Recently CGP Grey just put out a video based on The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. The video laid out three rules for power and made an attempt to apply those rules to both historical and modern political and ruling structures. The arguments seemed quite compelling on first watch, but I know there has been strong academic criticism of similar books like "Freakonomics" and "Guns, Germs, and Steel" that make a similar common sense appeal. Has there been any similar criticism of The Dictator's Handbook or works similar to it?
You'll probably want to try /r/AskSocialScience, or somewhere else you can get the opinion of a political scientist. But as a hot take, I saw the first segment and I think it is a bit misleading as to how dictatorships operate in the real world. The portrayal is that resources/money arise from the countryside, flow towards the ruler, who then distributes them to supporters, who are a major 🔑, then they distribute them to their own supporters, etc etc. This definitely happens, but it is a peculiarly antiquated model of governance. It strikes me as more like an Iron Age King than a modern dictator. If you look at, say, Suharto, surely one of the most successful dictators of the past century, straight up payment would be less important than something like fiefs--he might not pay a loyal general directly, but would instead give him the contract to operate a mine then more or less let him do what he wants. He didn't distribute the resources among supporters, he put them in positions where they could get the resources themselves. Going rather farther back, you can look at the Roman Empire, which as Peter Bang in Roman Bazaar argues, basically operated by allowing the political elite to nibble off the tax inflow.
And of course it is also important to remember things like ideology and personal loyalty or one might say, a desire to not upset the apple cart) have a huge role in this as well. The rational actor approach CGPGrey uses can be a nice starting point, but it doesn't necessarily match reality.