Wow. This article is one of the most compelling I've read in a while. There's even a bit in there about models and reality with respect to (authoritarian) governance and size, and why simplistic schemata suffer from large errors in larger states:
"Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases."
and on first-principles:
"Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism."
In that sense, Singapore is like a startup at a country-level.
> Singapore is clever enough to keep the democratic process
Mainly it appears to be a democracy. Speak to any of the cab drivers there who feel somewhat liberated to talk safely with a foreigner who is on the way to the airport, and they will tell you something about Singapore's democracy.
Not sure if that's a fair judgement - It seems particularly endemic that it's almost a meme/stereotype in itself in Singapore; that all cab drivers are discontent with the government
Singapore is not a democracy. They have sham elections where the opposition party is only allowed to have media coverage by the single state run media channel for three weeks before the election. If your neighborhood votes for the opposition party you lose funding for things like public transportation. Lee Kuan Yew lives in a giant, gated, guarded compound in the middle of the most valuable real estate in the city.
Also criticizing the government is a crime and saying the wrong thing on facebook can land you in prison.
As always, the truth is somewhere in between what you say and what the government portrays. 38 Oxley Road was owned by the Lees since the 1940s, well before any of them came into power, and well before property prices in Singapore exploded to the level they have now. It is also a stretch to call it "giant" or the "most valuable" piece of real estate, when there are hundreds of bigger houses in the nation. The number of "guards" is also comparable to the state leaders of any other European country, and certainly pales in comparison to the US or some dictatorial nations.
There is some bias in state media coverage, but that is fast becoming irrelevant when the main source of news for people nowadays is social media. Criticizing the government is not a crime, and people regularly do it - one only has to go to the Facebook comments section of the state newspaper to take a look. Making a factually false statement and then gaining significant fame could get a lawsuit filed against you - so tread lightly when making big claims that you have no proof for.
Specifically the opposition candidates get limited time three weeks out from an election. Saying that people are getting more news from the internet is not 'the truth being somewhere in the middle'. Temasek Holdings controls the news paper (which also has a web site) the single local TV channel, the telecoms and the banks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temasek_Holdings
yeah... I used to walk in front of that house when I went to school every day. There's like two dudes with guns, and there is a tiny booth of a guard post. My workplace has more security than that.
The current president tried to continue living in her HDB (public housing) after taking office but gave up on advice of security and complaints from neighbours about said security.
Eh, as they said in the article: "Part of the mythos of Lee Kuan Yew is that he succeeded as an authoritarian where so many others have failed." Singapore is the exception; authoritarian governments are almost always bad for the people otherwise.
Benevolent dictatorship is not just a sarcastic phrase, it is sometimes true for some distributions of benevolence in history. The more interesting question is what happens after he passes away, or cannot continue to make decisions.
True -- after all, it is still authoritarian, the only difference is that this authoritarian government seems to care for the wealth of its citizens (although not much else.)
Don't think that the democratic process guarantees a good hand off... it's still a crap shoot and a lucky draw. See current President Camacho of the United States.
Unlike a dictator, the aggregate will of the people never serves the self interest of a single individual. The issue with majority rule is that the aggregate intelligence/judgement of the people is likely not matched with what is required to select a good leader.
The current situation reflects how law and society has lagged behind technolgy and social media. We moved away from moderated information delivery to a torrent of self-published nonsense.
If you want to consider the success of LKY’s first principles, you should probably consider what they are. Free market economics, low taxation, user pays healthcare, restrictive welfare entitlements, restrictive immigration, and no minimum wage.
Singapore is a mostly-benevolent, mostly-single-party state, with rather poor individual freedoms, but an approach to economic liberty and self-reliance that would be considered extremist in most of the west.
I used to live in Singapore. I’m particularly familiar with how they do things.
> No minimum wage
> As a matter of national policy, MOM does not prescribe minimum wages for all workers in Singapore, whether local or foreign. Whether wages should increase or decrease is best determined by market demand and supply for labour.
Singapore doesn’t have an unemployment benefit. You can get a few months worth of assistance if you lose your job. The closest it has is ComCare, which is mostly reserved for invalids.
I have extended family in Singapore. I can assure you that the approach is not some libertarian utopia and neither is it some oligarchic capitalistic system sucker.
It is designed to be practical and constantly adapt to reality.
Today, that means a mixed economy. That means basic human decency will be taken care of by government, the remaining is market driven.
This means housing, food subsidies, education and healthcare is readily made available by the government, not just through price controls. Look up property rights there.
That means high taxes on vehicles, use it to develop a world class mass transit system.
That means, lower taxes on foreign businesses to come operate in Singapore, no xenophobia shown to skilled workers (barring their geographic limitations). This has the consequence of raising high value domestic activity, thus providing locals jobs.
They cannot accept refugees because of size.
That means they absolutely want to be integrated with the outside world, because they realize they absolutely cannot produce everything. Again, can't have xenophobia.
That means lower income taxes because the government doesn't need more money. They have already ensured that cost of living (housing and healthcare) is so low that no one will be bankrupt with routine medical procedures or no insurance scams and medical codes that will suddenly no the covered.
Frankly, sometimes people forget how much work the government has put in there to actually make life so easy that the government doesn't need to be the frankenstein like US govt is.
It's a matter of approach. The government wants to take care of people, not leave them wondering if they will be covered in the next crisis.
This comment reads half like PAP propaganda, and half simply uninformed.
> the approach is not some libertarian utopia
Well there’s no such thing as a real-world utopia. But Singapore, having the free-est market in the world is about as close as you could get.
> no xenophobia
Hmmmm... Chinese racism against pretty much everybody else has been a long standing issue in Singapore. Just go on any Singaporean job listing site and search for “must speak mandarin”.
> basic human decency will be taken care of by government
You can just look at the PAP’s website to see the mental gymnastics in this comment. Here are two of their four core values:
> Meritocratic
> A system that provides citizens with equal opportunities to progress, and for a person's contributions to be recognised and appreciated on the basis of merit.
> Self-reliant
> No one owes us a living. We will avoid creating the dependency syndrome a welfare state generates.
> Hmmmm... Chinese racism against pretty much everybody else has been a long standing issue in Singapore. Just go on any Singaporean job listing site and search for “must speak mandarin”.
What are we talking about? Xenophobia or racism?
Xenophobia is very low in SG. People expect to know foreigners and want foreigners to bring business or capital or skills.
And since you are using PAP values to inform yourself, please read their pledge:
"We, the members of the PAP,
Pledge ourselves to build a strong
United Party, to create a vibrant,
just and equal society,
through achieving excellence by all, so that
every citizen, regardless of race,
language or religion, can enjoy a
full and happy life."
This is from wikipedia:
The PAP symbol (which is red and blue on white) stands for action inside interracial unity. PAP members at party rallies have sometimes worn a uniform of white shirts and white trousers which symbolises purity of the party's ideologies of the government. The party also reminded that once the uniform is sullied, it would be difficult to make clean again.
> No one owes us a living. We will avoid creating the dependency syndrome a welfare state generates.
Do you know what this means in the Asian lens?
It means that they will collectively work to build their living because no other country will help them. It doesn't mean that they are going to leave their citizens homeless on the streets. It doesn't mean that they will let insurance companies shark out the lives out of citizens. They want to build a society where the basics are covered.
About 80% of housing in Singapore is mixed socialized (not the same as handouts or welfare) but a collective system that does things with goals in mind
Maybe it's really hard for people to even imagine how such a government could possibly work. Rest assured that the heavy hand of government takes care of basics so people can use their creativity to thrive on the free market built atop the safety.
Your comments are so easily falsifiable, I hope nobody is taking them seriously.
> Xenophobia is very low in SG. People expect to know foreigners and want foreigners to bring business or capital or skills.
An incredibly consistent social problem Singapore has had is dealing with the fact that Singapore is essentially run by Han Chinese, for the benefit of Han Chinese. Despite the governments best rhetoric, ethnic minorities and foreigners are still widely discriminated against.
> It means that they will collectively work to build their living because no other country will help them.
I really find it hard to believe that you’re actually trying to say LKY was an advocate for collectivism.
