Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore

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.

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.

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.

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.

(Some reflections from my time living there)

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.

The closing lesson:

> 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:

http://theindependent.sg/the-real-threat-to-spore-constructi...

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!).

* Lee's economic policies were, while good, largely not his idea. He had the good sense to follow this guy's proscriptions though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Winsemius

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.

of possible interest to Star Trek fans:

"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."

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Lee_Kuan

> 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."

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.

If you haven't been, you're missing out

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.

1) LKY’s autobiography is incredibly readable. Highly recommend.

2) It’s bizarre that discussions of “socialism” turn on Venezuela and the USSR instead of Singapore, which was explicitly governed by socialism.

Ask some of the million poorly paid foreign workers what they think of the success of Singapore - I'm sure the story won't be quite as glowing.

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.

TL;DR:

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.

Timeline:

1819: Stamford Raffles colonizes sleepy Malay village.

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.

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.

Capitalism’s version of North Korea