not let himself off from. there is a famous and a resurgence in the marine corps. he tells his jen marines when they complain about the salaries, and the marine corps you get to salaries peabody get a financial salary in the psychological salary. the financial salary sucks, but the psychological salary is knowing that you are part of our core. i don't need to repeat it. he says that psychological salary is honor. ..

associated press national security editor anne gearan. >> host: hello. i am anne gearan. we are going to talk today about a new book, the dictators handbook which as i understand builds on work that both of you have time them over a number of years in some previous political science work. can you explain how the dictators handbook is different

from your previous theory about how dictators and autocracies function differently than democracies and whom is this book primarily aimed? >> guest: well, the prior year work, academic worked, the logical political survival 500 page by the calculus there is no calculus in this book there is no statistics in this book there is not even alger burr in this book that is a difference. >> host: there is a little math, right? >> guest: this is a book aimed at intelligent politically interested audience, people who read "the new york times," "the wall street journal," the economist, people like that. the earlier work was aimed at the three other academics who want to read 150 pages of calculus. >> guest: that would be

exactly fair. we have tried here to popularize and translate difficult material in the straightforward and easy to understand because our arguments are very general. the art about how political organizations, how religious organizations and how corporations and charities and any kind of organization works and so the purpose of this book is we spend a lot of time talking to students and fellow academics and of course we never talked about the fellow increasing and the calculus terms and we don't get the statistics of the time as an example so we decided to write the book and to be honest it was a book that by itself was incredibly easy because we have this wonderful idea about how politics works and it's based on the self-interest and constraints people have to operate within the system and the jostling of who is going to get their way and who isn't in the was a book that story after story we felt took place and so

we've written it for the general audience >> host: can you explain more but the fury of self-interest that goes back to some of your earlier work? is it always the case a leader will act primarily in his or her self-interest tromping every other -- >> guest: that's the absolute dominant motivation so people have different things they would like to do and if they have some discretion they may want to push some religious preference over something but first and foremost you can't do any of that stuff until you secure yourself and power and take care of the people who keep you in power so that has to be done first. before anything else people take care of that. we don't deny there might be people who care about others first but they are not the ones who crush the heads that got them to the top in the first place. >> how far across the political

spectrum does that theory of paramount self-interest extend? i can understand in a country in which there is a cult of personality one leader that essentially gets to make all of the decisions that would be an easier model to sustain than it might be in a country where say there is a hunta or on the other side of democratically elected government. how far does that -- >> guest: the pherae applies to all governments, indeed to all organizations. what the theory tells us is that leaders need to obey to the extent they can five rules. the problem they have that you are deluding to is that of the depending upon the nature of the political system, the amount of constraints the face in changing

the way the system operates is greater or lesser, so as we see leaders want to depend on as few people as possible to keep them in power. they want those few people to be drawn from as large a pool of available people as possible they want to tax people as much as they can subject to the limitation that they are not trying to attack so much that the economy collapses on their watch and not so much that the formant a rebellion's there's an awful level. they want to make sure to pay those few people they need properly so that 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. so as we see it, a dictator contrasts with a hunta leader

would people think of as a dictator somebody who depends on very few people drawing from a relatively large pool of people, for the example, when an invented universal adult suffrage system in which everybody knew the elections were rigged but there was a very small probability for any individual that they could get into that little group of insiders. it wasn't the royal family as it had then. and they could get payoffs. they could get lots of benefits. as the people you depend on get bigger, bribing people gets to be too expensive if you have to bribe 100 people, not so hard. it's better to start producing effective public policy and the libraries as the coalition that you depend on gets bigger the loyalty gets weaker because the saturating more of the pool so there's not a lot of substitutes a bit and. the quality of the policy gets

