The Dictator's Handbook

The Dictator's Handbook — summary

The town where the city manager made $800,000

In 2010, the Los Angeles Times broke a story so absurd that most readers assumed it was a typo. The city manager of Bell, California, a small working-class town wedged between freeways, was earning $787,637 a year. His salary kept climbing until it crossed $800,000. The chief of police was making more than the chief of the LAPD. The part-time city council members were pulling in around $100,000 each for a few meetings a month. Bell was one of the poorest places in California. The median household income was less than $25,000. And yet the people running it were paid like Wall Street executives.

How did this happen? The numbers tell the whole story before you read a single word about ethics. Bell ran its elections at strange times of year, off the cycle of state and federal votes, so almost nobody showed up at the polls. A few hundred ballots could decide who governed. The city manager, Robert Rizzo, did not need to charm a town. He needed to keep about half a dozen people happy. He bought their loyalty by making them rich, and he funded that loyalty by quietly raising property taxes and writing his own paycheck. When the scandal broke, eight people were charged with misappropriation. Most readers focused on the personalities. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith look at Bell and see something else entirely. They see the universal logic of power, working in miniature, exactly the way it works in Pyongyang, in the Vatican, in Versailles, and in your last company's boardroom.

That is the unsettling promise of *The Dictator's Handbook*. It claims that almost everything we find baffling about politics, from why corrupt leaders survive for decades to why CEOs keep failing upward, can be explained without invoking culture, ideology, or the personal evil of any individual. It is a book about arithmetic. Once you see the equation, you cannot unsee it.