> "Cradle-to-grave welfarism blunted the ambition of many budding entrepreneurs. Worse, high personal taxes dampened the desire of many to achieve wealth and success." - LKY
> "the folly of populist politicians who win elections playing the politics of equal rewards or egalitarianism: squeeze the successful to pay for the welfare of the poor, and end up with the equalisation of poverty" - LKY
> About 80% of housing in Singapore is mixed socialized
The HDB scheme does in fact provide a lot of housing. But more specifically, what it does is provide affordable housing for the middle class professionals to buy. If you’re too poor to afford rent, you’re not going to be getting any benefit from the HDB.
I’ve posted reliable sources for every claim I’ve made in this thread. You’re just posting incredibly liberal reinterpretations of reality.
It appears that you have quite a few concepts completely mixed up.
I'm just going to leave it at collectivism != welfare state and xenophobia != racism. I'll allow you to do research on how such societies work.
Further, since you already color me liberal (which is incorrect), I can tell you are extremely biased in your perception of words. So feel free to take some classes in removing bias. It'll help.
The use of "liberal" in that last sentence has a different meaning. In that instance it means "to take liberties with regards to...". I was saying that I think you're "taking the liberty" of infusing your own ideas with what the actual reality of the situation is. Not that your ideas were liberal as in liberal/conservative.
Ah yes. This is correct. That became mandatory after I left.
MedShield Life is still quite restrictive in what it covers though. Even with half the population having additional private insurance, about a third of medical expenditure is out of pocket.
A consistent point of controversy in Singapore is how much MediShield funds the government keeps in surplus reserve.
Total medical expenditure in Singapore is also suppressed somewhat by people choosing not to have treatment.
By subsidize housing you mean that the government builds housing which they then sell to citizens. Which is a form of middle class welfare, but quite different from what most westerners would consider subsidized housing.
If you’re unemployed in Singapore, you get 3 months worth of welfare from the government. After that you rely on your own savings. (Unless you’re permanently disabled)
Going from first principles though, Singapore has a large ethnically Chinese population which tends to take care of family members / elders more than in the west.
Unless western countries are willing to adopt a culture of filial piety where you can live with your parents until you’re married and your parents expect you to take care of them in old age, I don’t see them replicating that feature.
It’s very controlled beyond prostitutes , helpers (maids) and labourers. They even specify which race and sex can do which job . Construction bangledesh (and some others) under 60. You must employ 1 local at 1400 a month to employ 7 Bangladeshi with no minimum wage and house them 24 to a room in what they call a dormitory , some might call a labour camp where COVID was out of control.
Helper , female under 50
https://www.mom.gov.sg/passes-and-permits/work-permit-for-fo... sourced from certain country’s only ,
At the professional and executive level it has been capped at about 200k and lowering for the last 10 years (out of about 6mil )
I think because HN's audience is mostly US based there's a high level of bias towards democratic governments.
I think if we all take a look at it from a unbiased angle it's all really apples and oranges. A bad dictator is not so different from a democracy electing bad leaders and a good dictator is not so different from a democracy electing good leaders.
The thing with a democracy is that you have a lot of checks and balances so an elected bad leader can't do much damage... but then again an elected good leader can't do much good either.
I tend to agree -- it seems to me that democracy creates ecological conditions favorable to long-term survival, because the risk of destruction under dictatorship is asymmetric with respect to the probability of prosperity.
Democratic checks-and-balances assume the inescapability of despotic buffoons who rise to power either through force or sometimes even through the people's choice (while it's good to believe in the wisdom of crowds, one must always account for its lapses). I think these are very realistic assumptions.
Hand-waving things away with your absolutist statement is what truly seems naive. IMO there is far more nuance than you suggest.
Democracy seems to work well for some types of problems but not others. What happens to democracies when faced with threats that manifest over very short timescales? They aren't nimble enough to respond in time. This is most evident in larger democracies; look at US/India responses to COVID. Countries like Taiwan are democratic and still succeeded, but they are small and they utilized methods that would be characterized as authoritarian here in the US.
What about problems where the consequences of decisions have a large time-lag? There is no incentive for democratic policymakers to address them. Global warming is the obvious example.
I question whether democracies can handle these kinds of
issues. More worryingly, I think that as humanity's capabilities continue to increase, these kinds of problems are going to be more and more frequent.
Countries like Australia, South Korea and New Zealand have had exemplary COVID-19 responses. It has nothing to do with whether you are a democracy or not and everything to do with the competence of the government.
And the people of the US will have an opportunity to vote in a few months on whether the response was adequate or not. I don't see the people of China having a similar opportunity for example.
I mentioned that I believe problems manifest as scale increases. Do you think there is a difference between implementations of democracy in a large country vs a small one? I do.
To clarify after some further thought - I think the bureaucratic burden scales much more drastically in a democratic system. In a large democracy all decisionmaking becomes mired in a swamp. Of course all governments will require more and more delegation and bureaucracy as the population grows, but IMO to a lesser degree in an authoritarian system, because there is no need to come to a broad consensus before making choices.
Additionally, complexity also scales. A dictatorship relies more on the common sense of the dictator while a democracy relies on a set of written laws that grows with complexity over time. A single party does not need a contract while at least two parties must engage in a contract called a written body of law in order to come to an agreement. This "contract" is edited and amended over time with no limit to how complex it gets.
In fact, that complexity balloons to a point where only experts can understand the law (lawyers). It also grows to the point where the law is so complex that it can become internally inconsistent and develop loop holes that do not serve the original intended purpose of the law.
This allows for entities to exploit these loop holes. Of course only entities with enough money to afford the "experts" to find the loop holes and exploit them will be able bend the laws to their advantage thereby causing only the rich and elite to become more powerful.
The above is the basic theory about the anthropological progression of your typical democracy. Growth in complexity of a body of law to the point where only the elite can afford to hire specialists to take advantage of said law.
That is the main danger of democracy. Excess Complexity to the point where only people who can afford specialists to change the law can exploit it to their advantage. Complexity of law also leads to all kinds of other phenomena that niche experts and common people can take advantage of as well. For example constructors that take advantage of property law.
The scary thing about the theory above is that there is a TON evidence of this. Almost every modern democracy in the world suffers from ALL of the problems above. Literally find me one that doesn't.
I live in Melbourne and her arrest is widely supported. Our city is in a severe lockdown and at a tipping point between New Zealand style suppression and US style chaos.
Just because she is a white, pregnant woman does not mean that she has the right to break the law and compromise the safety of the community.
Because the reaction to her arrest is a good example of white lady in distress.
Whether you agree or disagree with her arrest and release like two hours after this sort of stuff happens all the time with police but it's a big deal if it's a white lady.
Just for the record im not sure I agree with her arrest but you know... Bigger things to worry about
Is "wide support" of her arrest (as framed by the person I was replying to) an example of white lady in distress? That seems like the exact opposite of white lady in distress. Or is the single person who thought the arrest was unjust (further up) an example of white lady in distress?
None of this fits the white lady in distress definition. It just seems like a way to smuggle in anti-white racism for no particular reason. Nothing about this situation has to do with race in any way whatsoever.
The fact that he was replying to a comment that used it as an example of Australia's 'authoritarian' response to covid and the fact that it received widespread news coverage and we all got to see her distress Vs the other guy who got arrested and received zero coverage for the same crime seems to suggest that this it is relevant and on the balance of probabilities a good example of white lady in distress.
He didn't use the 'authoritarian' framing (he sarcastically questioned whether it was 'exemplary'), that's something you're presumptively attributing.
There was not 'zero' coverage of the guy's arrest, to the contrary there was wide coverage as a Google search easily reveals. There's also two factors you're not considering, (1) the guy ran a conspiracy theory group which reduces sympathy for him, (2) the woman's arrest came first so it was more novel and thus more engaging from a clicks perspective.
It's absurd that race is being brought into this as a relevant explanatory dimension. Pernicious and divisive to say the least, leaving aside the fact that there's no evidence that race is in any way relevant to either what occurred in this case or the coverage of the case
One thing about a democracy, if poor choices are made and poor leaders are selected, it’s only temporary until the next wave of elections. But in a dictatorship, or even something that masquerades as a democracy but is not, those choices may go unchecked for decades.
> One thing about a democracy, if poor choices are made and poor leaders are selected, it’s only temporary until the next wave of elections.
With sufficiently bad choices in a democracy it ceases to be a democracy before the error is corrected. Also, even when that doesn't happen, its possible for a choice to be bad but repeated in a democracy.
> With sufficiently bad choices in a democracy it ceases to be a democracy before the error is corrected.