better and the leader gets thrown out of office so a hunta leader depends on a small coalition just like a dictator but a hunta leader depends on a small coalition drawn from the generals and a dictator depends on the colish and potentially drawn from a huge coalition. so the hunta leader doesn't have as much loyalty the face the coups and overthrow much more frequently than seeing the little colish and withdraw from a big pool where everybody knows they are easily replaced. >> host: those are an awful lot of rules. you've listed the five main ones but it almost sounds as if a good durable dictatorship is a bit of an accident of history and how could all of those things easily be reproduced in so many countries. >> guest: one of our technical papers is a about how it is some governments ebal to be space and

some people 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 if nobody else has a gun. as a dictatorship, creation of dictatorship is generally about controlling violence, controlling the opportunity to engage in violence and not being hesitant about using at democracy is about being very hesitant to use it because we ull. we vote with the ballot box instead of the bullet. it's much harder to construct democracy and dictatorship. >> host: by your model democracy is a much more self limiting operation, why?

i mean, you can't do all of those things over and over and over again in your democracy because as you say over throw the bums out. but it also just isn't built that way. you can't bribe that many people coming can't effectively run that largest organization if people keep getting to vote on how the organization is being run we have to have an executive who makes decisions we have leaders we choose to retain them thinking things we might the basis is what does it mean to do things we like and it depends how many of us get to pick. this is the basis of the argument so people in the u.s. to be present of the 3534 or 35 million votes we might think it was a democracy but that is a country of 300 million people

and if you can pick the right to votes and the right states you can win have the electoral college and that is what we need to win so the thing to remember is the president gets more votes but remember how many does he need, and we can sort of see that in moment between the democratic steeled towards reporting a smaller section of society than rewarding everybody. if we take the system down to an even smaller system when we are talking for example we could go -- let's move away from politics and talk about the business enterprise and we might sort of wonder why is it that the firms have been paying out huge bonuses and they want to read their livers out people were feeding from the public to pay the bonuses they will run the corporations there's a relatively small number of board members, senior executives, institutional and investors often entertainers and certainly not much more than the hundreds

who are really important to stay at the top. so how do you reward a small number of people? you give them an enormous bonuses. you don't run them by giving a public goods so you see that everybody would like to 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: board members get paid money so do college, you know, big ten football coaches, it? >> guest: right. the highest paid government employee at the federal level in the united states is the coach of the army football team by far. it's not even close. democratic leaders have the misfortune of meeting a lot of people but they work as hard as

they can to reduce that number of people so the congress is one of the least popular institutions in the united states and yet individual member of congress as an incumbent is a 95% probability of reelection. that's because the politicians have chosen their voters, the voters are not choosing the politicians. they choose the voters by gerrymandering. they read the system so they don't really have to a answer to so many people. and who do the reword? we have a favorite rhetorical question. journalists would have us believe president obama wants to raise taxes on the rich and 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 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 why devotee of year is almost always good politics. can you talk a little bit about perhaps some of the exceptions to this over all 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 that's one of the fascinating things slightly one of the harder things to get the grasp of so what does the court to expand, does the court and i'm thinking sort of the development of institutions when would the aristocrats go along with wanting to bring people in and we find the aristocrat's find things like hunters very small concentrated systems but once we get away from that and we start

expanding the actually want to keep increasing, they want to bring more and more people in and so it is always in their interest. the leaders nearly always want to contract society. the coalition can go either way and the people of course who are outside of the system who are privileged they always want to make the system more and more space and more and more inclusive. so relatively few times will leaders actually ever want to switch from being in some sense contract jury, the few times they are actually going to have to adopt those policies is the willingness for a bankrupt. the problem with running a repressive society if people don't work you can tax them and pay your cronies so we find a lot of examples on where will we see liberalization and politicians actually do good things crops because they can't without doing good things the

arabs bring getting into those problems was egypt was doing very badly and the economy that is based largely on tourism which means after of an educated population and start liberalizing and bring people to get educated, reform carries on. some get ahead of the ball and they can keep liberalizing enough always so that day before the protest and so they give enough away to the people and eventually a sort of resource poor country that is left to its own devices so a nice example one might be taught in the book is gana so jerry comes in and he tries to have a people socialist revolution he's cracking heads left and right and jacking up the army to keep them loyal and then he runs out of money the country is broke and the dictatorship is destroyed. he goes to the soviets and says i want to be a socialist, give me money. we are short of money. no one will give you money.

