We interrupt this lovefest for Lee Kwan Yew with this important message

No, I’m not going to complain about the whitewashing of an authoritarian regime. I’m used to people trading off someone else’s freedom for GDP growth. Or forgetting that for every transformative dictator there are many more who take the country down the toilet.

Rather, I want to highlight this point from political scientist Tom Pepinsky:

The coverage of Singapore under the late Lee Kuan Yew consistently emphasizes a theme of rapid economic development in an inauspicious context, encapsulated by the slogan “From Third World to First.”

…Now, no one should doubt that Lee Kuan Yew was a developmentalist statebuilder par excellence. But Singapore at independence a third-world country? This narrative neglects the incredible legacy of openness, infrastructure, and stability that the British rule left this tiny country.

The graph below says it all. For every year since 1945, I have ranked all independent countries by real per capita GDP, the best measure we have of economic prosperity. I then normalize these to a percentile scale. Here is what we get.

comps

…Singapore entered the community of independent states as a prosperous country, at least by the standards of the time.

True, Lee Kwan Yew started governing a few years before Independence from Malaysia, where we don’t have data. Conceivably the green line starts at Indonesia levels in 1959 and goes vertical before the observed data come in. Conceivably.

I invite the Singapore experts to weigh in. Miracles do happen. Like most miracles, however, this one might be mythical.

58 Responses

  1. I think a good comparison would be to look at other British colony at the same time in 1959 – Malaysia, Hong Kong and Myanmar (Burma)

    I think if you do that study – you will find that Lee Kuan Yew did an exceptional job.

  2. Thanks for your normal used graph. The graph highlights another important point. And that is, Singapore was growing at a faster rate than its neighbour, Malaysia and also, US (where some press downplays his authoritarian style).

    There is no interruption. Only accentuates the lovefest.

  3. When the British left, they did leave behind a good set of infrastructure such as bridges, government buildings and even traffic lights. They also left behind a great legal system that helped us significantly. But few realised that when they left, they left in a hurry. This was not some HK handover planned over 99 years…it was sudden in comparison. A significant portion of the GDP and industry were contributed by European based companies (largely English) before the Brits left…as you can imagine, many of such companies and investment scaled back too at that time. We were left with a hegemony of different races in a city that could not even be water sufficient. The “prosperity” that the charts show in 1965 was unsustainable and if not for the hard work of the pioneer team of Singapore, the country would have gone down. Would traffic lights, government buildings and stone bridges be useful then? Would the financial firms and MNCs come into Singapore and make Singapore their Asian HQ when it was a defenceless, ill-resourced and divergent city in an exploding region? Compare Singapore to Detroit in the US, or Liverpool in the UK…when the industry moves out…the cities fell apart.

  5. As a long time reader of this blog, I’ve rarely felt the need to comment as I nearly always agree with what you have to say. But today I feel compelled to. You seem to be implying that the lovefest for Lee Kuan Yew (it’s Kuan, not Kwan btw) is somehow unjustified. Yes, he was an authoritarian and trampled on freedoms and in an ideal world, economies grow without infringing on freedoms – but when has that ever happened in history? The West’s growth was partly driven by slavery and murder, in comparison, Mr Lee’s transgressions would barely register.

    We can argue the technicalities about the exact scale of his achievements but even on that graph Singapore overtakes the USA in around 50 years – a remarkable accomplishment. What we must not do is insist that Mr Lee’s tactics would work elsewhere – it probably won’t but we can at least admire what it did for Singapore.

  6. surely there were other countries that were also british trading colonies that did not have the same development trajectory as singapore? Malaysia would be ideal comparison. Despite having single party rule for over 50 years, it has not matched the development achievements of singapore. That is not to say that malaysia is significantly poorer or that singapore is not significantly smaller. But LKY did bring achieve things that authoritarian malaysian governments with a similar colonial past were not able to achieve.