I’d like to see a real world example of what you mean. Because while lots of countries have elections, when leaders are allowed to arbitrarily extend their reign past with their laws allow, then I would agree with you. But those are the countries that I consider falling under the category of “masquerading as a democracy“.
> I’d like to see a real world example of what you mean.
The German Enabling Act of 1933.
> when leaders are allowed to arbitrarily extend their reign past with their laws allow
What if they just use the provisions in the fundamental law that allow changing the structure or terms of government?
A state can either have a thanatocracy in which the dead dictate the details of government to the living, or it can have process by which even the fundamental law can be changed. If it has the latter, that process can, within the preexisting democratic system, be used to terminate democracy without anyone exceeding the power allowed in law.
That seems a bit tautological to include the outcome in the definition. By that logic there are democracies today that will sometime in the future become “masquerading” that we can’t know yet.
You can't predict the future of any country of course, but you can certainly use its past to inform such a distinction. The moves by China and Russia, for example, to lengthen the reign of their leaders, while in the U.S., no matter what has happened to its leadership for the entirety of its history, no one has ever exceeded the time they were allowed before another election risked that tenure.
It's good that it hasn't happened in the US yet, the US luckily has pretty strong institutions it turns out.
But just looking at number of times a democratically elected senate has been dissolved throughout history (Rome, Japan (rise of imperial japan), Germany (third reich), Iran (iranian revolution), etc), there has indeed been a lot of "masquerading as a democracy" going on.
Separation of powers makes it harder to raise a dictator but in some cases it's just another piece of legislation away. Hence, I think Americans ought not to take our democracy for granted.
Some views suggest that the political structure of the United States is in many respects an oligarchy, where a small economic elite overwhelmingly determines policy and law. Some academic researchers suggest a drift toward oligarchy has been occurring by way of the influence of corporations, wealthy, and other special interest groups, leaving individual citizens with less impact than economic elites and organized interest groups in the political process.
A study by political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern University) released in April 2014 suggested that when the preferences of a majority of citizens conflicts with elites, elites tend to prevail. While not characterizing the United States as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" outright, Gilens and Page do give weight to the idea of a "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey A. Winters, saying, "Winters has posited a comparative theory of 'Oligarchy,' in which the wealthiest citizens – even in a 'civil oligarchy' like the United States – dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth- and income-protection."
In their study, Gilens and Page reached these conclusions:
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it. ... The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
— Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, 2014
E.J. Dionne Jr. described what he considers the effects of ideological and oligarchical interests on the judiciary. The journalist, columnist, and scholar interprets recent Supreme Court decisions as ones that allow wealthy elites to use economic power to influence political outcomes in their favor. "Thus," Dionne wrote, in speaking about the Supreme Court's McCutcheon et al. v. FEC and Citizens United v. FEC decisions, "has this court conferred on wealthy people the right to give vast sums of money to politicians while undercutting the rights of millions of citizens to cast a ballot."
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote:
The stark reality is that we have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people. This threatens to make us a democracy in name only.
— Paul Krugman, 2012
I would say, again, that the answer is complex and multifaceted. It is not exactly clear whether authoritarianism or democracy is better. One thing is clear though... both are far from perfect.
AFAIK one of LKY’s stated goals was to compete with private corporations for the best talent by paying comparably. DPMs are paid quite handsomely but not incomparable to C suite pay at large companies.
>Singapore's ministers are the highest paid in the world. Prior to a salary review in 2011, the Prime Minister's annual salary was S$3.07 million, while the pay of ministerial-grade officers ranged between S$1.58 million and S$2.37 million.
0ne of the pieces many articles discussing Singapore miss is actually the quality of the people in the Government officer corps. This i think makes a massive amount of difference in that a lot of what's planned in infrastructure and processes is much better thought out and executed than in other countries. It's the equivalent of the 10X programmer philosophy.
This is achieved largely by the government sponsoring the most promising/brilliant students to study in top Western universities and offering them quite competitive pay packages to join the government.
The Indian government's elite corps (IAS) as a contrasting example are also composed of similarly brilliant people (including some of my own classmates), but this is restricted to only the people at the very top of the hierarchy and capability doesn't penetrate deep into bulk of the government, nor is compensation as competitive which promotes corruption.
> The Indian government's elite corps (IAS) as a contrasting example are also composed of similarly brilliant people, but only restricted to the people at the very top of the hierarchy and is not true for bulk of the government, nor is compensation as competitive which promotes corruption.
It may be anecdotal, but in my experience the officers of the Union Public Services are in most cases not particularly brilliant, as you may expect from a examination and qualification system that prioritizes rote learning. (my anecdotal sample size being 3-4 IPS officers, 5-6 IAS officers and a couple of other officers of the lesser known services, i.e. IRS, IDAS, IFS, etc.)
btw brilliant or not, it is like a switch flips in their brain once they become an IAS.... emperor of the universe/feudal lord firmware gets installed.
> This is achieved largely by the government sponsoring the most promising/brilliant students to study in top Western universities and offering them quite competitive pay packages to join the government.
And so do countless of other countries, some successful, some not.
Much of Africa for example sends its brightest to Oxfords, and Harwards for exorbitant amounts of money.
And there are counterexamples, very big ones at that. Countries where civil service is poorly paid, and often not demanding even a college degree.
As for Asia, Taiwanese are quite low despite high bar, South Korean, and Japanese were more or less equal to average white collar job. Malaysia can be though of as a mid income country, and their local government salaries lag behind white collar jobs.
The current administration has certainly done some damage but:
- the NIH is one of the biggest drivers of biomedical research in the world, both in terms of extramural funding and intramural research. The NSF, NASA, and the research arms of the DoD and DoE (etc) are also world-class.
- Hurricane Dorian nonsense aside, the weather and ocean forecasts from NOAA/NWS are well-regarded.
- the FAA and FDA have kept flying, food, and medicine quite safe.
- The National Parks System is fantastic and the USGS maps are quite good; maybe only the UK’s OS maps are better regarded.
The FDA blocked private testing at a critical point early in the coronavirus. The FDA keeps many lifesaving treatments out of the US, at a large and unseen cost. For example, the FDA blocked UVB sunscreens for a decade after they were permitted in Europe. Those extra US skin cancer deaths are "unseen" but are casualties of the FDA. In turn, the FAA allowed Boeing to "self-regulate" approvals of the MAX and after the first plane went down, still deemed it to be airworthy.
Anything involving risk and trade-offs is tough to evaluate.
The FDA might be too slow to approve approve new sunscreens, but they also dragged their feet on approving thalidomide, a decision that turned out to be absolutely correct in hindsight.
The FDA's overall reputation seems pretty good. Daniel Carpenter's book calls it "the most powerful regulatory agency in the world." This article talks about its (very positive) reputation as well: https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.23.1....
There’s a revolving door system where you can make laws to benefit an incumbent large company and conveniently end up as a board member in a few years after quitting the government role.
So while the 3 letter agencies don’t profit directly, sometimes the people do.
ISPs are probably the big bugbear. Constantly ranked as one of the worst industries by consumers, competition doesn't exist in many markets or is noncompetitive, and mergers have slowly brought back the edifice of Ma Bell back from the dead.
> 0ne of the pieces many articles discussing Singapore miss is actually the quality of the people in the Government officer corps. This i think makes a massive amount of difference in that a lot of what's planned in infrastructure and processes is much better thought out and executed than in other countries. It's the equivalent of the 10X programmer philosophy.
> This is achieved largely by the government sponsoring the most promising/brilliant students to study in top Western universities and offering them quite competitive pay packages to join the government.
Some of the scholars, yes. I interacted with some scholars during my university time, and I thought that some of them were, in my opinion, not very smart outside of academics.
There are many in the civil service that perform the bare minimum for their position — it's not easy to get fired from the civil service, and they're content with minimal career progression.
Interesting... I immediately contrast this with the American drive to make government work undesirable. This has led to a mass exodus of competence from government all the way to the top. Even the office of President is now sought by a bunch of third rate candidates: bland old bureaucrats, delusional ideologues unfit for the real world, and con men and narcissists like the current occupant of the office. Have we intentionally created an incompetent government?
Disagree on calling Suzhou Industrial Park a failure. I grew up there and can say that while it may not have attracted the desired profit levels it certainly did have miraculous effect on the people of Suzhou. Wages have sky rocketed (as has property price). It may not have been profitable within 5 years, more than 400 fortune 500 companies had their factories located there in 2014. Suzhou went from a city with two big super markets and one KFC to a city with a mall around every block (and yes people could afford to spend in these malls).
