agretlent. i do not endorse the idea. i don't say anything about whl gher we g- what the meetingf this with a contemporary interpretation of the constitution is. as i say, not a lawll r. i will leave that for the lawyers to fight over, but at least we have a g to ide to the debate which airlines me, i don't know how many of you -- you must be good. i will we g- i have notes. the numbers that text. this is a big contrhat ersial thing. a lot of leaders still like them. i can never understand why. ..

other outside agitators were in other words did madison go to new york or pennsylvania or was it -- did everybody realize that we only have local people speaking? >> no outsiders spoke. no, no.

there was one of controversy in massachusetts one. what elbridge garrey who had been a delegate refused to sign who attended a and some people of like mind pointed him to speak and to just to give some information there was a big fight over this and finally he went home. no, no, only locals, the people of the state with making this decision. but people in the galleries were watching what was going on. morris of pennsylvania went to the virginia convention is very clever man a jingle about what happened in the virginia convention of course i quoted 11. i loved it. [applause]

>> my apologies. [applause] ♪ coming up next, book tv presents "after words" and government program or we invite a guest hosts to interview authors. this week bruce roi bueno presence is clobbered of work on the handbook on beyond behavior and good politics. the new york university professor explained how autocrats and dictators are able to maintain power by doing whatever is necessary to please

the coalition that will support their regime. they explore their theory with associated press national security editor anne gearan. >> host: hello, i am the anne gearan. we are going to talk today about a new book, the dictators handbook which as long understand builds on work that both of you have done over a number of years in some previous political science work. can you explain how the handbook is different from your previous theories about how dictators and autocracies function differently than democracies and who is this book primarily gained? one >> guest: well, the prior work, academic work, the logical political survival its 500 page book that led 150 pages

calculus. there is no calculus in this book. there's no statistics in this book does not even altar boy in this book. that's an important difference. >> host: there's a little math, it? well there's the politically interested audience to people who read quote "the new york times," the journal last, people like that, the earlier want to read 150 pages of calculus. is that your description? >> guest: we've tried here in which to translate different difficult material into some straightforward and easy to understand because our arguments are very general. they are about how political organizations come hell or religious organizations and corporations and how charities or any kind of organization works and so the purpose of the

book as we spend a lot of time talking to students and fellow academics and of course we never talk about the following functions increasing and all the calculus terms so we thought we decided to write the book and it was a book that for itself and it is incredibly easy because we have this wonderful idea about how politics works and it's based on self-interest and constraints that people have to operate within the system and who is going to get their way and who isn't and it is a book story after story just fell into place and we have written it for a general audience. >> can you explain the theory of self interest that goes back to some of your earlier work is it always the case that a leader will act primarily in his or her self-interest and tromping every of your? >> guest: this is the absolute moment of motivation so people have different things they would

like to do and if they have some discretion than they want to advance good public works projects. they may want to push to some kind of religious preference over something but first and foremost you can't do any of that stuff until you secure yourself in power and take care of the people who keep you in power so that's what has to be done first. before anything else people take care of that. we don't deny there might be a level of people who care about others first are not the ones that crush their heads that have gotten to the top in the first place. >> host: how far across the political spectrum does that theory of paramount the self-interest extend? i can understand in a country in which there is a personality one leader who gets to be essentially made of the decisions that there would be an easier model to sustain and it might be in the country will

know all the way on the other side where there is a democratically elected government. how far does that stretch? >> guest: the theory applies to all governments indeed to all organizations. what the theory tells us is that leaders will need to obey to the extent that they can five rules. the problem that they have which is what you are deluding to is in and depending upon the nature of the political system were, the amount of constraints they face in a changing the way the system operates is greater or lesser. so as we see it, leaders want to depend on as few people as possible to keep him in power. they want those few people to be drawn from as large a pool of available people less possible. they want to tax people as much

as they can, subject to the limitation that they are not trying to tax so much that the economy collapses on their watch and not so much that they form a rebellions there is an optimum level. they want to make sure to pay those few people they need properly so those folks will want to defect to somebody else, not a penny more, and they don't want to make the mistake of spending money on people who are not the essential to keep them in power it. so as we see it a dictator contrasts with of the leader what people think of as a dictator someone who depends on very few people drawn from a glut of the large pool of people, for example linen invented a universal adult suffrage system in which everybody knew that the elections were rigged but there was a small probability for any individual that they could get into that little group of insiders that wasn't the royal

