I'm finally reading this book on your recommendation and it's as good as you said it was. Easily one of the best political books I've ever read. Lee's commitment to intellectual honesty is remarkable in a politician and seems more than anything else to be the secret of his success.
The story of the liberal 1960s and the final breakup of the British empire is fascinating. I feel like I never really understood it before. Incredibly funny passage here:
"Harvard was determinedly liberal. No scholar was prepared to say or admit that there were any inherent differences between races or cultures or religions. They held that human beings were equal and a society only needed correct economic policies and institutions of government to succeed. They were so bright I found it difficult to believe that they sincerely held these views they felt compelled to espouse."
Lee is fascinating to read because he gets to look at all the things Western liberals are obligated to believe, i.e. free speech and democracy are moral necessities, and say "yeah I don't care about that, Confucian values or w/e". What you get from him is the unsympathetic view of a guy who had all the same problems as the other post-colonial states, effortlessly solved them and thinks they should have been able to do it as well. This probably makes him sound like more of a dick than he is - in fact he is quite kind and sympathetic - but he has zero patience with special pleading.
As an Australian I found his comments on Whitlam particularly interesting. Pretty funny to me that he makes the guy out to be a standard blowhard bullshit leftie who folded instantly when he was confronted on any issue. Also that he blames the short-lived Whitlam government for burdening our budget with ongoing welfare costs that we've never been able to get rid of.
Lee is completely right of course to point out that Australia is physically an Asian nation and that our tradition of nativist protectionism is holding us back, we need to engage more with our southeast Asian neighbours and Keating was quite right to try and push us in that direction. The White Australia Policy did so much damage, we could have built like four extra Singapores in the undeveloped tropical north.
Increasingly I feel like we kind of skim over the collapse of the British Empire in our histories of the 20th century. We treat it like it was inevitable and a triumph for the oppressed peoples of the world. But in fact it just created a huge power vacuum and a lot of the newly liberated countries instantly tore themselves apart through what seems to an outside eye like completely pointless ethnic conflict. (Are the Sinhalese and the Tamils really so different that they have to shoot each other? I mean, come on.)
Lee himself very much wanted the British to stay and was one of the few post-colonial leaders to actively keep symbols of the old Empire in place, i.e. the statue of Raffles. Given the incredible success of this strategy it's hard to understand why everyone else was so eager to get rid of them. I feel like particularly in Australia there's a lot of lessons we could take from this guy about what makes a post-British country good and how to navigate our place in the world.
> On a world scale, I think I would be uncomfortable with this sort of standard. I believe in the importance of creating robust societies where a wide range of ideas can thrive, and this sort of deliberately limited culture doesn't really provide that. But part of creating robust systems is questioning assumptions and experimenting with dramatically different approaches.
Thus the genesis of my own politics! I'm a single-issue voter, and the issue is "we should clone LKY ~200 times and install him as dictator-for-life in every country in the world."
He's the only proven benign tyrant / philosopher-king with an amazing and verifiable track record, a history of tackling ALL the hard problems nations face pretty well, and accessible DNA - so time for some radical experimentation in governance!
And the 'diversity of ideas' would still be quite wide, I would think, because the appropriate policies for empirical success will likely vary widely based on the people and cultures in the various countries.
Joking aside, amazing review. One of my favorite books, and one of my favorite countries.
On the multi-lingualism and diversity of Singapore, one of my favorite bits from the metro system is when they announce in Tamil, but for English speakers it sounds like "happy happy, platform has arrived."
Also, on the fertility crisis - it's certainly true by the numbers, but every time I'm there, I see couples with babies and young children everywhere! It's the biggest disconnect between "lived experience" vs "official statistics" I've ever seen.
You see the same in Tokyo, but that makes sense because all the young people go to Tokyo, and there's a vast hinterland full of old people, entirely denuded of youth. But Singapore has no hinterland!
The best argument I've heard explaining it is that a TFR of ~1 still means that most couples have 1 kid, and it's the lack of 2, 3, and 4 children families that really brings it down overall.
