Of course there are quite literally thousands of reasons that explain Singapore's economic growth. Attributing everything to only one of them, to the influence of an enlightened dictator, is silly.

Want an opposite anecdote? In my country we experienced our greatest transformation in centuries in our first ~20 years of democracy. The country is radically different now from what it was 50 years ago, and it only happened when democracy and civil liberties suddenly and unexpectedly came into the picture.

If the country you’re using as an example is in Eastern Europe, I think you may be overlooking key differences. Fareed Zakaria addresses this in his book “the Future of Freedom.” https://www.amazon.com/Future-Freedom-Illiberal-Democracy-Re.... He explains that many of the foundations of liberal democracy were put in place during autocratic regimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom. Eastern Europe had many building blocks of democracy in place hundreds of years ago. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks.

Is Hong Kong now more prosperous, after it moved to authoritarian rule?

What are your criteria for "authoritarian", that you count Japan among authoritarian countries?

What is your evidence that the authoritarian policies were the deciding factor in generating prosperity for these countries?

Yeah people had personal freedom, but they couldn’t do anything with it.

Being a city state means it's hard to hide when things get ugly. Having capitals far away from citizenry, on the other hand - like in myanmar or brazil, makes it easy to be corrupt. This is a well studied phenomenon.

Lee Kuan Yew was palpably afraid in 1965 - especially of the domestic communists. That was probably a good thing in most respects - he knew he had to improve living standards or he'd be strung up. He did, partly by following the good advice of albert winsemius.

It also led to his authoritarian streak and his censor happy ways, of course. The fear ran both ways.

1950s america was also a time where elites were palpably fearful of domestic communists. It also combined with fast improving living standards and the largest scale house building to date. That might just all be a giant coincidence though.

The geography of Singapore gets thrown around a lot to detract from how much Lee Kuan Yew’s deliberate decisions made Singapore what it is today. Which is a shame because that makes it hard for other developing countries to learn from Singapore’s example.

I find the geography doesnt really get thrown around a lot. Lee Kuan Yew's boasts that the city became rich despite "no natural resources" does though, which i find to be misleading.

There is obviously more to the story than just the port but it's important to understand the inbuilt advantages the city did have given the obvious incentive to "replicate" what happened, especially when the story told by the island's cult of personality was so keen to downplay them in favor of his genius leadership and the grit and determination of the people.

(I say cult of personality because I queued up to see his dead body lying in state... and the experience with him, mao, kim jong il and kim il sung wasnt all that different)

Most of the economic development was critically dependent upon the port and its status as a transshipment hub at a global crossroads. Getting Shell to build a refinery in cape town or bhutan would have been a lot harder.

Fascinating, I'd never really thought of this. Do you have a link to any studies about this phenomenon?

This is one

There is little question that a few countries in Asia benefitted from authoritarianism, some were more kid glovish than others, and obviously some were more violent than others in suppressing dissent. However, they achieved economic success for their people --though not all. The Philippines are an example where corruption as well as high pop growth dragged down progress. China too, initially was too authoritarian and too ideological, till they opened up their economy, or at least removed much of the stigma against "wealth" and invited foreign investment.

Singapore is a rare contemporary example of a city-state, & I think that makes the scenario very different from most cases. Using this as an example seems ill suited.

Let's compare to one of your other cited cases, Philippines. Both experienced to degrees the wave of modernization following WW2, a moment of great possibility. Singapore is a very small nation, 1/4 the size of the smallest US State, Rhode Island. Sinagpore is positioned nicely amid a number of other countries giving it close trade access, and at the sea-most tip of a major intercontinental route. The Philippines is almost 100x bigger, about on par with Nevada, the 7th largest state, with much more space & population to tend to. Philippines is non-continugous in extreme, a nation of many islands, further exarcerbating the difficulty of effective governance. Philippines are isolated by a couple hundred miles of sea from other nations, and located rather at the edge of the map.

Singapore is one of the few city-states left on this planet, and it was one permitted to strain & grow at a crucial inflection point in human history.

Too authoritarian and too ideological China lifted more people out of poverty faster than had previously happened on the planet. The problem was that Mao was insulated from information and his intentions were filtered through a corrupt collection of creeps who surrounded him, his wife being one of the worst. It eventually made him completely out of touch, and even his intentions became bizarre. The opening of the economy saved a country on fire, and wouldn't have been needed if they had established a proper system with proper succession and safeguards against corruption.

Removing stigma against wealth seriously damaged China culturally; instead of unity in beliefs and values, they drifted into boring nationalism. They used to fight for each other, now they fight for China.