family as it had been and could get payoffs and benefits and as the set of people you depend on gets bigger bribing people it's expensive if you have to bribe 100 people, not so hard. if you'd like to million, it's better to start producing the effective public policy in the bribery. as the coalition you depend on gets bigger, the loyalty to the leader gets weaker because the saturating of the pool so there's not substitutes. the quality of the policy gets better and the leader gets thrown out of the office more quickly. so the leader depends on a small coalition just like the dictator but depends on a small coalition drawn from the small group for example of generals and a dictator depends on the small coalition potentially draw on from the huge collection. so the leader doesn't have as much loyalty that day overthrow

much more frequently than the guy that was the same little collision would draw from a poor where everybody knows they are easily replaced. >> host: those ariana all of lot of rules. you've lifted the five main ones, but it almost sounds as if a good durable dictatorship is a bit of an accident of history. how can all of those things so easily be reproduced in so many countries? >> guest: one of our technical papers will is about how it is that some governments people to be space and some governments eve of to be dictatorial or autocratic. it's actually very easy to construct a dictatorship. take an example we use this analogy in the book. suppose we are in a room of 100 people and five of us have guns. the five of us are going to run that room if nobody else has a

gun. so dictatorship, creation of dictatorship is generally about controlling violence, controlling the opportunity to engage in violence and not being hesitant about using it. democracy is about people very hesitant to use it because we will throw the rascals out. we go with the ballot box instead of the bullet. it's much harder to construct democracy and dictatorship. >> by your model, the locker ceo to because the six democracies' a limited operation. i mean, you can't do all of those things over and over and over again in a democracy because as you say it's going to throw the bums out, but it also just sort of isn't built that way, right? if you can't bribe that many people, you can't effectively run that large an organization of people get to vote on how the

organization is being run. >> guest: we have to have an executive that makes decisions, so we have leaders we choose to retain them thinking the things we like and the basis of the theory is what does it mean to do things that we like and things we like depend upon how many of us get the picks. this is the basis of the argument. the democracy is many people so in the u.s., to be president if you need about 35, 34, 35 million votes is enough to win the presidency and in the country we might think of as a democracy but that is a country of the 300 million people. everybody is eligible and if you can pick the right to votes and states can when have the electoral college since that's what we need to win so that's always a thing to remember is the president gets more votes to but how many does he need and we can sort of see that congress moment between the republican and democrats tailor towards rewarding a smaller section of society and rewording let's move

away from politics to talk about business enterprise and we might sort of wonder why is it the wall street firms have been paying out huge bonuses. people want these guys want to rip their livers out. people feeding from the public purse to pay big bonuses and what's the reason here? ll, most publicly traded corporations run like autocracies. it is a relatively small number of board members, senior executives, institutional investors certainly not much more than the hundreds who are really important to stay in the top. so how do you reward a small number of people? you give them enormous bonuses. you don't run them by giving public goods so we see that everybody would like to get cut down the number of people they are beholden to because that lets them to get fabulous wealth to the small numbers of supporters.

>> host: is that why for example ceos and board members get paid lots of money but so do college big ten football coaches? >> guest: yes. the highest paid government employee in the federal level in the united states is the coach of the army football team. >> host: really? >> guest: by far. it's not even close. he makes a very important point about democracy. democratic leaders have the misfortune of meeting a lot of people to support them but they work as hard as they can to reduce that number best people, so the converse is one of the least popular institutions in the united states and yet the congress as an incumbent is a 95% probability of reelection. why is that? that's because the politicians have chosen their voters.

the voters are not choosing the politicians. they choose by gerrymandering. they've rigged the system so they don't really have to answer to so many people. well, we have a favorite rhetorical question. journalists would have us believe president obama wants to raise taxes on the rich and that the republicans want to cut benefits to the poor. we prefer to express that differently. president obama wants to raise taxes on republican voters, and republicans want to cut benefits to the democratic voters because that doesn't cost of their constituents anything. it helps to enrich their constituents at the expense of the other guy. >> host: the subtitle of your book is quite bad behavior is almost always good politics. can you talk about perhaps some of the exceptions to this overall pherae?

