An interesting parallel would be China, which has become since 2012 more and more concentrated with respect to how power has been transferred from the Politburo and the party with large 2 Xi Jinping. And that follows some of the logics of charismatic leadership. The Chinese economy has been not struggling, but it hasn't been doing as well as it once did. But late 2000s, early 2010s, say it's now a few percentage points lower in annual GDP growth than it once was. Although it did recover from the financial crisis and didn't really take anywhere near the kind of hit that America and Europe did and had a massive infrastructure spending package that made sure it did well by large. Do you think there's an extent to which you can see that logic playing out in authoritarian states like China or especially with Russia where any semblance of democracy there might have been minimized by their charismatic leader at the

moment? Yeah, I think there are a lot of states in other parts of the world where democracy never got as thoroughly established as it has in the United States, Britain, European Union, most of it, Japan, perhaps in a few other quite established democracies around the world, Canada, Australia, places like that. Yeah, the countries you're talking about never got that kind of established democracy. And I think in the case of Putin, yes, you have a kind of Caesar type regime in

Russia.

When it comes to China, I'm always a little bit hesitant to comment on the future prospects of authoritarian states because I don't trust the data. I think that the data that authoritarian states give us is messed with and doctored. And for that reason, I'm never confident that we really have a picture of how well things are going. Yeah, yeah. And so I'm always reluctant. One thing that I perhaps will have a discussion of parties as a concept in political theory, more generally at a later point. But one thing that always bugs me about one party states is that in a one party state, you are concealing the dissent from the government, from the party itself. And that means that the government doesn't become aware of problems as quickly because people won't talk about the problems for fear of being policed out of the party. Yeah. And so especially if you start doing purging and one of the things that Xi Jinping has done is a lot of purging. I think it was 1.5 million officials in the last five years. I think that's the statistic. He's done a lot of purging. And when you do purging, you make people more afraid to speak up about problems that they see and more afraid to offer solutions to the problems that are recognized. And it also means that the people who don't agree hide their beliefs more. And that makes the government more paranoid about hidden enemy elements within the party. And that makes them spy harder and more comprehensively. And that in turn makes the dissenters in the party more careful and more cautious and it makes them hide better. And that makes the government more paranoid and that makes it look harder. And I think that you can get into these purge loops where you create an atmosphere of paranoia. You eliminate everybody who isn't very good at being a yes man. And it saps the institution of the dynamism that it needs to adapt to problems going forward. And so I'm not really sure to what extent China has problems because I don't trust the data. But what I do worry about in the Chinese case is that if the charismatic leader is trying to make sure that there are no rivals and is heavily, heavily purging the party. That's the kind of thing that could mean that when the charismatic leader is gone, the institution doesn't have the strength that's required to renew itself. An excessive paranoia from the charismatic leader tends to sap the future capacities of the institution. I think the obvious example of that is what the Soviet leadership class looks like after. Here Stalin dies. And so that's what worries me politically about China. I would comment on the political economy. I just am not confident that any of the numbers that I ever see to do with China's economy are real. Yeah, yeah.