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Daniel D's avatar

Great job distilling the principles from one domain (military coups) and applying them to different ones (business startups)! Very engaging, insightful, and well-written essay!

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Endicott Mongoloid's avatar

A PhD sociologist colleague of mine, Tormod Lunde, in the late '80s and early '90s, studied coups from 1800 on from three POVs: actually counting them; considering state of military tech, especially defensive weoponry; and modeling them with stats variables, i.e., usual socioeconomic ones plus others such as the participation of coup leaders in previous coup attempts.

The two highest frequency coup states, well above the rest, were Spain (esp. in the 1800s) and Bolivia (up to very recently). There were so many in Spain that history texts grossly undercount, one has to go to newspaper archives.

An important variable was whether the coup leader eliminated challengers or not; this was well correlated with the coup leaders experience in previous coups. Saddam Hussein in Iraq is a classic example of an experienced coup leader who eliminated his challengers.

Bolivia was so high because elites protected their latifundia with private armies. And the invention of the automatic machine gun led to a big reduction in coup attempts.

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