why is it almost always? >> guest: once in a blue moon and i mean once in a blue moon, it becomes in everyone's interest to become a more inclusive society. so there's actually the sort of one of the fascinating things slightly one of the harder things to get the grasp of is what is the court want to expand because i'm thinking the sort of development of the institutions. when do the aristocrat's go along with wanting to bring people in? and we find that the aristocrats like to do things like hunters they are small concentrated systems but once we get away from that and start expanding the one to keep increasing, they want to bring more and more people in so it's always in their interest. the leaders nearly always want to contract society. the coalition can go either way and the people of course outside of the system who are privileged want to make the system more and more space and inclusive, so

relatively few times will leaders ever want to switch from being sometimes contract to marry wanting to be repressive. the few times they have to adopt the policies is when they are sort of bankrupt. it's a real problem with running their repressive society is it doesn't encourage people to do any work if people want to work you can tax them or pay your cronies. so we find a lot of examples of when we see liberalization, when politics actually do good things they do good things because they can't pay off their cronies without doing good things and so they start to liberalize, and we can see the arabs burning, the lead of into getting those problems is egypt's economy is doing very badly, an economy based on largely tourism means you have to have an educated population so you start bringing more people in and getting educated and reform carries on. do they manage to get ahead of the board and they can keep liberalizing enough's always so

that they be for the protest and give enough away to the people and eventually the sort of resource poor country that is left to its own devices would democratize soa am nice examplee talked about in the book is ghana. some jerry rawlings comes in and tries to have the people's socialist revolution and is cracking heads left and right and jacking up the army to keep them allele and then he runs out of money. the country is completely broke. years of dictatorship have destroyed it he goes to the soviets and say give me money. we are short of money. no one will give you money. what do you have to do? you have to turnaround to go to people to do good things and the people became in power and eventually he couldn't stop them and they could demand more and more good things. he is a leader who in hindsight looks like the poster boy of liberal economic reform. the realities he cracked heads while he could afford it only

did good things when he was forced to. >> host: than in a way he was an example of the entire year or give you a theory, right? it was in his self-interest to change. so he figured out how am i going to stay in power, alan my going to keep this whole makovsky operation running of the way i did before the the best i can do for me. >> guest: that's why almost always a bad things do what give you the best chance to stay in power and once in awhile that means doing good things. >> host: you mentioned the air of spurring. what did hosni mubarak to wrong? he's a dictator for three decades and ran one of the most successful countries in the middle east, board of the policy in the middle east which did some good things like signing a peace deal with israel. what did he do wrong? >> guest: an excellent question.

let me preface this by saying we use the fury and the dictators handbook may 5th, 2010 we predicted in a public lecture that hosni mubarak would probably be gone in a year. >> host: okay. excellent. >> guest: the first thing he had no control over, he got old. dictatorial leaders are in deep trouble under three conditions to start with. they've just come to power. they don't quite know where the money is. so nobody quite trust that they are going to be paid off properly so they shop around. they survive the first couple of years your golden for a long time until either the banaa lead problem, you are believed to have a terminal illness. this is what did in marcos, this is what they did in meshaal, this is an abysmally or also along with a terminal illness your cronies know you are no

longer a reliable source in the future or you are very old. very old as a terminal illness. and so the again know they are not liable. the first problem comegys 82. a second problem, his economy didn't have a vast amount of natural resource wealth. he depended on the two sources of books, to sources of wealth. one was comfortable, tourism. tourism requires a relatively well-educated population. a lot of english speakers and french speakers. these are people who have enough education they can think independently and because the come together in business associations began to organize the free assembly very bad for the dictator so he had the undergirding of that and foreign

aid. foreign aid is a great way to pay off your cronies if you are not generating an effective economy. president obama announced when he promoted his afghan policy after that he announced he was cutting foreign aid in egypt and deep with a few days media a few weeks of his announcement to the foreign aid to egypt that he egyptian foreign minister for the first time since 1979 referred to israel as egypt's enemy. if you are a military leader perhaps sitting there thinking the guy is getting old and decrepit and he is not able to manage his relationship with the united states well enough to keep the money flowing most of that money is coming to leave the military leaders. now it's getting cut off. maybe we ought to look around for somebody else.