what to the kafta? to turn around and go to the people to do good things and the people became in power and he couldn't stop them and they could demand more and more good things and he delivered more and more good things. he is a leader who in hindsight looks like the poster boy for liberal economic reform. but the reality was he cracked heads while he could afford it he only did good things when he was forced to. >> host: in a way than he was actually an example of the entire or give you a theory, right clacks it was in his self-interest to change, so he figured out how am i going to stay in power and keep this whole operation running not the way that i did before the best way i can do for me. >> guest: that's why almost always bad things always get the chance to stay in power and once in awhile that means doing good things. >> host: you mentioned the arabs bring.

what did hosni mubarak to wrong? he was a dictator for three decades, she ran one of the most successful countries in the middle east a bulwark of the u.s. policy in the mideast which did good things. what did he do wrong. >> guest: let me preface this by saying the fury on the dictators handbook on may 5th, 2010 we predicted in a public lecture that hosni mubarak was going to be gone in the year. >> host: okay. excellent. >> guest: the first thing he did wrong he had no control over. he got old. a dictatorial leaders are in deep trouble under preconditions to start with the come to power they don't quite know where the money is, so nobody quite trusts the you're going to be paid off properly so the shop around we

survive the first couple of-years-old in for a long time until either the bennati problem you are believed to have a terminal illness. this or a terminal illness your cronies no you are no longer a reliable source in the future very old as a terminal illness so the first problem he grew old, he's 82. second problem, his economy didn't have a vast amount of natural resource wealth. he depended on to sources of broadly speaking to sources of wealth. one was for a simple tourism. tourism require years a relatively well-educated

population. we've had a love of english speakers and french speakers, these are people who have enough education that they can think independently because they come together in business associations to organize free assembly very bad for a dictator. so he had the undergirding of that and foreign aid. foreign aid is a great way to pay off your cronies if you're not generating an effective economy in. but president obama announced when he promulgated his policy shortly after that he announced he was cutting foreign aid in egypt in half indeed within a few days or maybe it was two weeks of his announcement to the kind of foreign aid but the egyptian foreign minister for the first time since 1979 referred to israel as egypt's enemy.

and if you were a military leader perhaps sitting there thinking of the guy is getting old and decrepit and he is not able to manage his relationship 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 were 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 drying up. this is the time to rebuild. so that is as we saw it the perfect storm in egypt and it was the argument in the book that we use to evaluate that.

we had done some statistical analysis of the country's, the two or three years on the road back then most likely to face regime change. israel, tunisian, larocco, jordan at the top of the list. in fact egypt was the top of the list. there was little he could do the aging problem he said he did good things like peace with israel as we look at peace with israel was not a policy he favored and we could see that very clearly now that the egyptian people favored he needed to have something to sell to the united states for money, something the we would tell you enough to pay a lot for. some of a gun, peace with israel , and we did for 30 years. >> guest: it's not a policy

that but the egyptian people were brought along with that we should love our fellow men across the border the world was on a big campaign to educate tolerance towards alternative religion. israel was still on the grassroots treated as an enemy and this is precisely what the government would want because of the people actually like and you can't sell. we are going to like the israelis to the public policy so you don't write books and the uc the egyptian textbooks that say they are not good people because you want to encourage featured because we can sell that sweden's currency taking the u.s. aid is not a popular policy, so the survey people did a worldwide global studies and it's amazing that the countries they pick out are the ones having the most anti-american feelings are the ones that get huge amounts of u.s. aid. the dictatorial countries the

