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\u201cIndia needs a benevolent dictator<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n I have heard this being said over and over again, over the years.<\/p>\n Usually, the person saying it is a man.<\/p>\n Usually, he is a successful corporate type who is in the habit of driving his team to meet unreasonable goals set by the organisation.<\/p>\n Usually, he doesn\u2019t like to take no for an answer.<\/p>\n Usually, he is looking to encash his ESOPs at the end of the year.<\/p>\n Usually, you will hear him say things like, this year we did Turkey, next year we plan to do New Zealand.<\/p>\n Usually his heart is in the right place. It beats for his country. It wants the country to do well. And in the process, he ends up saying the nonsense that he does.<\/p>\n In some cases, he is a Non-Resident Indian, living in the United States, the oldest and one of the most successful democracies in the world. In some cases, he is someone who has lived through Indira Gandhi\u2019s emergency between 1975 and 1977 and is nostalgic about it.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, trains ran on time,\u201d he says. I don\u2019t know if they did, but at least that is the argument that is offered.<\/p>\n And in some other cases, he opens the argument with the line: \u201cLook at Singapore<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n So what is this Look at Singapore argument? Allow me to explain. As Arvind Pangariya writes in India\u2014The Emerging Giant<\/em>: \u201cCountries, such as the Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Singapore Hong Kong, and the People\u2019s Republic of China\u2026have attained high rates of growth under authoritarian regimes.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n India on the other hand almost always been a democracy since its independence in 1947. And on top, it has been one of the few countries which has managed to be a democracy almost all along. As Panagariya writes: \u201cAlong with Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Sri Lanka, India is only one of the four developing countries to have had democratically elected governments throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beyond\u2026The remaining three countries\u2026are all relatively tiny. The brief period of emergency rule\u2014from June 26, 1975, to March 21,1977\u2014in India may be viewed as representing a break in its democratic tradition<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n The people who argue in favour of benevolent dictators have basically this to say\u2014countries in Asia that have done well, are those which have had autocratic regimes. India lost out because it was a democracy.<\/p>\n As Ruchir Sharma writes in Breakout Nations<\/em>: \u201cOf the eight countries that quadrupled their incomes between 1950 and 1990, two (Taiwan and Singapore) were ruled by dictators during the entire period, one (South Korea) was ruled by a dictator during most of it, two (Japan and Malta) were democracies throughout the period and three (Thailand, Portugal and Greece) waffled between autocracy and democracy<\/em>.\u201d China has also had an autocratic regime through its period of economic development through the late 1970s.<\/p>\n This is offered as evidence as to why India would have done much better if it had been run by a benevolent dictator and an autocratic regime. The trouble with this argument is that it looks at just one side of the equation\u2014the countries which have had benevolent dictators and have done well. It doesn\u2019t look at countries, which have had dictators and gone absolutely to the dogs.<\/p>\n The African continent is littered with examples of such countries. Closer to home, there is Pakistan. Look at the mess the country currently is in. Or look at what has happened in a country like Myanmar.<\/p>\n Economist William Easterly has done some interesting research in this area, which he summarises in a research paper titled\u00a0Benevolent Autocrats<\/em>. As he writes: \u201cThe probability that you are an autocrat IF you are a growth success is 90 percent. This probability seems\u00a0to influence the discussion in favour of autocrats<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n But that is the wrong question to ask. The question that needs to be asked should be exactly the opposite\u2014if a country is governed by an autocrat what are the chances that it will be a growth success? \u201cThe relevant probability is whether you are a growth success IF you are an autocrat, which is\u00a0only 10 percent<\/em>,\u201d writes Easterly.<\/p>\n To put it simply\u2014most fast growing nations are ruled by autocrats. Nevertheless, most autocracies do not grow fast. The point being, if the government in a country is being ruled by a dictator, there is no way to figure out in advance, whether he will turn out to be a disaster or be benevolent.<\/p>\n The question is why do so many educated middle class Indian men believe in the idea of a benevolent dictator then? (I know I am stereotyping here, but I have experienced this many times over the years).<\/p>\n I guess what behavioural economists call availability bias is at play here. As Leonard Mlodinow writes in\u00a0The Drunkard\u2019s Walk\u2014How Randomness Rules Our Lives<\/em>: \u201cIn reconstructing the past, we give unwarranted importance to memories that are most vivid and hence most available for retrieval. The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our views of the word by distorting our perception of past events and our environment<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Air-crashes are an excellent example of this. As Jason Zweig writes in\u00a0The Devil\u2019s Financial Dictionary<\/em>: \u201cFlying is among the safest ways to travel, but on the rare occasions when an airplane does crash, the fireball on the runway is broadcast worldwide and burned into the brain of everyone who sees it<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n This leads people to believe that airplane travel is unsafe. But what they don\u2019t realise is that the media does not report about the thousands of planes that land safely every day all over the world. It also does not report the many car crashes that happen all over the world every day, unless a celebrity is involved.<\/p>\n Availability bias comes into the picture with an event being over-reported. As Easterly writes: \u201cOne way this can happen are with an event that is over-reported relative to its actual frequency. A common example is that probability of death from murder is overestimated because of intensive coverage of murders by the media relative to other causes of death that are not as newsworthy (e.g. heart disease)<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n When it comes to the idea of a benevolent dictator, this phenomenon is at play. Indians who go to countries like Singapore and China, see how much progress the country has made, and come to the conclusion that autocracy leads to economic growth. But these individuals never go to Pakistan, so that they can see that the opposite is also true. Or Myanmar for that matter.<\/p>\n The media with its stories of China\u2019s progress also has a role to play. But then the stories of how much mess dictators have made in Africa, over the decades, never really make it to the Indian press.<\/p>\n The column was originally published in the Vivek Kaul Diary<\/a> on June 6, 2016<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIndia needs a benevolent dictator.\u201d I have heard this being said over and over again, over the years. Usually, the person saying it is a man. Usually, he is a successful corporate type who is in the habit of driving his team to meet unreasonable goals set by the organisation. Usually, he … <\/p>\n Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,77],"tags":[330,446,2663,3162,4005],"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"Vivek Kaul","author_link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/author\/vivekkaul\/"},"qubely_comment":0,"qubely_category":"Equitymaster<\/a> Vivek Kaul's Diary<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":" \u201cIndia needs a benevolent dictator.\u201d I have heard this being said over and over again, over the years. Usually, the person saying it is a man. Usually, he is a successful corporate type who is in the habit of driving his team to meet unreasonable goals set by the organisation. Usually, he…","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4512\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}