maybe we should hedge our bets so now you are sitting there on the sidelines one of these relatively well-educated people, unemployed, paying double the price for food, and you're thinking you know the military is probably going to sit on its hands and hedge their bets because the money is drawing up this is the time to rebuild. as we saw it, the perfect storm in egypt completely consistent with the argument in the book to evaluate that. we had done some statistical analysis on the country's two or three years down the road back then were most likely to face regime shish. israel, to nisha, morocco and jordan were near the top of the list in fact egypt was at the top of the list.

there was little he could do about the aging problem. use it he did good things like peace with israel. as we look at it, peace with israel is not a policy he favored or a policy we could see very clearly now that the egyptian people favored. he needed to have something to sell to the united states for money, something that we would tell you enough to pay a lot more. some of a gun, peace with israel. >> host: and protect him. >> guest: exactly and we did. >> host: >> guest: we can see the beautiful expression that it's not the policy were people brought along that we should love our fellow man across the border. it's a campaign to educate tolerance towards the alternative religion. israel was still on the grassroots behind the treated as an enemy of this is precisely what the government would want because it's the people like

julie were already like these you can't sell we are going to cut these as a public policy so we don't write books, we still see egyptians take books and these are good people because we want to encourage the trend and sell that, and we can sort of see that taking the u.s. aid is not a popular policy so the survey people do a big worldwide global studies and it's amazing the countries they pick out as the ones having the most anti-american feelings are the ones with huge amounts of u.s. aid. the dictatorial countries not liberal democracies, they are the countries taking enormous amounts of aid to undertake u.s. policies highly unpopular so the pakistanis, they hate the americans, the afghans to the americans, the egyptians hate the americans because we pay their leader to give them money to pay off the military to keep the people down to adopt a policy that they don't like.

>> two things about egypt in this entire discussion here we haven't said the word to peery square. adis separate and i guess of early independent from your theory of why egypt was primed to fall and mubarak was prime to fall that there would be popular demonstrations and that i think is the world wide idea of why he fell. >> guest: it's not quite separate from the fury. so, take a step back and ask yourself why people were willing to demonstrate to of both and they weren't five years ago. >> guest: they had less to lose because things were going badly in egypt for them and they had more to gain because exactly

the foreign aid was cut in half the would have had a reason to believe that they will not face a vast amount of oppression which they would have faced five years earlier. so from the way we think about this from the pherae perspective they are doing what is called the backcourt induction. you dhaka on the street you are thinking do want to demonstrate? no. i'm going to get my head bashed in. educated, do i want to demonstrate? not this year. but now i see the situation is changing. the loyalty was the military has been shaken. maybe they will sit on their hands. the risk of getting my head - dennis still there but its lower. if it gets low enough for enough people it's worth it to others of surf nothing happened in these folds in the military did not bash their heads. the mother to be evin protected them from the police who did try to bash their heads more people to to the streets.

as it is exactly this calculation is the leader vulnerable. people would always like to overthrow dictators. the problem that the faces most of the time it is a very risky thing to do. when the moment arises they see that moment. >> host: in the egyptian case you identified a few minutes ago the first to recognize this and act on it is the military which is the backbone of the country and certainly was a big part of the recent mubarak was able to stay as long as he was. now the military is nominally in charge the announced elections only in a charge they are a charge the announced elections for november. do you think that the elections let chollet proceed in egypt or will the military make a second calculation that this holding pattern is probably better than the risk of an election?

