose power when the attention of the British people turned to postwar reconstruction and domestic matters? Or, in a completely different setting, could we see how a corporate partnership’s structure might encourage its members to overlook fraud? And wouldn’t knowing these things ahead of time be of some potential value?
I believe the answer to all of those questions is yes, which brings me to the very purpose of my work and to the principal claim of this book: that it is possible for us to anticipate actions, to predict the future, and, by looking for ways to change incentives, to engineer the future across a stunning range of considerations that involve human decision making. That’s not to say it’s easy, or that it’s a mere matter of anecdote and reflection—there’s hard science, theory, and some mind-bending arithmetic that come into play—but it is possible, and given what we’ve seen when humans in power run amok, whether in châteaus or boardrooms, it’s preferable to letting the chips fall where they may or to saving our better ideas, regrets, and outrage for when they usually appear—that is, when they’re too late.
Who am I that you should care what I think about these big questions? And why in the world should you take me seriously as a predictioneer?
It so happens I’ve been predicting future events for three decades, often in print before the fact, and mostly getting them right. Don’t get me wrong—I’m no soothsayer and I have no patience for crystal ball gazers, astrologers, or even most pundits. In my world, science, not mumbo-jumbo, is the way to anticipate people’s choices and their consequences for altering the future. I use game theory—we’ll talk later about what that means—to do just that for the U.S. government, big corporations, and sometimes ordinary folks too. In fact, I have made hundreds, even thousands of predictions—a great many of them in print, ready to be scrutinized by any naysayer. There is nothing uncanny about my ability to predict. Anyone can learn to use scientific reasoning to do what I do, and I’m going to show you a bit of how to do it right here. But first, let me fill you in a little bit about how I got into the prediction business.