Almaty, (November 9, 2019) – students and faculty members at Narxoz University hosted a well-known economist and PhD, Sergei Guriev as a keynote speaker at the main hall. Sergei delivered his presentation on “Informational autocrats”, a joint research with Daniel Treisman dedicated to discovering differences of an old and modern dictatorship style and its impact on economy. The lecture lasted for two hours and contained Q&A section at the end.
“Informational autocrats” – a joint research paper discovered new model of dictatorship among today’s government leaders that unlike former dictators who leaded governments based on violence. Sergei claims that “the main goal of dictatorship still remains the same, but the style of managing is significantly different. For instance, there are similar patterns of former world-known dictators like Stalin, Hitler and Mao that had military rankings and were generals of national armies. Also, all those dictators acted similarly like administrating cruel violent actions publicly. What about the current “dictators”? Today’s dictators run government based on popularity through informational manipulation. They use propaganda, religion and ideology through local mass media outlets to convince population that only they are capable and competent to run the governments.
According to Sergei Guriev, “higher education can disrupt dictatorship and cause prosperity of nations. Based on data that we have collected, there is a clear pattern that a government with higher educated population tends to create more democratic societies compare to a government with less educated population. So, we confirm that higher education is critically important for developing societies”.
Sergei Guriev – a former president of Russian Economic School and a chief economist at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. Currently, he is a professor of economics at Science PO (Paris). He is author of many research papers and books.