>> guest: i think you are right to say this patent will continue because we have an election so we believe election start to be truly meaningful. so they are unlikely to be a large amount of free press. there is the reinstitution of the sort of painted martial law that people pick up on the streets and given the short rush by the courts and what top for protesting so there's not going to be a large scale demonstration. they are going to use repression against religious extremist groups threatening the stability. so we are not going to see particularly fair election. one of the advantages we discussed earlier of having an election particularly doesn't count for much is an election is a great way of telling anybody to rise to the top and anyone can be brought in inside the government and become a person of importance but precisely because a lot of people can be brought in everyone who is inside can be bought more

cheaply said it is the duty of holding elections so we are not actually big believers in forcing elections on the countries where they are not really going to be meaningful. so pakistan might have been better when it continued to be under the military and in both cases the reality was only to a small section of society and in one case that small section doesn't have replacement so the leader has to work hard in order to keep the army very happy whereas then you've got an election doesn't work well. it's a substitute mechanism to let everybody know that you are easily cut and replaced it therefore they will do the dirty work that you asked them to do for a small amount of money. they are more loyal. >> host: i'm going to follow up on something there, the musharraf example. so here is a guy that executes his successful military coup, takes over the country it

becomes, for his own self-interest, a u.s. partner is not an ally compost 9/11. sue dear is otherwise they are going to, you know, indeed my country, blow me up, whenever, better thing to do is to help the americans go after terrorists. first thing the americans do after seeing things you and giving him to zillions of dollars you have to take off your uniform and hold elections. was that a strategically poor choice for the united states because musharraf was more useful than the current government is? >> guest: i'm going to answer that into ways. it was a strategic error for the united states? yes. do politicians in control in the

united states differ from politicians elsewhere in the world? no. what we mean by that? you're interested in what is good for them and if it happens to be good for the united states that's terrific and if it happens not to be good for the united states but it is good for them, that, too is terrific. so their calculation is how do my constituents respond to this, not how does the grand strategy respond to this. how does this affect the country's welfare fight for six years down the road but how do my constituents react? my constituents don't like our backing military dictators so they are going to react well to this and promote that policy. >> host: sticking with pakistan for that, there is a popularly elective the government in pakistan backed by the military generally assumed to really run the show. does that model still fit in

your theory? i mean, can you have essentially a front man? can you have somebody out there who is the person with whom the united states deals directly zardari in this case who is mentioned in your book somewhat at my ear for his ability -- >> to steal. >> host: [laughter] there you go. >> guest: tongue in cheek. >> guest: yes, he's good at it. >> host: perhaps you could talk about that. but is he a dictator? does he fit your model? >> guest: this is the duty of the space systems that have evolved. we have elections, so we like to think of the classic one man, one person, one vote. this is the way we like to think about the elections functioning but in many cases we find people actually implicitly in the voting in big blocks. so, if you were to think of the

pakistan case in the rural area, a politician would show up and they would make an implicit deal with of the village village elders and the bad stuff, they wouldn't be getting much because there are other people they can buy them for. but they are going to get a few jobs and you're going to go that way and there is going to be some crumbs are going to go down to that village. so delivering those votes for politicians are certainly going to win a particular area is going to get a few crumbs so people go along with the village elder tells them to do. so when we have got people isolating the systems, politicians are very good at playing them off and give you a few little things. it's not much the if you don't vote for us we are going to get elected any way and we will give you nothing. so during the flood last year what we are calling in and now him and i are looking at the natural disasters and one of the things he saw was the distribution of aid. it was vastly towards zardari's

supporters. so the probability of you getting any assistance greatly increased if you came from regions that supported parties that were part of his collection. king from the opposition, you got nothing. so just literally the simple things we think of as handing out blankets archer evan bayh these politics and things. we see the same thing in the u.s. it turns out he not federal disaster lead we can predict which districts. this has become a sort of burgeoning power of technical literature of where do we distribute the aid and it turns out the elections are just as important as the wind speed. but not to the same extent that it is in pakistan. in pakistan there were instances where if we break here we can run the water through the state into the desert and save hundreds of the villages. unfortunately the guy whose land was going to go through he sort of went up on the bridge and said this isn't going to happen so we see bad public policy and