not liberal democracies, the countries taking enormous amounts of aid to undertake u.s. policies that are highly on popularized said the pakistanis, they hate the americans, the afghans hit the americans, the e egyptian state the americans, so we pay their leader to give them money to pay off the military to keep the people there to adopt a policy that they don't like. >> host: in this discussion we haven't said the words to hear a square. it is separate and i guess utterly independent from your theory of why egypt was prime to fall and mubarak was prime to fall and there would be popular demonstrations and that i think is the worldwide idea of why he fell. >> guest: so, take a step back

and ask yourself why people were willing to demonstrate and they were not willing to demonstrate five years ago. >> host: they felt they had the license to now, right? >> guest: the had less to lose because things were going badly in egypt for them, and they had more to gain exactly because the foreign aid was cut in half. they would have had a reason to believe that they will not face vast amounts of oppression which they would have faced five years earlier. the way we think about this from kafiri perspective they are doing the backward induction. you dhaka on the street thinking what, do i want to demonstrate? no. i'm going to get my head bashed in. a little bit more educated to demonstrate, not this year but now i see the situation is changing. the loyalty of the military has

been shaken. maybe they will sit on their hands. the risk of getting my head bashed in is still there but its lower. if it gets low enough for enough people it's worth it than others observe nothing happened to these folks. the military did not bash their heads in the military even protected them from the police who did try to bash their heads more people take to the streets. so it is exactly this calculation is vulnerable. people always like to overthrow dictators. the problem is most of the time it is a very risky thing to do. when the moment arises, then they seize that moment. >> host: in the egyptian case we identified a few minutes ago the first to recognize this and act on it is military which is always the backbone of the country and certainly a big part of the reason that mubarak was able to stay as long as he was. now that the military is nominally in charge the announce

elections they are not only charge that they are in charge the announced their elections for november. do you think that elections will actually 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 that you are entirely right to say this patent will continue because we have an election so we are going to have elections that are unlikely to be dahuk truly meaningful and a large amount of free press. there is the reinstitution for the heat martial law where people pick up on the streets and given the short run it by the courts and not for protesting. so there is not going to be a large scale demonstration in use repression against religious extremist groups rising and threatening the stability.

so we are not going to see particularly fear election. one we discussed earlier of having an election particularly doesn't count for much as an election is a great way of telling anybody they can rise to the top and anyone can be brought inside the government and become a person of importance. but precisely a lot of people can be brought in everyone who is inside can be brought cheap lisa that's the beauty of actually holding elections, so forcing elections on countries where they are not really going to be meaningful, so in some sense pakistan might have been better when it was under the military, and in both cases the reality was the leaders small section of society. in one case though the small section of society doesn't have replacements, so the leader has to work hard in order to keep in musharraf's caisse the army very happy where an election doesn't

work well. it's a mechanism to let everybody know that you are easily cut, you are easily replaced and therefore they will do the dirty work you asked them to do for a smaller amount of money. >> host: i'm going to follow on something they're on the musharraf example. succumb here is a guy that executes the successful military coup, takes over the country and becomes for his own self-interest u.s. partner if not an ally post 9/11 of the rise they are going to invade my country, blow me up, whatever. the better thing to do is to help the americans go after terrorists. first thing the americans do after saying finch you and giving him gazillions of dollars is to say 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 to us in his previous role than the current government is? >> guest: i am going to answer that two ways. was it 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 do i mean by that? their interest in what was good for them and it happened 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? notte 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 reject? my constituents don't like our backing the military dictators so they have come to react to this id are going to promote

that policy. >> host: sticking with pakistan for a bid, there is a popularly elected government in pakistan backed by the military generally assumed to really run the show. does that model still fit your theory? 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 ring for his ability -- >> guest: that is a tongue-in-cheek admiration. >> host: perhaps you could talk about that. but is he a dictator? does he fit your model?