One aspect about this topic that I’ve never seen discussed anywhere, is the bidirectional relationship between countries, such as how authoritarian and corrupt countries export their authoritarianism and corruption to other countries in the same way that the US exports their weapons, capitalism, entertainment, and soft power, but very rarely, if ever, their "freedom", as if that’s the one thing, in spite of the excessive rhetoric, that isn’t fungible.

For an example of what I’m talking about, much of the political chaos and tendency towards authoritarianism in the US that we’ve seen in the post-9/11 era, has been imported from autocratic and authoritarian regimes. From what I’ve read, the first reports of massive online political trolling operations outside of Russia and China were first observed and reported on from the Philippines at the beginning of the Obama admin in the US.

Interviews with regional human rights groups at the time noted that the trolling operations in the Philippines were being used in the same way as repressive regimes in the Middle East had previously used them—to deliberately spread conspiracy theories so as to destabilize the information held by the electorate and to shift the power from independent media sources that provide checks and balances on power to authoritarian regimes which relied on the conspiracy theories to foment confusion and consolidate hegemony.

We saw the same thing occur in the US beginning in 2016, with the rise of Trumpism and its associated conspiracy theories known as QAnon. Was it just a coincidence that their origin point was also the Philippines?

Trolling though, that is also not new. The VoA and North Korean campaigns, to name but two, have promoted all kinds of destabilizing theories. The difference is the media used --Duterte used it to great success and so did ISIS.

I'm not sure what you were expecting or what what angle you were approaching this article from.

There's more to life than economics and politics. I thought it was an interesting piece of history (especially as a Gibson fan) and also thought provoking aesthetic critique.

Gibson even said "Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable... weirdness."

It was a commentary on culture and human behavior, an orthogonal topic.

He wasn't suggesting Singapore sacrifice economics for culture, or as far as I can tell, making any suggestion at all.

It is weird that so many people conflate the topics, as if art, history, and as Gibson would put it "weirdness" are inherently in conflict with material prosperity.

>Whatever draconian measures it took to get there, they were worth it.

I feel as though most lovers of liberty would disagree with this statement, whether it comes from the right wing or the left wing; it could justify literally any horror to humanity, and at worst justifies waiting out decades of repression and poor quality of life for anticipated gains for two generations of people down the line. I'm reminded that a similar argument is used to justify the maintenance of sweatshops.

unfortunately that word more and more means "your universal human rights don't apply here". Many cultures across the world are decades and even centuries behind when it comes to human rights. The naturally authoritarian regimes there are usually don't care that much about the culture and only using that word to protect their power as the societal move forward to progress threatens that power. Among the most glaring examples these days - traditionalist/conservative Russia using tremendous violence trying to reign in the Ukrainian people's move to progress with Russia being one of the leaders today in the use of "multiculturalism" as a guise to cover its violence.

Are a lie. You only have the rights that you are able to wrest away from your government and those are far from universal.

Look at freedom of speech for example, then try to criticize the royal family when in Thailand.

Of look at your "right to self-defense", then look at how several western countries are acting in that regard. Or NYC even.

The US constitution states that only the powers enumerated are given to the government and everything else is reserved for the people. But look at how we act when our political adversaries are silenced or trampled, "Show me where in the constitution you have that right". We are willing to throw away our power to hurt those we find distasteful.

There is nothing universal about rights, except that you must win them through struggle and guard them jealously

Where do these “universal human rights” come from? Who decides what they are? It’s hard to overlook the fact that, in practice, “universal human rights” means “the morals beliefs of people of European descent.” (Observe the downvotes to my comment below describing how Asians view the obligations of children to their parents.)

Further, large numbers of people with at least some theistic leanings were/are nevertheless adherents to legal positivism, which explains how you can have Catholics or Lutherans that were okay with the Nuremberg Laws, for example.

That’s just creating a religion, complete with supernatural assertions—things that are “inherent our existence” but can’t be established empirically—without copping to it.

That is not to say that conservatives don’t believe in “universal human rights”—for example those who believe that a society can’t permit abortion because it violates the right to life. But conservatives don’t deny that they believe in a God we can’t see that makes rules for the world.

“Universal human rights” tends to reflect in practice the individualistic quasi-religious beliefs of European-descended liberals. In an international context it functions as a form of cultural supremacy by people who claim to reject such ideas. But isn’t it curious how on everything from the nature of marriage, to familial obligation, to sexual morality, to criminal justice, to when it’s okay to extinguish nascent human life, societies run by white people have figured out the correct “universal” answer while Bangladeshis, Nigerians, and apparently even Singaporeans have got it all wrong? This is a harder road to hoe for people who claim not to believe that their society is chosen by God to be a shining city on a hill.