redistribution and we are saving the few chosen even though the system is normally nondemocratic. >> guest: one of the things that we are hoping to cure people of and the dictators handbook is the distinction of the categorical regimes, democracy, autocracy, monarchies. for instance, we talk about a winning coalition drawn from the pool of people. all the democracies have the characteristic that the selected is very large, the pool of people coming and the winning coalition is relatively large but highly variable in size. britain to control the prime ministership become a candidate in the two-party race needs to win half of the parliamentary districts with half of the votes so they don't need 25% of the

vote, 75% of the vote properly distributed could have gone the other way. and the united states we estimate you can control the house, the senate and the presidency with as little as 10% of the vote. what that means is that when you are doling of rewards, you are focused on who you absolutely have to have, not just who backs you. in other systems you need much closer to a simple majority of the vote and the various all over the place. in pakistan needed very small percentage of the vote to control the country and i think we estimate i don't know if their somewhere around 10%. that fundamentally changes how much the public good you do and how much corruption you engage in. they are going to be more corrupt and we are. will we be as corrupt as north korea? no, no. triet kim jong il depends on me the 200 people out of almost 20 million people. it could be much more corrupt. but zardari is in a position to

steal a heck of a lot and to allow his coalition of backers to steal a lot and that is why they are loyal to him. they are not loyal to him because they think he has better policy ideas that they are loyal to him because he's making sure the blankets deutsch to them and not to the other person flooded but didn't vote the right way. >> host: so, continuing the sort of u.s. centric line of questioning here just for a minute, what the u.s. now wants from zardari and pakistan is two things basically. one, keep a lid on terrorism so it doesn't become an external threat to the united states within afghanistan or elsewhere. and a subset of that specifically go after these groups that primarily operate along the afghan border.

is that -- meter of which pakistan has gone foley just by promises. so, is it in missouri's interest to stay in power to keep the -- to follow the rules of the dictators handbook to do any of those things? >> guest: just before the dictators and the guy wrote a book called the prediction near's game and the ultimate chapter of that book is about how much aid it would take the united states come from the united states to the pakistanis to pursue the taliban and so forth. it's about one paid 5 billion a year and the book makes the point that for that amount of money we would get the optimal effort. we shouldn't expect them to wipe out the taliban. we shouldn't expect them to wipe out al qaeda and pakistan because if they do, the money stops. we have no reason to give them

money. that's the objective of the fix the problem as much as a lark didn't work hard and educating the egyptians to love israel because the money would stop flowing. as, the zardari government is nuanced but the if zardari government is working reasonably hard at tracking down and killing or capturing the taliban and al qaeda leaders. in february of 2010, they killed the number to telehealth -- tel dan leaders. they were delivering enough to keep the money flowing. they have an additional problem they have to recognize and again it goes back to the theory. there is not a pakistani leader. so, zardari has his set of cronies. the isa has its own interest and the rest of the military has other interests said he has to leave the coalition together. he's not been very good at getting the isi on board so the

question is what would it take to change their behavior and what they are willing to pay because their longer-term interests is to get us out of the way and in line with these guys. >> host: it is essentially operating organizationally the way you've layout. zardari is irrelevant. they have to figure out how war we strategically going to be able to continue our power base and to be able to call the shots to the extent possible and if afghanistan and india, so they are looking out. >> guest: they're looking out for them and doing a good job of it unfortunately. >> host: you talked when we were talking about egypt about the sort of gradual willingness of people to take a risk to demonstrate against the

government to go against the government period. how does that contrast in libya where we did see the protests taking place and in syria now we see the protests taking place in the face of really horrific government violence that people are willing to brave. >> host: >> guest: so libya is a place where we look at that by deleting one of the five rules that went too early. he made a classic mistakes. he was too nice to the people. we find that hard to believe because we live in the united states we're all beholden to 35 million people so he has to keep a lot of us happy. the market off he didn't have that problem yet compared to some of his neighbors even comparatively mice, so the gideon space substantial or education than the neighbors in yemen and saudi arabia and egypt

and jordan and syria. he didn't need to educate the people in most of the oil was extracted by foreign workers if they protested he sends them home and gets more. it's a big mistake to make. in 2005 the country mentioned he had the biggest restrictions on the press freedom. by far and hurt terms of how his draconian restrictions were. in 2010 he was tied down to arabia and close. all of the others had put in more restrictions than him. it allowed people to start to talk and the was a big problem. then we get a little spark in the suddenly people say the regime is not as strong as we thought so that's more information that we think maybe it's safe everything is going wrong and so people took to the streets. he had given the opportunity to organize. he hadn't broken enough, he hadn't been smashingly enough heads and people took this as a sign of weakness.

