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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why political leaders don’t look to LKY for insight the way business leaders look to Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. Singapore is the closest thing to a deliberate, systematic experiment in developing a third world country into a first world country.

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If you’re talking about North American political leaders, they really can’t. LKY had a lot more power than anyone can have in most countries political systems. If you’re talking about political leaders in growing countries, a lot do take inspiration from him. Singapore had a lot of qualities to benefit from at the time that other countries don’t, though.

Precisely.

There is no city government, state/province. Just the parliament. PAP has had an overwhelming majority for Singapore's entire existence (helped by some rather dubious methods). If a law needs to be passed - it's passed. There is no real debate.

You need a police permit to protest in Singapore (except for Speaker's corner). Today, there is little culture of protest in Singapore. They've pretty much completely passed their reins of power to the government.

Singaporeans like to call the country Singapore Inc. And it's true. It's about as close to a business structure as one could imagine.

I've reflected on this a lot over time. My conclusion is that it would be pointless. That would be akin to companies like Google and Walmart looking to a wildly successful mom and pop shop for business advice.

Wasn't it an inspiration to China's development, in particular to Deng Xiaoping? If so, then it is a great example of developing a third world country following LKY's insights.

IIRC there was a rumor? Legend? that Kim Jong Un, when he first claimed the throne, sent a delegation to Singapore to study what a prosperous benevolent dictatorship might look like in North Korea.

Considering many years later North Korea has changed very little in behavior both internally nor externally, the second part of the rumor is that the conclusion of the studies was that the Singapore model couldn’t be applied to North Korea.

I think they do.

1. I think the establishment of Special Economic Zones by Deng Xiaoping was inspired in part by Singapore's success.

2. Rwanda, which now seems to be doing well in an economic sense, is led by Paul Kagame, who is frequently compared to (and may even be trying to model himself on?) LKY. (Personally though, with the genocide, and Kagame's military background, and Rwanda's continued involvement in Congo, I think the analogy may actually be strained.)

3. The Brexiteers (optimistically, or delusionally), spoke for a while of trying to create a "Singapore on Thames" (London). I suspect LKY would have been amused.

The general theme is that comparisons to LKY seem to be more aspirational than truly legitimate. But the aspiration does exist.

politics is more about ideology and appeasing the powerbase than developing the nation or reaching "targets".

Singapore as a British port city on a small island was never a third world country. Before WWII it was already known as a major leisure, high life spot (as evident by Verinsky's 1931 "Magnolia"). It was surrounded by 3rd world countries like an American base may be surrounded by middle eastern shacks, but it is very different from them. If that base was to gain independence it would retain the QoL.

Lots of former British colonies have posh enclaves surrounded by poverty. Singapore’s GDP per capita in 1960 was similar to Guatemala: https://cepr.net/documents/publications/econ_growth_2005_11_.... And as the article noted, 20% of that was British military spending which went away with independence in 1965. The UK’s per capita gdp was more than 5 times higher.

Even in this table, you see Taiwan and South Korea with same impressive growth as Singapore, and then you see Thailand and Malaysia that fare very well. And they all have the handicap of not consisting out of a metropolis entirely, since capitals are known to have high GDPs per person and countryside is known to be lagging.

All of those countries were poor too. I’m not saying Singapore was the only country to develop. But lots of countries that were similarly situated to Singapore and Korea in 1960 didn’t develop.

How separate was British Singapore from British Malaya? My understanding is that Lee Kuan Yew wept when Singapore was thrown out of Malaysia. Neither he nor anyone else expected that Singapore would become a first-world economy and Malaysia would, well, not.

Not separate at all. You are right that he did weep.

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