Also Lee's success in Singapore is not only due to his authoritarianism as most western scholars put out, but also due to the sheer pragmatism of Singapore's policy making elite. They respect no ideology but the one that is suitable. If they need to have free markets they will have free markets. If they need to regulate pricing they will regulate it.
Some pretty interesting remarks in the wikipedia article on SIP:
> The SIP ran into trouble when local officials began building Suzhou New District (SND) industrial park to compete with it. As the Suzhou city government had only a minority 35 percent stake in the SIP, while they had a major stake in SND, the city government largely ignored SIP and concentrated on promoting the SND instead.
> After incurring losses of some US$90 million over 5 years, the Singapore consortium lowered its stake to 35 percent, raising the Chinese consortium's stake to 65 percent from 35 percent and reducing the Singaporean share from a planned 70 km2 to just 8 km2. The Chinese side appointed Wang Jinhua, vice-mayor of Suzhou and the former manager of the New District, as the new chief executive.
> In 2001, one year after Singapore lowered its stake, the park made its first profit of $3.8 million.
>Wages have sky rocketed (as has property price). It may not have been profitable within 5 years, more than 400 fortune 500 companies had their factories located there in 2014. Suzhou went from a city with two big super markets and one KFC to a city with a mall around every block (and yes people could afford to spend in these malls).
I interpreted from the article that it was nothing special. That is, it followed more or less the same trends as Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou and Wuxi rather than trailblazing its own path.
To be honest WuXi (which is next to Suzhou), was significantly lagging behind it around 2014. I believe that has changed now but I left China more than 6 years ago. SIP definitely had its perks. It was incredibly important for China to attract foreign talent and many foreigners would live in SIP but work in some other city or place. So arguably the growth of cities like WuXi also depended on SIP.
>Disagree on calling Suzhou Industrial Park a failure
Yes. The article also calls out Chandigarh as a 'failed city', but it's one of the highest income regions in India, and one with the cleanest urban environmental footprint. Far from being a failure it seems to have been quite successful.
> They respect no ideology but the one that is suitable. If they need to have free markets they will have free markets. If they need to regulate pricing they will regulate it.
Isn't that what Deng Xiaoping meant when he said that "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice."
Fukuyuma's acknowledgement came two decades after the publication of "The End of History". Given how strongly he advocated for the inevitable triumph of his worldview, I think it's fair to label his admission in your article as backpedalling.
Compare and contrast with the latter part of Yergin & Stanislaw's The Commanding Heights, which goes into detail on the American origins of China's economic policy.
Huntington's The Third Wave also applies, since China looks about the same as a lot of other economically developing countries in the mid-late 20th century, including a lot of 'democracies' that were de facto single party states.
Only more authoritarian leaders can get away with pure pragmatism. Singapore easily destroy an old low density housing, and replace it with high density housing. In construction gets postponed can get delayed for years because a renter refuses to leave.
That's right, we tend to label every successful economy "capitalism", but actually if you look at Singapore there's some things that are not so obviously free market. Housing, for instance.
Housing is much less subsidised than in many western "social-market" economies. You work 10-15 years, save for the flat and buy it.
One great thing is, everyone in Singapore is saving for their own future (health care, housing, retirement). You can be nearly sure no corrupt politician will diverge your savings to buy votes. The government is just the enforcer of this scheme -- they know, not everyone would be happy to carve out a part of their salary to save for the future.
If you're not a resident and don't plan to stay for long you barely pay any taxes (11% AFAIK). But then you don't save for your own flat or retirement.
Gotta say, housing is one good that the free market seems to not really be amazing at.
Here in Australia, it has become an investment vehicle; a huge amount of housing stock is empty while a third of the population are living in very poor accommodation.
The population of Tokyo has grown 50% over the last two decades while house prices and rents have stayed flat. The reason housing prices go up is almost always because zoning makes building more housing illegal. See San Francisco. Contrast with Seattle and Houston. When more housing is built prices go down, or at least go up slower.
As a result, the phenomenon of hoarding real estate for profit simply doesn’t exist. And the regular tear down of old houses allows density to increase rapidly, at the expense of building waste.
This might just be the psychological aftermath of the Japanese bubble.
Land prices in Japan was insane in early 1990s, and then it burst, losing almost 60% of the value. it doesn't get that high without people believing it will appreciate - and now they don't.
The approach that seems to work is to give economically elastic things to the free market, and make economically inelastic things (housing, medical care, etc) a responsibility of the state. It's difficult to tell if this is the case as we can only look at macroeconomic effects in hindsight, and this approach would have many problems at scale, but this seems to be the most beneficial approach for society long term?
You can get identical effects as Singapore’s state owned land without actually making it state owned/managed/priced by simply instituting a very high Land Value Tax.
Rent collected for buildings/management/amenities goes to landlord, rent collected for the physical land upon which the building exists (which is valuable not because of the landlord) is recouped by the community as tax.
Lower taxes means more money people can devote to housing, which in turn can also bid up prices.
This is why the USA provides for a foreign housing deduction, or Americans could never practically live in Singapore without running into double taxation.
Reiterating the other comment: this is not true of LVT. LVT cannot be passed on to renters. Essentially every other tax can be and is passed to consumers. No economist disputes LVT’s inability to be passed on.
With a couple of exceptions, how is housing inelastic sans government zoning and other policy restrictions?
We're long past the point where the private sector can estimate housing demand on a long enough time scale for single and multi-family housing in most environments.
Outside of cases like Manhattan or London, where demand is driven more by wanting to 'live in...' than actual economic necessity, I don't see why housing needs to be overly regulated when it only takes one-two years (or less) to build new capacity once you remove all of the unnecessary red tape.
Since we're on HN I guess it's safe to assume that you live in the general Bay area, and probably have for most or all of your life, which is only relevant in that if true it's a location which is particularly prone to problematic housing policy and not much else in the way of housing supply (from what I can tell?).
However the view that policy is the only issue to housing just isn't appropriate in many places outside of SF and Singapore is actually a very good example (as is London to a certain degree, expanding inland burroughs notwithstanding): you only have so much space on which to build housing, but the population is variable. If we take the available housing space to be the supply and the population requiring housing to be the demand, you have a textbook case of economic inelasticity.
In Singapore they have ironically solved this with policy, as opposed to exacerbating it, and since this was planned early in the country's developmental phase as an economic policy I can assume they understood this problem as economic one very early on.
I don’t know about Australia, but one of the reasons that the housing market is so distorted in the US is due to gov’t intervention. 30 year mortgages, FHA loans, tax deduction of mortgage interest, etc, have been major drivers of real estate price inflation. Add in single family home zoning and it shouldn’t be that surprising we are where we are.
Having embarked on a house hunt in an Australian city, I’m surprised by how many of the houses I see (especially the more “affordable” homes) are empty on inspection. I assumed they were vacant post-lease, but your point about the houses being empty as a result of speculation is quite plausible. That’s crazy.
> Gotta say, housing is one good that the free market seems to not really be amazing at.
Most developed countries don't even have anything close to a Free Market anyway, with restrictions on the construction of new housing, zoning, and rent controls in many places.
It's good for many tenants who have longstanding leases, but rent increases have outstripped salary increases in all the better neighborhoods, by an almost laughable margin, for more than ten years.
A fair amount of that was fueled by long-term tenants getting kicked out by their new landlords who "needed" to reside in the flats. Similar gentrification model to parts of San Francisco.
So yeah, some things in Berlin are very tenant-friendly, but finding what used to be a typical flat in, say, Mitte on what is still a typical salary is pretty much impossible.
Edit: I get the impression that a lot of new housing is being built in Berlin, but I have yet to see any downward pressure on rents or for that matter purchase prices coming from it. The more they build, the more things cost.
The Mietendeckel has effectively triggered the death spiral of Berlin's housing market, it's the product of a reactionary local politics and the intransigence of the main political parties at a federal level to either fund housing development or loosen planning restrictions. I came to berlin in 2011 and almost a decade later the problem has only gotten worse, which goes to show that the direction of cracking down on private landlords whilst making negligible efforts to either zone new housing areas or speed up planning permission is ineffective at creating more living space for the 140,000 people who are under-housed.
