Here’s where old Bernie Ecclestone went wrong. He used the H word. He has now brought in a PR agency, and I am sure he is paying it well. But, really, I could have given him the advice free. Outlining Hitler’s good points is a poor idea corporate-communication- strategywise. There, I’ve saved him £300 an hour.

I think Ecclestone would have been fine from a PR standpoint if he’d just stuck to dictators in general. You see, his view — that “strong leaders” (the euphemism generally employed to describe murderous tyrants) get things done — is actually quite a common one. He could have applied this (and did so) to Saddam Hussein without too much controversy. The idea that, for instance, getting rid of Saddam was bound to produce chaos is so standard as to be almost conventional wisdom.

The strong-man theory of history, when it doesn’t get caught up on the barbed wire of the Nazis, generally has a good run. And the trick being pulled is to treat as exogenous things that should be regarded as endogenous.

Economists use the term “exogenous factor” to refer to things outside the model that impact upon it. Endogenous factors are things inside the model that are part of its working. In building an explanation of the effectiveness of dictators it is necessary to dictinguish between these things, to differentiate between things that just happened to dictators and things that have to happen in order for them to be dictators at all.

Now dictatorships usually end in disaster. The “strong leaders” become embroiled in wars, or are subject to international sanctions to curb their aggressive behaviour, or start killing ethnic groups in large numbers. A class of officials arises that starts stealing from the general population and autocracy becomes kleptocracy.

The problem with the strong-man theory is not that it overlooks these problems or accords them too little weight. It is not simply that praising dictators is like saying, “Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, did you enjoy the theatre?”, it is that it fails to recognise that they are bound up with whatever achievements there have been. Repression and aggressive wars, theft and killing, are endogenous to dictators — they are how they maintain power. That is how they appear strong in the first place.

“What we need to do is to raise their self-esteem”. How often have you heard that? Well, I have often wondered if this really correct.

I have been much influenced by a piece of research on training, which suggested that it often drove unemployment among trained people upwards. Their valuation of themselves had gone up more than the increase in their real value. As a result, the trainees were demanding too high wages.

Now I have come across — thanks to the science writer Ed Yong — research that tackles the self-esteem issue head-on. Sander Thomas, of Utrecht University, and colleagues surveyed 206 children between the ages of 9 and 12. They were asked to score how much they liked their classmates and to estimate what their own average score would be.

Then, at random, the researchers told some students that they were unpopular, gave them a fake low score and surveyed them about their reaction to the news. The more realistic the students were about how others saw them, the better they were able to take the fake information. Those who thought too highly (or too poorly) of themselves took it much worse.

On this evidence, at least, the right thing to be doing is promoting a realistic view of self-worth, rather than an inflated notion of self-esteem.

Last week I wrote about studies into the lifespan of rock stars. A reader has recommended to me a further piece of work on the health of musicians. In a paper for the British Journal of Psychiatry, Geoffrey Wills has examined Forty lives in the bebop business.

He studied mental health in a group of eminent jazz musicians, seeking to discover if it is the case that such people suffer more mental health problems than you might expect in an ordinary group of the same size.

Wills begins his paper with the words : “There is now a comprehensive literature that convincingly demonstrates a link between psychopathology and creativity in the arts.” His careful classification of the problems faced by various jazz icons adds weight to this literature. Creativity may be tied up with very dark emotions.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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