>> guest: this is the beauty of the space systems that haven't involved very well. we have e. elections so we would like to think of the classic one-man one-vote one person one vote this is the way we think about elections functioning but people actually is implicitly end up voting in big blocks. so if we were to think of the pakistan case we go to the rural area a politician will show up and began implicit deal with of the the elders of this village delivers enough votes they will get stuff they won't be getting much because there are a lot of people they can buy for but they are going to get a few jobs and go that way and there is coming to be some crumbs are going to go down to that village so delivering those votes for politicians are certainly going to weigh in in a particular area is going to get a few crumbs so people go along with with the elder tells them to do. so when we have the people isolating the systems, politicians are very good at playing the mafia they will give

you a few little things. it's not much but if you don't vote for us we will get elected in the way and we are going to give you nothing. so, during the flood last year the colleague aliandro for list who is now in the efiks and he and i are looking at the natural disasters and all the things we saw was the distribution of aid. it was vastly towards sar laureate's supporters. so the probability of you getting any assistance greatly increased if you came from the regions that supported parties that were part of his culture. if it can from the opposition coming to got nothing so just literally the simple things we think of as handing out blankets are driven by these politics of buying things. we see this and in the u.s. and not federal disaster aid we can predict which districts. this has become a sort of burgeoning part of the literature about where do we distribute the aid in the terms of elections are just as important as when speed but not

to the same extent it is in pakistan. if we break it down here we can rahm this war through the state into the desert and saved hundreds of villages. the guy whose land was going to go through is a member of the cabinet and he sort of went on the bridge and said this isn't going to have been so bad public policy we see the redistribution saving the few chosen even though the system is nominally space. >> guest: one of the things we're hoping to cure people of with the dictators handbook is the distinction of categorical regimes, democracy come autocracy come on our key -- monarchies. for instance we talk about the winning coalition drawn from a pool of people selected to all democracies have the characteristic that of the selected is very large, the pool of people come a and relatively

large but highly variable in the size and in britain to control the prime ministership a candidate in two-party race needs to have half of the parliamentary districts and half of the votes so they don't need 25% of the vote. 75% of the vote properly distributed put it down the other way. and the united states we estimate you can control the house, the senate and the presidency with as little as 20% of the vote. what that means is that when your dillinger of rewards you are focused on who do you absolutely have to have not just for the back suit and other systems need closer to a simple majority. it varies all over the place in pakistan you need a very small percentage of the vote to control the country. we estimate it i don't know the exact number, around 10%.

that fundamentally changes how much public goods you do and how much corruption you engage in there are going to be a lot more corrupt than we are. will they be as corrupt as north korea? no, north korea kim jong il depends on maybe 200 people. out of almost 20 million people. it could be much more corrupt but zardari is in the position to steal a heck of a lot and to allow his coalition of backers to steal and that is why they are loyal to him. they are not loyal because they think the a better policy ideas but because he's making sure the blankets go to them and not to the other person who was flooded who didn't vote the right way. >> guest: so, continuing an the u.s.-led of questioning here the with the u.s. now wants from zardari and pakistan is two

things. one, keep a lid on terrorism so it doesn't become an external threat to the united states whether in afghanistan or elsewhere, and sort of a subset of that specifically go after these groups that primarily operate along the afghan border. is that -- neither of which pakistan has done foley despite terrorism. so is it in the zardari's interest to stay in power to keep, to follow the rules of the dictators handbook to do in the of those things. >> guest: i wrote a book called the prediction near's game animals amid chapter of that book is about how much it would take from the united states to get the pakistanis to pursue the taliban and so forth

about 1.5 billion the book makes the point that for that amount of money 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 will stop. we have no reason to give them money if it is the objective 56 the problem as much as mubarak did not work hard at educating egyptians to let israel because the money will stop flowing. so, the zardari government nuanced but the zardari government is working reasonably hard at tracking down killing or capturing the taliban and al qaeda leaders in february of 2010 they killed the number two taliban leaders and so forth, so they were delivering enough to keep the money flowing.