The death spiral is accelerated by two factors, firstly private landlords have had their income curtailed and are selling up, secondly prospective private investors in rental housing, wary of further unilateral retrospective changes in the future, are walking away. For those that don't know what the Mietendeckel is, rents in Berlin have been reset to circa 2013 levels, where buildings built before 2014 cannot be rented above 6-10 euros per sqm, existing contracts and renovation investments be damned. For example a building in Friedrichshain built in 1890 but completely renovated < 10 years ago can only fetch 6-8 Euros per sqm, if an elevator is present, underfloor heating and a high quality finish to living areas is provided you could at a maximum charge an extra 1 Euro per sqm. Failure to retroactively lower the rent for your existing tenants is punishable with fines up-to 250,000 Euros, there are practically no loopholes.
So this legislation has lead to the current situation where landlords are preferring to sell their properties when they become empty or when that's not foreseeable, selling them with the tenants in them (which can reduce the final sale price by up to ~30%) or just hold off on renting empty properties for now or even rent them on the booming black market. This is evident in the 47% drop in rental listings for apartments in old buildings and the moderate rise in condominium sales.
German tenancy laws read like the wish list of rental activists in America or the UK, they provide comprehensive protection from no fault terminations and are backed by a lethargic court system, the sole reason that can be given for terminating a contract is when the apartment is needed for you or your relatives own use, a lot of people like to imagine that this is abused but the consequences are so severe I can't see any logical person making that choice. A long term tenant who fights this kind of termination can expect to stay in their apartment for up-to 2-3 years, but in the end will face certain eviction and ruinous costs in excess of 15-40,000 euros. Whilst there are clauses to protect vulnerable tenants from eviction, they are not evident in practice, just recently a 82 year old woman with advanced dementia was evicted as the court determined after 3 years that she could be physically lifted out the apartment by her daughters and so is therefore capable of moving elsewhere.
There is nothing to rent here, your sole choice is to buy a place, but you won't be able to afford an apartment which is unoccupied as the banks' valuations don't match that of the realtors. Which leaves you with finding soft targets for eviction, the easy to persuade will have accepted an offer, so take a pick between the elderly or single earner families with kids.
Since the Mietendeckel went into effect in February my (already low) rent went down by almost 300€ per month - I have never experienced anything like that anywhere else I lived in. We moved from Tel Aviv to Berlin in late 2013 & even back then we left a crumbling, old 55m 2-room apartment in a worse location that costed more than our current 92m, 3-room apartment in much better state of repair & in a better location (in terms of transit access, schools, environment, noise, etc - the only significant advantage I can think of for our old apartment or neighborhood is that my parents & sisters lived nearby).
According to the first internet resource[0][1] I found (as well as anecdotal data from many people I know in both cities) wages are more or less the same in both (tech workers earn more in Tel Aviv but everyone else earns more in Berlin).
I would say while the situation needs improvement (namely more housing built & faster) it's hardly the worse I've seen & almost everyone I know in other major global cities suffers from a worse housing market.
House prices in Australia are driven by two forces - immigration and monetary policy (ie, interest rates).
Neither of those drivers are linked to a free market. The equilibrium in both is set by government decree (immigration numbers) and interest rates are set by the RBA (effectively part of the government bureaucracy) to a first approximation.
The government doesn't have an explicit policy of pushing up house prices, but there is a very strong implicit policy to the same effect. Giving them more direct control over housing wouldn't change much.
> housing is one good that the free market seems to not really be amazing at
Housing isn't a free market if the government's central bank puts its thumb on the scale by printing money for mortgage loans. The Fed does that in the US.
Singapore's population is very conservative, e.g. live with parents until marry, homosexuality is illegal, a lot of pressure against interracial couples (my experience), and essentially a single, dominant media voice.
There is a militant approach to education which produces nice test results, but it doesn't produce young entrepreneurs, just conservative careers, helped by statutory hiring quotas. I don't think the Singapore model produces much innovation, they just really opened up to innovative foreign companies.
> they just really opened up to innovative foreign companies.
They also have a very important geographical position as a hub to many other Asian countries, and one of the few countries friendly to foreign investments in the area (even more so now that HK is going down).
This is a culture thing, nothing to do with being conservative/liberal. Renting in Singapore is expensive, therefore people prefer to stay with parents until they can afford to buy their own HDB.
Actually you are not allowed to buy HDB (apart from very special exceptions) if you are not married. So one joke goes how to propose (marriage): you, ... you want to apply for HDB?
Has everything to do with conservative/liberal. Living with parents your whole life until marriage produces conservative non risk takers, and there is a conservative political policy behind it that prevents you from obtaining HBD housing until you marry.
I think it's really just more of the ruthless pragmatism that makes this place so efficient and a consequence of land scarcity. Housing is limited and leaving it up to the free market would exacerbate wealth inequality. Therefore the government steps in with subsidized housing, which almost by definition will have more demand than supply. Prioritizing young families makes sense as the birth rate is below replacement.
Well, a leader can only do so much with what he/she is given. (or conversely, for all the success, only attribute some of it to a leader)
One of the most important contributing success factors was that Singapore had a population and people dying (literally dying) to have effective government, material improvements in their lives, and a willingness to be compliant with leaders who delivered.
It really makes a big difference when your people are cooperating with government. It costs less. It produces more.
When your people contribute their own time and work, when people keep things clean and disapprove of crime, when they don't tolerate disorder or corruption, gangs, etc., when they don't sue each other left and right, you achieve a lot more with the same resources.
It's a cultural thing, so it's hard to reproduce except over decades of changing a people's mindset.
You could put all these structures in place somewhere else, but if people don't want it, or don't support it, it could simply produce every run-of-the-mill banana republic that we know all too well, with elite institutions and guarantees of competence on paper and nothing in reality.
The article failed to mention 1 important thing: LKY built an incorruptible government. With all the power he had, he could have done so much better for his family if he just tried, but that wouldn't necessarily be good for the country. A lot of countries want to be Singapore, but few have a leader of his caliber.
I once worked with a Malaysian guy who had worked in the Singaporean broadcast company. They managed all radio equipment. He told me the story of one time the radio gear salesman gave the manager a box of chocolates at Christmas. The manager was so nervous about accepting a gift that he insisted that everyone on staff eat at least one of the chocolates.
He controls a 313 billion dollar fund that includes the country's internet access, cell phones access, the state run broadcasting and the banks. What would corruption look like when you already control everything? Putting people in prison for criticizing you, because they do that.
Anything specific about it? The PM's wife being CEO is obviously a bit suspect but it would be far more notable if the family was siphoning off money which there are unsaid said things about but never anything explicit which is... frustrating. So many untalked about things with regards to sg.
If Putin's wife ran the largest investment fund in Russia would you consider that only a bit suspect?
If she were siphoning off money she would not be doing it an obvious way and we likely wouldn't hear about it. They have a habit of bankrupting wannabe woodward and Bernsteins and taking large sums of money from foreign news organizations that say the "wrong" thing:
> forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism.
The trick is distinguishing between what is truly pragmatic and not merely ruthless. One wonders if some of the illiberal policies like caning are regional necessities or minor pathologies that did not overwhelm the overall trend towards liberalization.
And let's not forget Singapore's strategic location in the center of world's busiest shipping lane too. That's why Singapore is strongly against the construction or Kra canal, which could shorten the route by ~1200 km bypassing Malacca straight:
Whilst it depends a bit which ships you count- the world’s busiest shipping lane is generally regarded to be the Straits of Dover with about 400 commercial transits per day. [1]
My one disappointment with Singapore is the lack of genuine free speech, and the lack of freedom of the press. This simple void causes many things that are invisible to the eye, and it creates veins that run deep. Live there for any non-trivial amount of time and compare that experience and your conversations with peers to that of living in many places in the West, and the effect is striking, the way this gap can so gently weigh on an entire people and change individual personalities.
Is Chandigarh really a massive failure? From where I stand it's the most livable city in North India. (Of course, that's not a particularly mighty accolade.)
There are a few key things to bear in mind about Singapore's growth model and success:
* The proximity of power to population because it is a tiny city state. Singaporean governance is under extreme pressure to be effective because if it fails it cannot hide. This is a systemic issue that can be seen all around the world and is probably why some countries moved their capitals AWAY from population centres (e.g. brazil, myanmar): https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/8830780/Campante...
