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Singapore’s Governance

Probably the last of many copied...

Thomas Friedman told America to get serious with learning from Singapore. Wei Seng asked for opposition and he got it. It was argued by Alastair on the Harvard Political Review that America can't follow Singapore and that it shouldn't. It was a strong cultural-political perspective but tend to treat the world as a little too static. Perhaps the key here is that people were getting somewhat too ideological about this 'learning from a model' thing.

As I finished my LSE100 Essay, I find myself more sensitive to our common tendencies to generalize from narrow cases or try to squeeze generalizations to fit individual cases just because of a couple of hints of a reasonable fit. We need to be eclectic about using models especially when it comes down to governance. It is not easy to point out key factors driving a performance or phenomena and often, obvious causes for one thing might be present in another situation where outcomes diverges. And that is where I find Alastair's piece a little flawed in its fundamental claim:

In order to properly understand Singapore’s government, you just can’t disentangle its “less-than-free politics” from its “attitude” and treat them as independent from each other, since it is Singapore’s political institutions that drive its government’s success.

I'm not sure if Alastair's definition of 'government's success' is the same as that of Friedman's because in Singapore, we tend to think of the government and the ruling party as synonymous. But I take it to mean that they are taking 'success' to be the 'governance of the country'. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of economics involved in the governance of Singapore and Alastair risk treating the governance as being about politicking, or even vile manipulation (which explains why he might think 'it’s also something that Americans will find morally abhorrent'). Economic incentives can be designed and put in place even in America's political structure and even if it does affect the Gini coefficient, I don't understand why that is that much of a cause for concern in the short term - to adopt the Singapore government's argument, you want to expend efforts to expand the pie, not waste efforts trying to divide it equally. More often than not, when the pie is not expanding, it's shrinking and that ones with small share of it simply gets even smaller shares. Thinking 'we're just different' doesn't help us learn from others, not to mention that America's liberal tradition doesn't appear to help with Gini Coefficient much either.

In the special report on the future of the state in the recent Economist, Singapore was praised once again and hailed as a model that the west should follow. The Economist provided a more pragmatic and balanced view of the issue, identifying exactly the many features that the west could follow. And perhaps more importantly, it urges Singapore to think also about relaxing its grip. It highlighted the progress made in thinking about its elitist education system (It's The End to something more positive and better; though some Singaporeans might disagree) and the investment made in people. The equation of success is always changing, the Singapore government do not always 'knows best'. We are already at the edge of development where there's no longer models or formulas we can follow and at this point of time, if granted people greater liberty is vital for success, I believe the government will move ahead with that.

It is pragmatism that drives the politics and economics in Singapore and the entire system is actually more laissez-faire, on a grander scale than most would have noticed.