now they have an additional problem they have to recognize and again goes back to the fury there's not a pakistani leader the isi has its own interests and the rest of the military has other interests so he has to leave the coalition together and he's not been good at getting the isi on board. so the question is what will it take to change their behavior more than they are willing to pay? because their longer-term interests is to get us out of the way with these guys. >> host: the isi is essentially operating organizational lead the way that you hockley out, right? i mean, they are -- zardari is irrelevant. they have to figure out how or we strategically going to be able to continue our power recede be able to call the shots to the exhibit policy to lead to

possible and so they are looking not -- >> guest: looking out for them and doing a good job of it unfortunately. >> host: you talked about egypt about the sort of ritual willingness of people to take greater risk to demonstrate against the government to, you know, to go against the government, period. how does that contrast in the libya where we did see protests taking place in syria now we see protests taking place in the face of really horrific government violence that people are willing to brave. >> guest: libya is a case where ghadaffi did a classic mistake she was too nice to the people. we find that hard to believe

because we believe in the united states the president is beholden to 35 million people so he has to keep a lot of us happy. ghadaffi didn't have that problem yet compared to some of his neighbors comparatively mice, so libyans got substantially more education than the neighbors indonesia and yemen and saudi arabia and egypt and jordan and syria. he didn't need to educate people because most of the ordeal was extracted by the foreign workers as they protested he just sends them home and gets more. big mistake to make. 2005 the country i just mentioned he had the biggest restrictions on press, freedom, by far out wire in terms of how draconian his restrictions were. 2010 he was fourth and ury close all the others had put in more restrictions he would allow people to start to talk and that

was a big problem. did we get a little spark and people say the regime is not as strong as we fought so that is more information i think maybe it's safe and everything is going wrong and so people took to the streets. he had given them the opportunity to organize. he hadn't been smashing a be enough heads and people took this as a sign of weakness. it turned out i don't think that he was that week but to them that nato military stop to be able to deploy the people who were willing to break heads. you will get him he had solicited loyalty. there were still people backing had even though he stuck in the remote towns now but he still has a few fanatics supporters stayed loyal to the very end. >> guest: hours is not a happy view of the world. >> guest: let's pick up from here. the sad thing is i think this has been a really brilliant of the policy by the west because the reality is the next group of leaders are going to come in and

half of the frozen assets and billions of dollars putting in the oil revenue is going to come back in. the countries are awash with weapons. the people are going to be fighting to become globalist in terms of power who can buy the most loyalty and get the weapons pointed at everybody else and then from there, out the supporters they don't really need and be back in the sierra must type of system that we had before. we are going to have a leader that is going to be hard to buy because he has lots of wealth and he's cui to be brutal to the people. a different set of people are going to be persecuted to the people persecuted under but i don't see anything different changing it he made in error of being too kind. it's unlikely the next dhaka is we to make the same mistake. >> guest: this ury in case looks different and indeed we are as alistair said quite pessimistic of the future of libya we are optimistic about the future of syria. there are places where we are optimists.

in the syrian case he was looking at an economy with my in % deficit annually relative to gdp. we complain they are way ahead and so, he was facing in the economy with some educated people, unemployed. he had natural resource wealth that unlike libya's was rapidly declining to come to a smaller and smaller part of his economy and foreign aid to syria was slowly draw the map, so all of the economic conditions were bad news for him making the risk more attractive to people. he has been brutal in his response to that risk. people have continued to fight, did because syria doesn't have the vast natural resource wealth

and if it is also not flooded with foreign aid when he finally falls and syria will probably become a reasonably liberalized place. if it is flooded with foreign aid good intentions are very bad news because the and the leaders will be in the position to do the bribery that is necessary to shore themselves of and no need to listen to the peoples we have to hope the foreign aid doesn't come except after performance benchmarks are met. have to free assembly, free press, free speech. you can borrow against promised aid for a year. you don't get the lump. if you meet those conditions you get a promise again for the next year until you are entrenched in free-speech, free press, freedom of assembly. you have those things in place it is really tough sleeper law of for the leaders to be.