* The reaction to the communists. Lee Kuan Yew didn't just annihilate the communists with coldstore, he tried to replicate their policies to maintain his stranglehold on power (note the resemblance of HDBs to soviet style housing, for instance). In a way, his lack of any real conviction and ruthless pragmatism helped here. This was echoed later when an opposition party set up on a platform of smaller class sizes. PAP effectively strangled the party (largely through unethical means) but then recognized the power of the protests that led to this party's popularity and took their policy (ceding no credit of course!).
I lived in Singapore for 3 years. While I acknowledge its success at industrializing, I hated working there. The authoritarianism and rigid class structure permeates every aspect of life. This also made it a really bad environment for tech to flourish IMHO, even though they threw money at it. Creativity is massively stifled. Cargo cultism of silicon valley was rife. Most tech startups and founder I encountered were fast followers and largely treated developers like cogs.
I was going to type a disagree until you edited that last bit. I don't mind the authoritarianism, since the authorities seem very proactive towards encouraging foreign tech startups, but creativity is near zero and heavily sanitized, and most devs are poorly treated, I guess due to the massive glut of technical folks for the tiny population it has.
Singapore feels so artificial, just like another Dubai. Going to London and now a smaller city in Germany was like a breath of fresh air. Startups grow "organically", as in without the government machinery shoved up their arse, people are freer to pursue whatever interests them, and since you can actually see the good and the bad in the city, you actually feel that the city is a living entity. Compare that to SG or DXB, where the homeless are stashed away/deported so that the tourists don't see them.
Recently Singapore has been making a push for the arts, yet it's clearly evident how inorganic the output is - one can clearly notice the wannabeism.
> Recently Singapore has been making a push for the arts, yet it's clearly evident how inorganic the output is
Last time I went to Singapore I was struck by how it was impossible to buy any local music. I associate by music, so I always buy local music when I travel. But in Singapore's tiny music stores, I couldn't even find a Dick Lee CD for sale, and his music wasn't available through Australian iTunes.
(In the end I emailed his website asking which stores to try, and instead they sent one of his personal assistants to my Singapore hotel in person to hand deliver one of their remaining CD copies. For which my family were deeply grateful, we had discovered him 25 years earlier on a cassette we bought of The Mad Chinaman, and as a little Aussie kid I'd learned all the words of Rasa Sayang: "Everything we have has to be the best of the fabulous east and the wonderful west".)
Lately I've started to find Singaporean bands on Bandcamp, so things are improving. But it wasn't like I could walk into Starbucks and find CDs from a bunch of emerging local artists at the counter. I'm heartbroken that the 100th Starbucks store near The Fullerton Waterboat House has apparently closed too.
Speaking about art in SG. I find that street artists in Europe are way more better than those in SG. I’m always amazed by their skill and enthusiasm in my Europe trip. While back in SG, the only ones I see are art students or old uncles playing some music that you can hardly say “good”. This is sad.
Some of that is cultural. Education is math and science, art is for when you’ve done your homework and is regarded more as “play” than a serious subject worth dedicating yourself to (some exception noted).
I also noticed that the foreign startups they lured in with their juicy incentives were not the better ones. Nonetheless they probably still believe that the same techniques that brought in Shell in the early days needed to be adapted for the "modern world".
Despite throwing money at tech salaries are still poor. Everybody gets that money except the developers.
They managed to persuade Grab to move from Malaysia to Singapore though.
Tech salaries are not poor if you compare them to other South East Asia countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, etc). If you compare them to other professions in Singapore... then I can't say (I don't know).
Moving Grab isn't a big deal, considering Grab's founders are Malaysian Chinese, and likely face indirect discrimination thanks to Malaysia's constitution. Malaysia drove them away, Singapore didn't persuade them.
Edit:- to counter your example, devs are not as highly paid for the living costs of Singapore. And they don't even form part of the upper bracket, which is largely populated by people in finance and management.
Top devs in India and China are usually paid on par with the managerial salaries there. I have a bunch of mates who get paid on par with/more than mid-level IB bankers.
I wonder why this is the case. I also heard the software engineers are not considered "high status" as well in UK. Not sure in Europe (like Sweden, Germany, etc).
> Singapore feels so artificial, just like another Dubai. … Compare that to SG or DXB, where the homeless are stashed away/deported so that the tourists don't see them.
Singaporean here. The central touristy area is artificial, but the public housing areas surrounding it are slightly more organic — with a fair share of homeless people who sleep on benches at night, too.
I agree. I've seen my fair share of homeless folks in SG, but I heard they are regularly stashed away in some temporary housing that can barely fit anyone.
And of course, for an actual taste of SG culture, one has to visit the hawker centres and the HDBs to actually get a feel of the city's life. But they seem so staid and artificial still, almost Soviet-esque, compared to their counterparts elsewhere. Even if I take a locality in Dubai (the other culprit here), the Dubai Marina is still vastly more lively than MBS, and the less fancier residential colonies in Old Dubai are still more lively than the average HDB complex. Shenton Way turns into practically a ghost town on weekends in comparison to its counterparts elsewhere.
I live in Vietnam and I've always been surprised at the large number of Singaporean tech companies that open up development offices in Vietnam. And it isn't (just) to save money on salaries. The average quality of a Singaporean developer is shockingly bad for such an educated, developed country.
And saying that Vietnam has more creativity isn't exactly a high bar given the similar values of Confucian hierarchy here!
> And saying that Vietnam has more creativity isn't exactly a high bar given the similar values of Confucian hierarchy here!
I'd suggest that it's because the "happy path" for most residents in Singapore is ridiculously straightforward to navigate, so people don't need to be resourceful to accomplish things.
As a Singaporean, I've travelled to Vietnam multiple times, and have worked with Vietnamese on projects before. The Vietnamese usually get my admiration for being highly resourceful and entrepreneurial. They're really good at hustling and improvising.
Lots of working-class Singaporeans aren't raised like that, because the first 18 to 20 years of their lives have been laid out for them.
Vietnam has twenty times the population of Singapore; it's not surprising that it'd be easier to find good developers there. It's also harder for good Vietnamese developers to emigrate to somewhere with better pay like the US, compared to Singaporean developers.
>And saying that Vietnam has more creativity isn't exactly a high bar given the similar values of Confucian hierarchy here!
I know some mainland Chinese who live in Singapore, and they often complain about how closed-minded the locals are. If Vietnam is similar to China in that regard, then it might well be less hierarchical than Singapore (Chinese culture seems much less hierarchical than some other Confucian-influenced cultures like Japan/Korea, maybe due to the communist revolution actively demonising Confucious, and Vietnam also had a similar revolution).
Yes but Vietnam’s population has been through a millenia of war and they are the most enthusiastic group of people I’ve ever met for doing something well other than that
> The reaction to the communists. Lee Kuan Yew didn't just annihilate the communists with coldstore, he tried to replicate their policies to maintain his stranglehold on power (note the resemblance of HDBs to soviet style housing, for instance). In a way, his lack of any real
PAP itself started as a largely communist party. The later confrontation can be largely seen as two communist parties vying for power. And the Western styled communist party (PAP) has won.
Being an offshore finance centre isn't something you can just become. It requires an industrial or resource extraction base to generate wealth (e.g. Dubai/singapore/London/NYC) or a client state relationship with a powerful country (Bahamas). Lesotho, for instance, would never be able to do this and neither would 1950s Singapore.
"This character was only mentioned in dialogue.
Lee Kuan shares naming elements with Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Singapore in the 1960s. Lee established a hybrid form of governance with democratic and authoritarian elements."
> Yet history is littered with the failures of authoritarian modernist regimes. Indeed, the record of utopian schemes to improve the human condition is dismal in the 20th century. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s plan to transform “small, backward and scattered peasant farms to amalgamated, large scale socialized farms” led to brutality and starvation for millions. In China, Mao’s Great Leap Forward propelled the nation into the Great Chinese Famine. Even Le Corbusierian plans in Brasilia or Chandigarh have become embarrassing examples of government hubris. Why did authoritarian modernism work well for Singapore and poorly for others?
And given this track record, why is high modernism still given such pride of place in the minds of the highly educated, who ostensibly are more attuned to contradictory evidence than the average person? Singapore is held out as the model when it is the exception.
I guess in the words of an old song, "everybody wants to rule the world."