I've heard some theories about East Asian TFRs that a potential cause is that most of the housing (in the places where young people live) is tower blocks that get prohibitively expensive past a 2 bed. Raising 2+ children in such a flat doesn't seem like a pleasant experience to families, so they choose to only have one kid.
This applies to Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore.
My potential policy solution in Singapore would be to build/allocate 3-4 bed flats and promise them to any couple with one child who are expecting another.
European countries have higher TFRs (notwithstanding religious demographics) because their urban housing is less hostile to families. The Anglo settler colonies are even higher because of our massive amount of suburbs that are constructed to provide generous space for a 2-3 child family.
On this front, we actually have pretty strong data supporting your conclusion.
One of the strongest downward correlated variables for fertility is "percent of population living in apartments," both at the country and the individual city level.
As someone with a burgeoning interest in the topic of improving institutional decision-making, I thought this review was great from that perspective. :) I wish it got more traction.
Tangentially: I'm also Malaysian. In our high school history textbooks we learned that Lee Kuan Yew "cried crocodile tears" when Singapore was expelled from the rest of Malaysia in 1965 ("crying crocodile tears" was a teacher's password, if you're familiar with that term, that we had to write in answer to free-response questions to get full marks, so it's indelibly imprinted in memory). Laughable in retrospect...
One thing I would point out. Singapore's savings-based welfare system works because it is small country on a major trade route.
Singapore runs trade surpluses amounting to some 35% of GDP. Hence a third of its economy is supported by foreign consumers, allowing its population to save a much larger portion of its income while still having the aggregate demand needed to grow the economy.
Everyone can't run big surpluses; somebody has to buy the output, or it won't get produced.
Fantastic writing. I always wondered what LKY would do if Singapore were a vastly larger state, and the public policy-response feedback loop were much longer in time
I'm finally reading this book on your recommendation and it's as good as you said it was. Easily one of the best political books I've ever read. Lee's commitment to intellectual honesty is remarkable in a politician and seems more than anything else to be the secret of his success.
The story of the liberal 1960s and the final breakup of the British empire is fascinating. I feel like I never really understood it before. Incredibly funny passage here:
"Harvard was determinedly liberal. No scholar was prepared to say or admit that there were any inherent differences between races or cultures or religions. They held that human beings were equal and a society only needed correct economic policies and institutions of government to succeed. They were so bright I found it difficult to believe that they sincerely held these views they felt compelled to espouse."
Lee is fascinating to read because he gets to look at all the things Western liberals are obligated to believe, i.e. free speech and democracy are moral necessities, and say "yeah I don't care about that, Confucian values or w/e". What you get from him is the unsympathetic view of a guy who had all the same problems as the other post-colonial states, effortlessly solved them and thinks they should have been able to do it as well. This probably makes him sound like more of a dick than he is - in fact he is quite kind and sympathetic - but he has zero patience with special pleading.
As an Australian I found his comments on Whitlam particularly interesting. Pretty funny to me that he makes the guy out to be a standard blowhard bullshit leftie who folded instantly when he was confronted on any issue. Also that he blames the short-lived Whitlam government for burdening our budget with ongoing welfare costs that we've never been able to get rid of.
Lee is completely right of course to point out that Australia is physically an Asian nation and that our tradition of nativist protectionism is holding us back, we need to engage more with our southeast Asian neighbours and Keating was quite right to try and push us in that direction. The White Australia Policy did so much damage, we could have built like four extra Singapores in the undeveloped tropical north.
Increasingly I feel like we kind of skim over the collapse of the British Empire in our histories of the 20th century. We treat it like it was inevitable and a triumph for the oppressed peoples of the world. But in fact it just created a huge power vacuum and a lot of the newly liberated countries instantly tore themselves apart through what seems to an outside eye like completely pointless ethnic conflict. (Are the Sinhalese and the Tamils really so different that they have to shoot each other? I mean, come on.)