>> host: does your advice to president obama that he not reword any of these governments of whatever, you know, civilian maybe slightly military government emerging in egypt potential follow-on keep your distance? >> guest: it's more complicated and i want to come back to that. in general, yes. in general one of the big effects of foreign aid is to significantly the probability that an oprah's of dictatorial regime stays in power. it has a significant impact on the survival of dictators. so egypt is more complicated because although that remains true of the president has to play that against its impact of hostility towards israel on the

reelection prospects. so, basically it always comes back to it's not national interest 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 forcible there is an election and the muslim brotherhood in egypt, of the muslim brotherhood in alignment with the military controls the country the price of maintaining relations with israel goes way up so we have to decide will we pay that much higher price is that worth it in terms of the 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 had the last word. you've given a little bit of advice to president obama and an article in the foreign policy

this month. what's the single worst thing that president obama could do in the couple years that he's got left according to theory? >> you use the term worst. we always want to go back to the worst of what we're talking about the u.s. people as a whole. so, he could spend all his time and resources to kissing 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 and according to the incentive is that he had he should be doing. he will be trying to shore of the the record voters to make sure that we have benefits for unions and we get more education for teachers because teachers and to give workers a but

democratic. how are we going to fund these things? we want to tax the rich. why? because they tend to be republican voters so we want to bring money and redistribute 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 what are they going to try to do? do the stuff to cut the benefits to the -- we are going to say democrats and that lets them have tax breaks that are rich, the republicans. >> host: speed come bueno de mesquita come thank you very much for both of you. i really enjoyed the book and i look forward to having a chance to hear more about it. i guess it comes out -- >> guest: today. >> host: today. okay, great. well, thank you very much. >> guest: thank you very much.

>> about was "after words," booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policy makers, legislators and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 p.m. and 9 p.m. on sunday at 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch "after words" on line. go to booktv.org, and click on "after words" in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. what you think; do you think that he did as well with the architect sue kimmel and his life? he had a very good relationship with the other one. >> h. h. richardson. >> he was fabulous. richardson died at 47 or something. >> yeah. i don't think he ever found a partner he worked with as well

as vox and anyone who thought about -- vox described prospect park and it literally was supposed to be separate places of land with a bridge between them and vox is the one who said let's take the one piece of land so he would think about not only think about the landscape would provide a lot of landscape ideas. i think that that is why olmstead had the kind of division of labor partnerships like with h. h. richardson he got a well with them but h. h. richardson is going to destroy have structures and what is more is some of these folks like h. h. richardson had massive egos he was going to design a bridge that looked however he felt the bridge should look. olmstead designed it and was able to accept that relationship because there were not that many bridges in the park to design. >> guest [laughter] >> yes, i think a lot of interesting other topics came up

the chicago world fair to me was amazing because he was this guy is now in his -- >> he would have been in his seventies. >> late 70's, yes. he was told by that time, and just the fact that you mentioned googled travel. so you have all of these commissions going on at the same time and here he is doing this rush job for the chicago and maybe you can talk a little bit about that. >> she was of sync with in his age and being in the late 60's or 70's that was old age you out of a lot of your contemporaries and he did not settle into a restful latter years. he actually became fevered and it's because landscape architecture is so different from the painting or work of music and he had this anxiety that after he was gone all of

his work would be on the day and he spent his whole adult life basically fighting against people meddling in central park which is always this place everyone wanted to stick something or racecourse or whatever in central park there's always a battle. he had the sense particularly because he and vox had a sense of after he was gone everything might be reversed so they're breakable commissions on the world fair being one of them that lead in life he was as desperate to stick his reputation and so as an old man by the standards of that day he just herbal love for the united states he took on commissions bill waukee, a kansas city, denver, ashbel north carolina to the bill more state and a bunch of other places and he would work on -- he would work on the chicago world's fair which he actually came up with this preposterous that the maddock formula which he would get half of his attention to the chicago world. half of his attention to the

