M. Cristian

I think about this every single day. Lee Kuan Yew took over a tiny island with no natural resources and people who didn't even speak the same language, and turned it into one of the richest, least corrupt countries in the world. All within 30 years. It's absurd this isn't mandatory study for anyone taking public office. What's so special about Singapore's success is how much common sense there was in LKY's approach. After taking over, he witnessed how having different cultures, each with their own language, was leading to a dysfunctional society. He not only fixed it by having all schools switch to a bilingual system, but he also chose English as one of the two. English was neutral to all cultures and the mother tongue of the future world leader. There's this great passage in From Third World to First where he speaks about how he was "never a prisoner of any theory." The only test is reality. If you try something that doesn't work, you stop doing it and you double down on the ones that do. While visiting other countries, he'd recognize what elements of their foundations were good, and which were bad. The bar was whether it solved the issue for which it existed or not. Again, grounded in reality. Those factors that worked, he replicated in Singapore. And those that failed in other countries, LKY avoided. It didn't matter to him if the USA or any other country did something. When creating the blueprint for Singapore's economic system, he didn't start with a traditional central bank, like every country had. LKY realized that unregulated issuance intrinsically bred trouble, so Singapore started out with a currency board. For each Singapore dollar issued, there had to be equivalent backing with foreign reserves. The ultimate example of first-principles thinking was his reasoning for turning Singapore into a global financial powerhouse. Lee Kuan Yew observed that global trading started in Zurich, then Frankfurt and London, passed to New York, then to San Francisco, and after San Francisco closed nothing happened until Zurich reopened. There was a 6-8-hour gap, which Singapore could fill. By the '90s, its FX market moved hundreds of billions. When Singapore had traffic bottlenecks, LKY started charging drivers to enter the city centre at rush hour. With that simple measure, traffic issues eased immensely. Similarly, to make Singapore a place people would be happy to visit, it had to be clean. Great effort went into cleaning rivers and planting trees, and measures like fining people for spitting in the street were introduced. Over and over again, Lee Kuan Yew found solutions to extremely complex issues. Maybe one of the lessons is in what made this possible. Singapore's size allowed him to essentially be everywhere, because everything was close by. Maybe starting out from zero was also key. Trying this in a large country with all institutions in place might not lead to the same result.