In light of the recent summit between North and South Korea, and the on-off bromance between President Trump and Kim Jong-Un, we ask the question whether democracies or dictatorships offer more certainty.

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision-making. I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're talking about the improving relations between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Nick, tell us about this burgeoning bromance.

Yeah, well, so I'm not going to say totally out of the blue, because obviously our needs have been focused on North Korea recently because of the sort of what appeared to be growing tensions between North Korea and the US. Out of the blue, North and South Korea, the respective presidents held a sudden sort of conference. You know, Kim Jong-un, president of North Korea, or the leader of North Korea, or whatever he's called. Supreme leader. The supreme leader. The dear leader. The dear leader. Well, no, because I think they've got... because each generation has its own title, doesn't it? And he stepped, in this amazing moment, stepped into South Korea, I think for the first time since the Korean War. First time it's ever happened since there's been these two officially divided careers. And I think it's fair to say that this was pretty surprising. People didn't really see it coming. And the question is really, you know, we often think of dictatorships as being relatively stable, that, you know, they kind of go on for a long time, don't they? I mean, you get the same leader generally in power for a very long time. But, you know, is that right? Is that wrong? And, you know, what does it mean for our attempts to predict the future?

Let's just check on one thing, though. You're talking about unpredictable versus stable, right? Is being unpredictable necessarily the opposite of being stable? Could you be predictable and unstable?

You're asking me?

I don't know who I'm asking.

Yeah. I mean, I think this is what we're touching on, that actually there's several things going on here. It's certainly not as straightforward as, you know, just because it looks the same for a long time. Therefore, it's somehow predictable. I mean, and so that's what that's what we want to drill into, really.

The big thing is democracies are not meant to fight against each other. Democracies aren't meant to go to war against each other. Right? There we go.

Well, and according to data, by and large. There are a few things here that need sort of clarifying, or at least considering. The first is, you know, how do we define these two different things? So, you know, dictatorship versus a democracy is clear cut as you've got all of the things over there and, you know, are they discrete categories? And, you know, there are different thoughts on that. I mean, you could say there are lots of different types of dictatorships. So, you know, you've got political party monopolies, you've got royal families, you've got, you know, things where they're led by a leader, theocracies, military dictatorships. So there are lots of different types of dictatorships. There are obviously lots of different types of democracies, constitutional monarchies and republics and so on and so forth. Right? So, first of all, those things in themselves are not necessarily categories. But I think we all accept that there's like autocratic regimes and there's ones where, you know, the people have more say over what goes on. There's greater accountability. Greater accountability and so on. And in fact, you know, the Economist Intelligence Unit has almost like a sliding spectrum with, you know, Norway and Iceland at one end and North Korea and Syria at the other end and anything in between. So, you know, perhaps there's a way of viewing this as being a bit more of a spectrum. But if we accept that in broad terms, there are some governments that are very autocratic and some governments that are much more democratic. Is there a difference, a tangible difference, in the stability? And by stability, I suppose there are two factors here. There is the survivability of the regime or the government or the form of government. And then the second thing is the predictability of the behaviour of that government. Right? You know, are they, can you determine what they're going to do ahead of time within certain boundaries? So I think those are the questions.

Yes. So to be clear, it sounds like we agree that there is a difference between predictability and stability. So, and looking around what might result in greater unpredictability would be, we're looking, essentially we're talking about decision making. And so I guess in an autocracy, often we've got things like opacity, for example. We've got things like, and which also can be a very concentrated power structure or decision making structure. What else?

Yeah, sorry. I think there's a great exception to this. But anyway, for the moment, go on, Chris.

Well, I was just going to say, it's interesting to look at this through the prism of the Cold War. And one of the sort of constructs that was generated there by both sides was this idea of a black box versus white noise. And that the, to us in the West, the Soviet, you know, system was viewed as a black box. It was a small number of people making decisions that we couldn't see. And so we struggled to know what they were going to do necessarily. We spent a lot of effort trying to find out what they were trying to do. On the flip side, they found us difficult to predict because there was so much information coming out. It was difficult to decide when a, you know, when a president or, you know, a Western politician says something, you know, that they're going to do, are they actually going to do it? You know, there's lots of commentary on it, you know, this is what they mean, and so on and so forth. It's a problem of volume, you know, so one is not enough information, one is too much information, what's actually true?