it turned out i don't think that he was that week but the military stopped him actually being able to deploy the people who were willing to break heads. he had phenomenal loyalty there were still people backing him even though he's the kid remote towns now but he still has a few fanatics supporters staying loyal to the end. >> guest: this isn't a happy view of the world. >> guest: let's pick up from here the sad thing is this has been a really poor implemented policy by the west because the reality is the next curve leaders are going to come in and have on the frozen assets and have billions of dollars pouring in the oil revenue will come back. the country's awash with weapons. the people are going to fight to become the monopolist in terms of power who can buy the most loyalty and get the weapons pointed devotee of and then from there they are going to call out the supporters they don't need and we are going to be back in the same type of system that we

had before. we are going to have a leader who is going to be very hard to buy because he has lots of wealth and he's going to be brutal to the people. a different set of people are going to be persecuted people persecuted under the former colonel but i don't see anything different changing and he made an error of being too kind. it's unlikely the next guy is going to make this a mistake. >> guest: this ury in case looks different and indeed we are quite pessimistic about the future of libya. we are optimistic about the future syria. there are places we are optimists. in the syrian case, so he was looking at an economy with 9% deficit annually relative to gdp. so the very big. we complain that our -- the hour way, way ahead.

and so, he was facing the economy again with some educated people unemployed. he has natural resources wealth that unlike libya's was rapidly declining. foreign aid to syria was slowly drying up. so all of the economic conditions were bad news for him at making the risk more attractive to people. he has been brutal in his response to that risk. people have continued to fight, and because syria doesn't have the national resource wealth and if it is also not flooded with foreign aid when he finally falls, then syria will probably become a reasonably liberalized place if it is flooded with the intentions it's very bad news because centiliters would be in the position to the bribery that is necessary to assure

themselves a bit no need to listen to the people so we have to hope the foreign aid doesn't come rex that after performance benchmarks are met tough free assembly etc and free speech for. you can borrow against promised aid for your you don't get a lump. if you meet those conditions to get it promised again. escrow for the next year until you are entrenched in the free speech, free assembly. you have those in place it is tough for the leaders to be impressive. >> host: so is your advice then to president obama that he not rework any of these governments to which in what civilian maybe slightly military flavor government emerged in egypt and a potential follow-on

keep your distance? >> guest: it's complicated by want to come back to that. in general, yes. in general, one of the big effects of foreign aid is to significantly increase increase the probability of an oppressive dictatorial regimes these in power has a significant impact on the survival of dictators. so egypt is more complicated because all that remains true, the president has to plead that the hope against the impact of costly towards israel on the reelection prospects. so basically it's not national interest it's the politicians interest, so in that case one of two things has to happen. we either are going to have to pay a lot bigger price to israel if for a simple verities and election and the muslim

brotherhood in egypt and alignment with the military controls the country the price of maintaining good relations with israel goes way out so we have to decide will we pay that much higher your price is that worth it in terms of domestic votes or do we leave it to the israelis and others to manage the problem on their own? my guess is we will pay the price. >> host: we only have a minute left. you have the last word in an, alistair. you've given a little a device to president obama in an article in foreign policy this month. what is the single worst thing president obama code to end the couple of years he's got left? according to your theory? >> guest: you use the term worst. we always want to go back to the worst talking about the u.s. people as a whole, we talk about him himself.

so he could spend all his time and resources focusing on making the u.s. great. that might not be such a great policy for him or for the democrats come the next election i want to clarify your question. if he wants to do the best for him which is what we expect he will come in and according to the incentives he had come he should be doing. he will be trying to shore up the democratic voters so he will be trying to make sure we have benefits for unions. we get more education for the teachers because teachers and union workers are both democratic. how are we going to fund these things? we want to tax the rich. why they tend to be a republican voters so we are going to bring money and redistribute it out so the best thing for him would be to focus on making his supporters the ones he needs as happy as possible. the republicans of course want him out of office so they are going to try to do exactly this

stuff and cut the benefits. we could support what you're going to see democrats and that puts them have tax breaks for the rich and the republicans. >> guest: alistair an bueno de mesquita i look forward to the book and again, the chance to hear more about it as you i guess it comes out -- >> guest: today. >> host: today. okay, great. thank you very much. >> thank you.

