What can and can’t be learnt from Singapore
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
When I was two or three, I went walkabout and wasn’t found until some time later at a local mall. What a close brush with disaster, readers will think. What a potential loss to English letters and the Clerkenwell restaurant trade. Relax. This happened in one of the safest countries on Earth. I got my infant meanderings out of the way in Singapore.
A point gets lost in all the coverage of the island state as it changes leadership this month. Economic enrichment is Singapore’s other achievement. It comes below, and wouldn’t have happened without, the creation of order and cohesion where there had been communal strife. To quote its per capita income, which now tops that of the US, is to understate what has happened in a once-fractious Chinese-Malay-Indian society.
So, what can other countries learn from Singapore? Be small. If the US could hive off 320mn people and 99 per cent of its land mass, it would be an easier nation to mould. Second, have a maritime rather than continental setting. The likes of Bolivia are missing a trick there. Third, and foremost, get an individual of the calibre of Lee Kuan Yew as founder-leader. I presume there are headhunters for these things.
And so on and so unhelpfully on. In the end, Singapore is too particular, too sui generis in both its assets and liabilities, to constitute a template. It has but one universal lesson: the importance of an open mind.
The podcaster Chris Williamson has an almost-great line. “If I know one of your views, and from it, I can accurately predict everything else that you believe, then you’re not a serious thinker.” As a quote, it needs some Wildean polishing. But it captures the single oddest thing about politics. From someone’s view on, say, Israel-Palestine, it is too easy to anticipate their opinion on public spending, on abortion, on Brexit, on net zero. A lot of people, even or above all the most educated, take their views from their peers as a kind of bundled software. This is what we might call irrational coherence.
Singapore is a lesson in what can be done when this mental trap is avoided. If the mark of a thinking person is a having a weird mix of beliefs, the island has had a few among its policymakers. This is a high-income nation where most people live in public housing. It is a private-sector paradise where civil servants can earn a fortune. It has an acute sense of independence from the west but uses English as the main language of instruction. Conservatives in Britain and America have tended to regard the island as proof of concept: look what stern laws and low taxes can do. (It was under President Reagan that LKY addressed the US Congress.) But the government involves itself in matters of identity to an extent that would make the same people flinch.
The Singaporean “method” has been to come at each question afresh. The result is a lack of pattern: a libertarian nanny state. Even the nation’s Freedom House score, 48 out of 100, shows how hard it is to categorise the place. (The UAE, to which Singapore is so often likened, scores 18. Switzerland, another expat hub, rates 96.)
It is difficult to examine each issue one faces on its merits. This isn’t, or isn’t just, laziness, but a need for the comfort blanket of a worldview and a like-minded tribe. In the west, I sense, politics has come to provide the fellow-feeling that might once have come from religion, large families or a homogeneous town. If Singapore, or at least its officials, have been able to resist this, perhaps it is because the very idea of groupism has such raw historical connotations there.
The press is full of “Whither Singapore?” articles this month, and fair enough. The country has to navigate the US-China rift without the helpful scale of other Asean nations. It flourished in a world order that is decomposing. (LKY’s all-too-prescient speech to Congress urged America to uphold free trade.) But the island’s ultimate advantage, and example to the world, was always inside the head. That rational incoherence isn’t so easily lost.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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