Hold the phone. How have I got this far through my life without and only just heard this dichotomy between black box and white noise? Because I totally love it. Where does it come from?

Well, there's the thing, you see, somewhere in the back of my brain, and I struggled. No, I didn't make it up. No, I would take credit for it if I had made it up, but it's a theory that I've heard that I cannot, for the life of me, trace back to its origin. Okay, I love that.

I think you might have heard me talking about it in a previous podcast. Yes, that's right. That's probably it. That was it, yeah. Okay, so just sort of, just a quick point, a quick aside. We tend not to get too hung up on news, let's say. But one of the things that people, and also we tend to be fairly, I think we're pretty good at being non-partisan. But one of the things that Trump has been criticised for is his sort of, the surprises and the quick policy changes, which actually also suggests another aspect of his presidency people have talked about is this sort of shrunken policy-making environment, and an almost court-like decision-making process. Any thoughts on that? And of course, that's democracy, right?

I like the word shrunken there. That feels like what it is. Like, why it is that democracies are open and slow is because they depend on a lot of people. There's a lot of buffers involved. There's a lot of devolution of power to different groups and different people and everything. And that's, the reward you get from having all that, of course, is much more efficiency, quite apart from having greater, all the kind of stability benefits you get, having a sort of much more devolved, sort of bigger, you get an economy of scale effectively, where different people who are kind of trusted to run their own little bits of government can do that relatively unmolested. Whereas if you've got one guy, it can be totally all over the place. And especially if it's one guy who we don't necessarily trust to have a particularly good grasp of the issues. So now, apparently, now Chris mentioned the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index, I think it's pretty good. I think it looks at a bunch of things like electoral process, government functioning, political participation, and they're all quite well defined. So it's not it's not a kind of subjective scale. It's not like they're just ranking these countries. I mean, they're scoring them on various different, you know, objective criteria. But the US has actually for the first time, slipped from full sort of full democracy to flawed democracy, just dropped below that completely arbitrary cut off. What are they out of interest? What other countries would that put it with? Any ideas? Good question. I forgot. Yeah, it's about 22nd, I think. So it's I think

it's somewhere alongside Nigeria and Colombia. No, no, no, it's definitely it's definitely above them. It's it's, you know, it's in it's in fairly respectable company, to be fair. But I was going a bit like me right now. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I was gonna say that, you know, in terms of so we've had, we've talked about predictability. But in terms of stability, I think these highlights a really interesting point, which is that democracies rarely fail, right? I mean, democracies erode, and it's dictatorships that collapse, right? And, and I think, you know, we, so in one direction, you know, you now often they might be replaced by another dictatorship. But in one direction, you get catastrophic failure. In the other, you get sort of slippage. You know, if you look at Turkey and Russia, they still, you know, have elections, but they're getting increasingly autocratic. And within a democracy, you know, even even the National Socialists in Germany took a long time, not long, well, a relatively long time to dismantle the, you know, the Weimar Republic apparatus. And I think that democracy provides a certain amount of insurance inbuilt into it, that that system itself might fail, because governments, governments change, that's your, that's your pressure valve. In a dictatorship, there's no real mechanism for that, other than a coup, or, you know, an uprising of some description. And I mean, looking, I think DPRK,