Obviously the world is a super simple place with super simple answers to seemingly complex questions. When I asked my friend which is better authoritarianism or democracy he told me the answer is complicated. I told him to look at the evidence:
Almost Every civilization in history: egyptians, romans, greeks, China was more or less some form of authoritarian government. They all failed.
Basically every single civilization that existed before modern civilization existed Failed! The fact that the United States of America hasn't failed means the US way (democracy) is the best and only way!
All the civilizations I mentioned were authoritarian. Egyptian Pharaohs, Roman Caesars, Chinese Emperors. The history of all great civilizations is by a huge majority created and maintained through authoritative rule.
In fact, modern anthropological theory states that the first step in the formation of a big civilization requires central authorities to form first.
>what we should really be looking at is whether they provide for their citizens the best -- which democracy does
America didn't have the capability to provide room for the influx of covid-19 patients. China built a hospital in a week. There's no question that for this specific instance, authoritarianism provided better for its' citizens than democracy.
> America didn't have the capability to provide room for the influx of covid-19 patients
No, America had (and still has) central authority make (making) a conscious choice not only not to direct energy at that purpose but to actively interfere with subordinate authorities attempts to do so for purposes linked to maintaining institutional power by placing blame.
There was no lack of capacity caused by the absence of central authority, there was active prevention caused by the interests of central authority.
And the entire global pandemic is in no small part due to the delay and denial initially by China before they decided they needed to deal with it, again because of the propaganda interests of central authority.
There certainly is utility in central organization in dealing with things like pandemics, but COVID-19 itself, especially the US and China subparts of it, are hardly a ringing endorsement of “central authority good”.
>No, America had (and still has) central authority make (making) a conscious choice not only not to direct energy at that purpose but to actively interfere with subordinate authorities attempts to do so for purposes linked to maintaining institutional power by placing blame.
Right of course. You're talking about the HBB, the Hospital Building Bureau the government sponsored central entity that builds all hospitals in the United States obeying trump and not building any hospitals.
According to wikipedia:
Health care in the United States is provided by many distinct organizations.[1] Health care facilities are largely owned and operated by private sector businesses. 58% of community hospitals in the United States are non-profit, 21% are government-owned, and 21% are for-profit.
Which is pure BS. Hospitals are centrally planned like you said by the HBB! Central authorities are stopping hospitals from being built! Nothing to do with private enterprise or the lack of central control! My friend told me it's because private enterprise isn't reacting fast enough to demand because the demand is temporary and there really is no profit for private business to build more hospitals! What a stupid answer. Obviously it's a government conspiracy.
Yes and how useful was that hospital? How much of that construction equipment moving about on the drone videos was just for show vs actually contributing to its construction?
The hospital was built to save lives. Now that the initial wave of the pandemic is over the hospital sits empty.
Private enterprise would never spend resources to build hospitals to save lives simply because it isn't "profitable." Only a centrally planned government will pull off such a feat purely in the name of saving lives without regard to profit. I mean literally no non-profit in the united states is capable of building a hospital just to handle a temporary spike in demand.
I assume this is sarcasm because by definition every non modern civilization is no longer with us. Including some of the early more democratic ones like Athens.
You shouldn't be asking yourself whether the post is sarcasm. You should be asking yourself does my post fit with the logic provided by the initial post?
Then if the logic fits with the logic of the initial post you should ask yourself is the logic absurd?
I've been all over the world, Singapore is my all-time favourite place to visit. It's too bad that it's so expensive though - especially housing, else I'd seriously consider living there.
I was fascinated by the details about politics in Singapore from 1945 to 1965. You don't hear about that very often. In this account, PAP sounds a Chinese mirror of UMNO; both parties could have been nurtured by the British, who needed to produce an alternative to Chin Peng, who they could allow to win Malaya's war of independence. It would be really interesting to hear about British support for PAP in the early days.
This article doesn't mention that Lee Kuan Yew was a staunch supporter of the Khmer Rouge. It's a genocidal regime that killed millions of people. Lee remains a strong supporter after he knew about the genocide. He also made efforts to dodge responsibility. He said the US and China were bigger supporters than Singapore. Financially, the US and China contributed more money. But Lee Kuan Yew seems to be the mastermind behind the support for Khmer Rouge. Lee Hsien Loong, son and successor of LKY, also made comments to revise the history.
Singapore's role in the Cambodian–Vietnamese War against Communism probably contributed to its rise. Singapore gained credibility amongst Western leaders.
> Let's not turn this into a character assassination.
This discussion is filled with praise for the late dictator. But say something negative and "let's not turn this into a character assassination". When discussing a notable person, why shouldn't we talk about their flaws as much as their positive attributes?
Discuss away. It's just that posts like these tend to actually completely assassinate the character and all discussions related to it. I'm just putting this here to temper the sentiment before it gets carried away. I am in no way trying to censor all criticism.
Singapore socialism is quite interesting. From what I’ve read it’s bare bones (we won’t let you starve), includes forced savings and cost sharing (you need to have skin in the game).
Kind of capitalism with the minimal amount of socialism to maintain a stable society.
Anecdotal of course but there are stories of foreign workers being promised one thing then receiving something else when they get there. It's difficult to complain when you can be sent home for doing so.
This kind of employment arrangement which is very open to exploitation is not unique to Singapore. Where I live there are similar programs for foreign farm workers and the are also stories if exploitation. However the scale of it in Singapore is enormously larger.
> Anecdotal of course but there are stories of foreign workers being promised one thing then receiving something else when they get there. It's difficult to complain when you can be sent home for doing so.
It's possible but very unlikely to be a problem over the long run with the means of communication nowadays. Everyone (even poor people) have access to mobile phones and can warn their peers/friends/communities if they happen to fall in such a trap.
Honestly I don't know any issue in the real world that has been solved this way. Just because much of the world has a mobile phone doesn't mean they are getting the right information at the right time.
I guess it raises the question - in the instance of say FDW (Foreign domestic workers, who live with a number of families in Singapore) - just because it’s legal, does it make it right?
I don’t know.
Majority of maids live in 1.5m x 1.7m rooms, get paid ~450USD a month (anecdotal guess), are female and see their own kids for maybe two weeks a year, work 6 if not 7 days a week.
All these articles tend to miss the fundamental point of city state uniqueness.
With no internal market, city states work almost completely different from other countries and if anything LKYs unconditional acceptance of this truth is underpinning much of the countries success - embracing its role and limitations and pursuing unique solutions suited for this situation.
Singapore started out, beyond a good location for a deep water habor, without natural resources at all - a homeless orphan somehow clawing into a billionaire neighbourhood despite having to pay for water, food, fuel, sand (essential construction materials), energy - paying for imports almost every other nations take for granted.
Surrounded by no exactly friendly countries, its sons have to sacrifice 2 prime years of workforce contribution to national defense, on top of having to spend the equivalent 25% of Germany's defense budget despite only having only 3.5M citizens (compared to 120M)
It's a disadvantage so fundamental and overwhelming that any call to adopt systems - econonic or social - is misguided. It's a place with little right to exist in the global world and only a ruthless, focused government free of ideological blinders would be able to make that work.
For Singapore to have value to the world, having no resources others desire, means being more efficient, more nimble and smarter/harder working than anyone else - its role fundamental connection between others that is so efficient that it beats all other arrangement. Water independence from Malaysia alone is a 100 year project - and has turned Singapore into the key exporter of desalination tech in the world.
And the battle has only become harder- money/offshore finance was the key lifeline and competitive advantage most small countries in the world in the last century... it got pulled like a rug under most of them after 9/11, necessitating much restructuring.
Changi is the world's best airport out of necessity, air sharing and absorbing the value of sea - port location being the only advantage the country was blessed with (and under constant attempts to be replaced by Chinese and Malaysian ports)
Singapore is South East Asia's business hub out of necessity, using safety and rule of law as a key advantage over the surrounding countries to attract regional HQs for jobs, tax revenue and growth.
No, most of these articles miss the point, comparing full fledged countries to city states while making some affordable to size as a supposed advantage, glancing over the extreme disadvantage inherent to it.
With reputation and trust gained of decades but possible to lose in moments, no, lofty talk of how things should be and simplifications and reflexive typecasting around authoritarianism few western press articles really convey the deeply nuanced and complex tradeoffs this country has to make to stay alive and relevant.
