Notes on Singapore

"Canary Wharf in a Sauna"

For a certain kind of disaffected young Westerner on Twitter, Singapore is the gold standard of what a country should be. A fantasy dreamscape where the government is actually competent, a young country with an actual founder, a land flowing with FDI and container ships. From healthcare and pandemic management to racial/ethnic issues and law and order, so the argument goes, Singapore does it right.

Source.

I recently visited Singapore, in part to test that thesis.

State competence

First, Singapore’s reputation for incredible state efficiency is well-earned. Take transport and infrastructure: any service I used in public worked, ran on time, and was clean, from the MRT to road infrastructure. I tried quite hard but couldn’t identify a single pothole anywhere I went.

The big picture political situation in Singapore helps with this. The system is very stable, and political leaders feel comfortable making decisions which will pay off in the long run. They (or their handpicked successors) will be around to reap the rewards of doing so.

For example, there is a multi-decade plan for land reclamation off the south eastern coast of Singapore. The language is surprising similar to Western infrastructure projects: the government is consulting “stakeholders” including businesses and the local community. The work is going in to make sure people are willing for this to happen (though one does suspect that there is less legal scope for NIMBYism than in the UK).

How could you be a NIMBY with an artist’s impression like this? (Source)

One advantage of these long term, stable plans is that people can plan their entire careers – and lives – around this work. When it comes to infrastructure in particular, this means the state knows it’s worthwhile to retain or develop expertise internally rather than rely on consultants. The Transit Costs project cites lack of civil service capacity and excessive/poor use of consultants as a driver of high infrastructure costs in certain countries (pp24-25 here).

Singaporean competence isn’t limited to the private sector, of course — it’s evidenced across their government. I met a range of Singaporean government officials, and they were uniformly excellent.

It’s very tempting to see the state as solving all of Singapore’s problems, which then makes one yearn for state competence and execution in the UK. To take a simple example, the chain of command in Singapore is clear. Singaporeans are willing to contact their politicians when something goes wrong for them. For example, seeing a rat in your (government-run) housing block might prompt you to contact your local MP.

This superficially resembles the UK, where people are very happy to complain to elected officials, except it’s not even clear who you should speak to: your MP? Councillor? Mayor? MEP? Minster? Secretary of State? All of these people have overlapping responsibilities, and often don’t know themselves which levers to pull to change the system.

Meanwhile, in Singapore, the MP and political system largely know how to address people’s concerns and solve their problems. They speak to the right people and make sure things get fixed – that’s how the PAP retains popular support and political power.

Excessive focus on the chain of command, however, obscures a simple fact: the whole of Singaporean society has bought into the state’s vision. It’s a team effort; great thinking at the top doesn’t automatically lead to clean streets and trains that run on time.

In practice, this means that the population is supportive of the PAP, works hard, and even prays for FDI and national productivity.

Source.

Cultural questions

All of this means that culture is actually at the heart of Singapore: it’s the special sauce that gets everything to work. As a friend put it:

When you come to Singapore[…] having read much Lee Kuan Yew in advance — it felt oddly natural to think of this place as something above and beyond, as existing outside the normal way of the world, as something cyberpunk, as something novel. While obviously not the “Orient” in the traditional and romantic way, I had inchoately wondered whether it would offer an alien experience.

But it didn't. It seems in general to be running the same software as everyone in the developed world, just with a special degree of polish and in an Asian context. Less Disneyland with the Death Penalty so much as Canary Wharf in a Sauna.

The secret is that there is no secret; Singapore simply tries. It applies Western methods of government with a genuine focus on competence and results i.e. meritocracy. And it works!

An important additional question after meritocracy is that of commerce. Singaporeans really believe in it:

So when Peranakan culture was combined with the British Enlightenment model of governance in the 19th century, the result was truly unique. A set of cultural institutions characterized by positive attitudes towards commerce, innovation and globalization was combined with robust political economy in the form of strong rule of law, property rights and free trade.

The wealth that results from this heady mix of culture and political economy helps to cover a multitude of sins – consider the land reclamation above: it’s an incredibly expensive way to deal with rising sea levels, but considering the actions of other countries, it’s actually the only option. Good thing Singapore can afford it.¹

I’m not sure how this should this make us feel. Optimistically, if Singapore is different because they actually try, then it should be easy for us to get back to that kind of excellence; it doesn’t require wholesale changes to our governmental structure or society. We are already supposed to believe in competence over rule by divine right.

On the other hand, if they have the same form of government from us on the surface, then maybe there really is something deeper that drives their good outcomes – and that might be harder for us to change, perhaps even impossible.

The Singaporean state’s excellence shouldn’t just be an excuse to sit back and criticise the government, however. Instead we should get up and solve our own problems. For example, if someone dumps waste in one’s locality, maybe one should just clean it up rather than wait for the government to do it? Or if you don’t like local schools, maybe you can band together with others and set up a free school? Communities in the United States have a strong tradition of solving their own problems — in other words, building — and there’s no reason the rest of the West can’t start to do the same.

1. Just like its government itself, however, Singaporean culture is not perfect. Singaporeans themselves will tell you this. Despite a focus on the long term, they are in a worse position than the UK when it comes to one of the ultimate long term questions: birth rates. A total fertility rate of 1.12 can hardly be more worrying, and the UK isn’t far behind at 1.56. Is this the biggest and most serious problem that meritocracy and government competence alone can’t solve?