sorry, North Korea, is a real, a real outlier in a sense. I mean, you can tell it's an outlier kind of politically. I mean, it's so weird. It's like the last of the, of the great completely isolated communist countries. But it is a bit of an outlier in the sense that actually, if you look at the data for dictatorships, they're generally unstable. I mean, they're unstable in the sense that if they have more, they have considerably more civil wars, they're more likely to switch between types of dictatorships. So around about, you know, 1% or so of, sorry, around about 3% of civilian dictatorships become military dictatorships every year because of a coup, and vice versa, because of, you know, a sort of democracy, well, let's just say a civilization of government. Democracy is very, very stable, only about 1% of democracies a year becomes a dictatorship. So, but, so it's sort of, but actually the change, there's more regime change between types of regime within dictatorships than there is a change from dictatorships to, to, to democracies. So it's sort of suggest- So you're talking about factionalism? Yeah, what I mean is that if we, I know we think, if we think of North Korea, we think, we think of a country where they've had the same regime essentially for 60 years or whatever. Whereas, whereas actually the, the average dictatorship, there is a little more change than you, you know, but it tends to go from one dictatorship to another dictatorship to another one. So it's not necessarily stable, but the dictatorship bit is, right? So it's quite hard to go from dictatorship to democracy and vice versa, which sort of suggests that they, they are a kind of local, you know, equilibria there too. And actually, if you look at the data for the things that, bad things, so things like civil wars and homicide rates and so on, kind of interestingly, they're, they're usually worse in the middle. So countries that are sort of in between, hybrid countries where they're sort of in transition or where they, you know, where they were democ- or country, you know, so it's countries where they have aspects of both autocracy and, and democracy, that they generally score worse on all the indicators. So it sort of suggests that you really want to be in one or the other.

to whoever followed. Yeah, I think that that's exactly fits the number if I if I mean, I reckon 3% of dictatorships have a kind of regime change per year, that would give you on average, a 30

year lifespan. So that fits fits nicely. We need to finish fairly soon. I was going to ask a question about would you like to be a dictator? I think we've done that before we've done Chris,

Chris is still it's what keeps him awake at night. He's not a dictator. But what I want to ask is,

do you have a favourite dictator? Now? I remember back when I was a LATAM analyst, I developed a kind of rogues gallery. And I mean, covering Latin America was it was just rich pickings in terms of looking for a dictator because I had, I had lots of pictures of South American Central American dictators. But actually, probably my favourite dictator is who was that bloke recently, about a decade ago in in, in Central Asia, who had the revolving statue of himself, the Turkmenbashi. Yeah, that's it always facing the sun. I don't know much about him. But I know that. And in my books, that's what puts him up there with the dictators. I think he

sounds like a good one. favourite dictator? Well, obviously, most of them either start out or finish off as murderous villains. So from that point of view, none of them but if I had to pick one, I think it would be King Zog of Albania. I think just to have the the brass neck to just make yourself a monarch out of nowhere, in in a sort of, you know, in the modern world. I've got a lot of admiration for that. Yeah, because you you but didn't he get he got deposed by Hitler, right? Well, make that up. He, he, no, he fell, he, he fell as a result of

kind of Albanian revolution. Okay. Enver Hoxha. Who? All right. So he's an Albanian. I was confused. I was thinking of someone else with a small name in Romania. But yeah, okay. No, no, no. Anyway, we're all getting a bit bogged down. No, I, like you, Fraser, I'm also a fan of the, I have to say the, someone like Papa Doctor Vallier, or who was the, who's our, not IND, who's the guy in Chile who supported us? Pinochet. Pinochet. He looked good in a pair of shades. And I loved a lot of people out of planes into the sea. But yes, I'm not, I think we've got a bit of a bit of a rum bunch to choose from if we're picking dictators. But if you're going to be a dictator, I much prefer that sort of white suit, big moustache, sunglasses, preferably a cigar, than the kind of uptight, more the kind of Hitler-y, Stalin-y, uptight sort of bullying, kind of control-free. But no, I think the only correct answer is Vladimir Putin, all British people's favourite, favourite dictator. So yeah, I mean, as long as he knows that we pose no threat, then that's the key thing. Yeah, be careful about opening your door when you go home.

Um, so let's stop there. And that's my decision. And it's final. Actually, that's the great thing about these podcasts, is that I have the power of the edit. And so any moment, you're the kind of,

like working in the Ministry of Truth, effectively, you're able to. Yeah. So I can

carve it out exactly how it should be and reflecting what the truth actually is. History,

basically, you re-record all of the things. During the podcast, Fraser makes all kinds of moronic statements. And the things that he edits in, he basically records later.

Well, it's true. Actually, one thing I do do is that anytime I say anything particularly spectacularly stupid, I do edit that out. But any time that you guys say that, I keep it in. So there we go. Yeah. Okay, well, look, thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. You've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Thanks for listening. And until next time, goodbye.