No, left / right ideology has no place here, fundamental empirical and scientific understanding of cold hard reality and day to day optimizing for the country's long term actually make this a pretty good place to live, especially in times of covid and LKY has more credit to that than anyone - not just because he was smart but because he never lost sight of the fundamental differences and unique solutions the country needed
> In fact, it was highly conditioned by Singapore’s own context, and how Lee and the People’s Action Party (PAP) responded to the political dynamics of the time. The resulting model is effective in Singapore itself, yet inevitably limited by scale. Large social processes are more complex than any schemata can capture—and yet, authoritarian high modernist states must rely on schemata to make centralized decisions.
What happened to writing without heaps of jargon thrown in? Instead of "Singapore's history and culture," we read, "Singapore's own context." And there's the double usage of "schemata" two sentences later.
Before I outgrew my youthful Marx-Hegel phase, I might have thought writing such as this was insightful. Now I see it mostly as pseudo-profundity that communicates minuscule amounts of information, if any, wrapped in an obfuscating layer of jargon.
I'm so tire of the Singapore miracle and Lee Kuan Yew hymn as someone who received education and lived early life there. I do believe on certain grounds they are produced and promoted by public relation department of Singapore government, as a counter-measure to all the criticism concerning human rights, free speech, totalitarianism, etc.
To put it shortly, Singapore is just China in minuscule, just that Singaporean officialdom knows how to conceal. There are many myths/narrative constructions regarding to this city state.
1, Singapore government is immune from corruption and highly efficient.
To be fair, Singapore government is very efficient and officials not corrupted at low levels. However, at high levels, it's a different story. Things are just concealed. One department buying useless software and renewing license for millions every year from some 2-people company, do you think it's corruption? remember it's not a democracy you can hold officials accountable. At top level, well, they own the country. Also, as a totalitarian regime where all decisions are made by a few feudal families, Singapore government made many wrong decisions that cost trillions. For example, it spent a huge amount of resources to biopharmaceutical industries for years in belief that this will have great economic gains, which turned out a total failure. Baisically they can do anything without any kind of mechanisms to check.
2, Singapore is a (economic) miracle.
Authority in Singapore since the very beginning has been saying that Singapore before PAP(People's Action Party) is a dirt poor fishing village, in primary schools, on textbooks, in scholar studies, etc. Well, this is a severe distortion of truth to say the least. In colonial era, Singapore had already been far ahead of other regions in South East Asia in every aspect. And that's why Singapore less than 1% of the land counted more than 50% of Chinese immigrant population in the whole Malaysia. People came to Singapore for money! In fact, in late 1800s and early 1900s, you can make about 5-10 times of what you can in other Malaysia cities for same job.
3, Singaporean people are living a happy life.
Some certainly are. Majority is not. Singaporean people's life standard is quite low, given its GDP. In fact, the philosophy from top, is, people's very basic needs are to be met, but anything else should be a luxury that they need to labor very hard (for us) to get. Singapore's wage is not high. Very basic food and shelter is not expensive to be fair. But if you want some comfort from life that most people in the world can have rather easily, you are probably not able to afford. I'm not talking about bmw or luxury condo, i'm talking about ice cream, beer, high quality fruit, air-con, Toyota, etc.
4, Singapore is meritocratic and being pragmatical.
Again, at low level of officialdom, it is, to a great extent. But there's saying in Singapore, people who got to make public transportation policies never take public transportation in life. You get the idea. To understand this, you need to know some Singaporean/Malaysian history. There's a people called Straights Chineses, to which Lee Kuan Yew's family belong. Straight Chinese is what later Chinese immigrants call them. They don't deem themselves as Chinese. Lee Kuan Yew only changed his name to Chinese and began to learn Chinese in his late years. That history is quite completed.
As I said, Singapore is just China in minuscule. Whatever you think of China, be it good or bad, applies to Singapore. I personally don't think highly of it. Actually there's a perennial quitter phenomenon in Singapore. Those who make it thru to middle class, especially professionals, tend to leave.
Gist: Described as SG's "original sin," Lee's detainment without trial of
pro-Communist opposition in 1963 paves the way for one-man rule. Lee applies
scientific rigor to backwater of Southeast Asia.
Theory 1: SG's small geography is uniquely tailored for Lee's centralism.
Abstractions collapse and errors get magnified over larger distances (USSR,
China, Brazil). Lee and Chinese premiere Jiang Zemin apply SG's model to Suzhou Industrial Park. Widely regarded as failure.
Theory 2: Strongman approach fails in Zimbabwe and North Korea because only Lee is wise enough to pull it off.
1940s: Japan captures and oppresses SG during WW2. Britain gradually decolonizes in war's aftermath.
1950s: Moderate Lee and Communist sympathizer Lim Chin Siong emerge as leaders of Western-educated PAP party. Lim dominates Lee in charisma and Mandarin ability in rallying the key Chinese laborer demographic.
1956: Minister of SG Lim Yew Hock imprisons Lim and other Communist PAP leaders citing public safety.
1958: Mollified by Hock's anti-leftism, Britain entrusts SG with full self-governance in State of Singapore Act.
1959: Lee's PAP party wins election in landslide. Lee releases Lim and other imprisoned Communists.
1961: Lim splits from Lee over Malay merger (Lee is for, Lim is against), forming own party Barisan Sosialis.
1963: Lee wins Malay merger referendum. Lim accuses Lee of "cheating" and "threats." Lee builds case for Lim's potential for violent subversion. When Lim is discovered lunching with Brunei's rebel leader, Lee triggers "Operation Coldsore" detaining Lim and 113 others without trial. Lim was released after six years, moved to England and became a grocer.
1965: SG leaves Malaysian Federation. Lee cries on TV.
What appears notable there is that Singapore's leaders used detention not mass murder for political control, unlike most dictators and Communist countries.
I lived 2 years in Singapore as an exchange student.
The economic success of Singapore is a relatively new phenomenon, and it was largely a doing of Lee jr., not Lee sr.
LKY was not well versed in matters of economics, and industry, and his forceful early industrialisation pushes failed miserably. For the bigger half of its history, Singapore was not that successful economically.
The money came to Singapore when it liberalised financially, and became a tax heaven.
LKY severely lacked vision, and ambition, and was very content with Sing remaining a "Lee family villa." What has really brought the change was LKY's extremely timid kid, who conceded much of authority to technocrats.
--which gives a rate of growth of 10.7%, and some of that will be inflation: the data is denominated in USD, which famously inflated rapidly in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Here is my math: solve for rate where e ^ (31 times rate) = 11828 / 428. (I am compounding continuously.)
The time series you linked to is already inflation adjusted, so I'm not sure why you're adjusting again. On a more practical level, over that period it went from
a colony whose inhabitants mostly lived in shanty towns to somewhere William Gibson compared to Zurich, Atlanta and Disneyland in an essay complaining about the dullness of its prosperity.
Singapore's per capita GDP was close to double South Korea's in 1990, though its divorce from Malaysia was less messy than the Korean War.
The macrotrends website says "Data are in current U.S. dollars", so the number I presented should be the real GDP growth rate. I think correcting for population growth is OK, but don't think your inflation calculation is correct.
Over the 29 years 1960-1989, Botswana experienced the greatest growth at 11.6%/year, followed by South Korea at 9.6% and Singapore at 8.6%. World growth was 4.1%, and U.S. growth was 3.6%. The worst performer was Guyana at 0.6%. (This among only those countries with available data at the start and end years.)
The same comparison for the period 1990-2019 shows top performer Equatorial Guinea at 15.0%/year, followed by China at 9.5%. Singapore weighed in at 5.6%, the World at 2.8%, and the U.S. at 2.5%. Bottom performer was Ukraine at -1.4%, and second-worst was Georgia at 0.2%. Former bottom performer Guyana faired much better at 3.8%.
Population does not cause GDP. Adjusting for population will give a better idea of changes in living standards but won't explain the differences in economic growth.
Population density may be related to economic growth, and for this reason it may be misleading to compare Singapore, which is essentially a city-state, to nation-states.
Haven't grown up in a 3rd world country - I disagree with you.
Most countries in SG's state at that time never made it past these initial stages of growth.
Because there's lots of low hanging fruit in terms of infrastructure, education, technology, etc. You don't really need to innovate, you can just copy other successful countries.
if it's so easy we would see more 3rd world countries advancing past their current state.
At the time of independence, people were very pessimistic about Singapore's prospects, it just looks inevitable now given their rise.
"Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases."
and on first-principles:
"Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism."
In that sense, Singapore is like a startup at a country-level.