state all the way down national north carolina, yet he would also give attention he already used up 100 per cent to ron jester milwaukee etc, and he would be -- what he would do is he would be working of chicago world's fair grounds and literally when he sensed the was a break in the action he would speak don't asheville where he would plead with george vanderbilt of the richest man in the world, to support national and scoffed to leave the which was closed asheville and do some work on their park system and he was just desperate traveling around to go late night rides try to kind of secure his deputy and and make sure also that he left a big lasting legacy that if he did enough parts may be some of them would last. [laughter] >> and writing letters of the time. i mean, we've all forgotten we said short e-mails to everybody and who knows figure probably all going to vanish off the face of the earth but for an artifice to this fabulous because he wrote thousands of these letters. >> guest: he did. the way that i always discredited this is wonderful it

is a 19th century olmstead was very much a sort of, you know, a man about town he had a lot of friends it the best way to describe it as if he crossed the street he did a diary entry about it, he wrote a variety of letters about it because he was a journal he wrote articles and several others had diary entries or letters they wrote and crossing the street. as a biographer it minted created this kind of, you know, it's like there's so many different takes on any given action but at least it was a sort of embarrassment of the rich is basically to be able to have so many acts in his life for him to be a county of a very articulately and insightful and often very long. nothing like e-mails for the ten or 15 pages of the explanation of his being enraged about a part design being rolled back and what ever it that ought of the people he would send these letters to responded they would create a rich trove to sort of digging to. >> i guess nobody will be as

easy to follow in the future. there will be other people's opinions. >> access to their facebook page. >> exactly. i wonder what would look like, his face page. he also eight horrible food. that was interesting. his body it was terrible. interesting that you would say that because it of the early 1890's, he was brought back to prospect park to try to figure out where the tennis house should go and so he goes around and of course he doesn't like the tennis house because it is a formal architectural piece and so on and so forth, but he does say at that time this is the perfect part. now, there is a little preference in your book i would say significant for central park. now, as somebody from prospect park who spent 30 years, i have to say that i agree with olmsted

that that was the perfect part because he had all of this money, complete freedom, it in central park all of those people mr. green and everybody. so we don't know, what do you think? >> welcome a will plead. [laughter] even brought a quotation i will not be able to count. [laughter] >> i know that quote though. >> i want people to take up the quotation. i felt the ladder in 1873 he said in central park. >> he did love central park. >> he certainly did, but i guess the way that i would attempt to counter that at least is by saying that it's kind of the old i always think about musicians like st. paul simon the way for the interview when he said, you know, my early work with simon and garfunkel it was a mature, youthful, etc..

i was of the top of my game during the world music etc. but i had this kind of feeling that artists are the best authority of their own work and so i know he felt the prospect park was his final work but i'm going to try your argument that central park was his masterpiece based on i guess two things. one is just that was his first work like so many i felt like he brought all of this. that is when he just all the spontaneity and all these ideas came to the surface so that's where all of a sudden he just goes from being a survey year turned farmer turned sailor turned this, that and the author and brings it to park work and the other sort of suggestion i would make is that central park on a few was a particularly masterful design simply because of the constraint. it was a perfect rectangle. it is a perfect rectangle. terrible shape for a park which was a beautiful sort of organic

natural shape. central park perfect rectangle, terrible piece of land. that's why it was chosen to be a part to a portable piece of land people didn't want necessarily at the real-estate could develop elsewhere in the city and olmsted faced with that concentrate on top of the country that the actual design competition that he entered into cattle kind of mandatory demands come all kind of things that had to be done in order to part of the mandatory design for the contest. with his terribly khan strayed sheep and piece of land i feel like he just brought the best creative thinking they possibly could to try to make this very constrained space have a flow, have a sense of grandeur and scale and i guess the one thing that always strikes me is that you're talking about a park that is half a mile wide which literally means he could not ever be anywhere where you were more than a quarter mile away from civilization come from rhodes, so it is a