Lee himself very much wanted the British to stay and was one of the few post-colonial leaders to actively keep symbols of the old Empire in place, i.e. the statue of Raffles. Given the incredible success of this strategy it's hard to understand why everyone else was so eager to get rid of them. I feel like particularly in Australia there's a lot of lessons we could take from this guy about what makes a post-British country good and how to navigate our place in the world.
I’d never heard of LKY before but this was great
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.
Wow! Thanks for that. Very fascinating
Well written lah!
> On a world scale, I think I would be uncomfortable with this sort of standard. I believe in the importance of creating robust societies where a wide range of ideas can thrive, and this sort of deliberately limited culture doesn't really provide that. But part of creating robust systems is questioning assumptions and experimenting with dramatically different approaches.
Thus the genesis of my own politics! I'm a single-issue voter, and the issue is "we should clone LKY ~200 times and install him as dictator-for-life in every country in the world."
He's the only proven benign tyrant / philosopher-king with an amazing and verifiable track record, a history of tackling ALL the hard problems nations face pretty well, and accessible DNA - so time for some radical experimentation in governance!
And the 'diversity of ideas' would still be quite wide, I would think, because the appropriate policies for empirical success will likely vary widely based on the people and cultures in the various countries.
Joking aside, amazing review. One of my favorite books, and one of my favorite countries.
On the multi-lingualism and diversity of Singapore, one of my favorite bits from the metro system is when they announce in Tamil, but for English speakers it sounds like "happy happy, platform has arrived."
Also, on the fertility crisis - it's certainly true by the numbers, but every time I'm there, I see couples with babies and young children everywhere! It's the biggest disconnect between "lived experience" vs "official statistics" I've ever seen.
You see the same in Tokyo, but that makes sense because all the young people go to Tokyo, and there's a vast hinterland full of old people, entirely denuded of youth. But Singapore has no hinterland!
The best argument I've heard explaining it is that a TFR of ~1 still means that most couples have 1 kid, and it's the lack of 2, 3, and 4 children families that really brings it down overall.
I've heard some theories about East Asian TFRs that a potential cause is that most of the housing (in the places where young people live) is tower blocks that get prohibitively expensive past a 2 bed. Raising 2+ children in such a flat doesn't seem like a pleasant experience to families, so they choose to only have one kid.
This applies to Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore.
My potential policy solution in Singapore would be to build/allocate 3-4 bed flats and promise them to any couple with one child who are expecting another.
European countries have higher TFRs (notwithstanding religious demographics) because their urban housing is less hostile to families. The Anglo settler colonies are even higher because of our massive amount of suburbs that are constructed to provide generous space for a 2-3 child family.
On this front, we actually have pretty strong data supporting your conclusion.
One of the strongest downward correlated variables for fertility is "percent of population living in apartments," both at the country and the individual city level.
https://imgur.com/a/IVr1num
Basically, if you want more relationships / babies, you want suburbs.
https://imgur.com/a/SzfdIGI
Oh, and I actually ended up writing a post about my "clone LKY" political philosophy here:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/why-we-need-to-clone-lee-kuan-yew?r=17hw9h
As someone with a burgeoning interest in the topic of improving institutional decision-making, I thought this review was great from that perspective. :) I wish it got more traction.
Tangentially: I'm also Malaysian. In our high school history textbooks we learned that Lee Kuan Yew "cried crocodile tears" when Singapore was expelled from the rest of Malaysia in 1965 ("crying crocodile tears" was a teacher's password, if you're familiar with that term, that we had to write in answer to free-response questions to get full marks, so it's indelibly imprinted in memory). Laughable in retrospect...
I'm sure you know this, but R.H. Herrnstein co-authored The Bell Curve.
One thing I would point out. Singapore's savings-based welfare system works because it is small country on a major trade route.
Singapore runs trade surpluses amounting to some 35% of GDP. Hence a third of its economy is supported by foreign consumers, allowing its population to save a much larger portion of its income while still having the aggregate demand needed to grow the economy.
Everyone can't run big surpluses; somebody has to buy the output, or it won't get produced.
Fantastic writing. I always wondered what LKY would do if Singapore were a vastly larger state, and the public policy-response feedback loop were much longer in time