>> doctor, you've written a few books on archaeology. why is it important for people to learn history through archaeology? >> it is often said that history is written by the victors and we read about such things as major battles, military campaigns history talks about those who one. it talks about the famous and the great events. archaeology on the other hand talks about ordinary people. we dig up the remains of soldiers on average states of the forces and military encampments. it's the real lives of real people that archaeology gets half. whereas history is traditionally been brightest towards the famous people. the important people.

welcome to an archaeologist everyone is important. when i dig up military camps, i am digging up the activities. the things people were doing 360 days out of the year, not what they did on the one or two days they were fighting during the year. so archaeologists love to say it is everybody's story that we try to tell. >> you've spoken about how you the multiple kinds of ideology. how did you transition to the military archaeology of the battlefield? >> i was originally trained in the central mexico. it's fun and exciting to dig in other countries. but gradually i started to get to the historical sites in america. things like early factories. the gun factory many years ago. i've dug mills, but somewhere along the way the national park service asked if i would start working at the saratoga

battlefield. i never worked on the military sites before. i did note so that when you dig up a bit early america people in general are drawn to certain types of things and other things maybe they don't find quite as exciting. it was 1985 that they first started to dig a battlefield a and i was amazed to find that everybody was fascinated by the early military history and it's not just memorizing facts and minimizing bedle stretchies. people want to actually go where the action was. they want to stand where the soldiers stood and where the battle was going on and they want to see and touch the things of the past. a bayonet, part of the muskett. people want to physically connected with evidence and traces for the past war or battles. the moment i started digging at forts and battlefields to many

more people started signing up for magazines started requesting articles and programs books on degette for its. i never realized that level of interest exists here in america for all the old military campaigns and the old force a and so they realized i never planned to build a fort in my life but all of a sudden people cared. people wanted to visit and wanted to connect with past soldiers and for 25 years now, i have dug up the remains of american's battlefields and encampments trillion to find out with their lives were really like. >> there's a lot of interest as you mentioned in the battlefields and in the forward to your book it states that some type of compromise to the

material record. what does that mean? >> i'm afraid the battlefields are such famous popular sites that the moment a battle was over, any time in the past, local people would descend to pick up souvenirs and in no time at all those musket balls and the bullets and bayonets would be picked up and carried off. also if people live nearby, if the remains of a ford were starting to crumble or starting to lot, the local citizens and townspeople would go there, grab anything they could walk off with water is bricks, fireplaces, timber and take them off and use them for their own houses. so, the military sites are compromised all the time of people wanting souvenirs and wanting things to recycle for their own use. so by the time the archaeologist

arrives there is only a fragment of what was once there had a military site. >> culberson of the things you found that people wouldn't expect you'd find on a battlefield and what type of things are held to those stories? >> i think that people expect us to find would be things like muskets and gun parts and it is interesting. i see lots of with the students get excited in finding a musket ball but i think the more unexpected things are usually the personal items. things a soldier has on their body. buttons, buckles, cufflinks, anything of a personal nature you suddenly see the bottom and real lives a real person was wearing that and you are connecting with that soldier from the past. i think unexpected things we find are the fancy things.

i.t. we assume everything is sort of standard military issue. everybody's wearing the same thing, fighting with the same weapons. all of a sudden you find something nice and one that comes to mind is fort orange, the city in lt, new york. fort orange was an early dutch force, and eight is on the frontier in the 16th everything would be simple and crew. well, they had found the fanciest glass vessels. the nicest things on the frontier. soldiers, people living in for its did not just half crude simple out of date garbage if you will. they had nice things. they wanted to bring the best things from home from stila mother country, from europe with them to the frontier of america. when