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Belfer Center Studies in International Security
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World
Grand strategist and founder of modern Singapore offers key insights and controversial opinions on globalization, geopolitics, economic growth, and democracy.When Lee Kuan Yew speaks, presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, and CEOs listen. Lee, the founding father of modern Singapore and its prime minister from 1959 to 1990, has honed his wisdom during more than fifty years on the world stage. Almost single-handedly responsible for transforming Singapore into a Western-style economic success, he offers a unique perspective on the geopolitics of East and West. American presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama have welcomed him to the White House; British prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair have recognized his wisdom; and business leaders from Rupert Murdoch to Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, have praised his accomplishments. This book gathers key insights from interviews, speeches, and Lee's voluminous published writings and presents them in an engaging question and answer format.
Lee offers his assessment of China's future, asserting, among other things, that "China will want to share this century as co-equals with the U.S." He affirms the United States' position as the world's sole superpower but expresses dismay at the vagaries of its political system. He offers strategic advice for dealing with China and goes on to discuss India's future, Islamic terrorism, economic growth, geopolitics and globalization, and democracy. Lee does not pull his punches, offering his unvarnished opinions on multiculturalism, the welfare state, education, and the free market. This little book belongs on the reading list of every world leader--including the one who takes the oath of office on January 20, 2013.
Lee offers his assessment of China's future, asserting, among other things, that "China will want to share this century as co-equals with the U.S." He affirms the United States' position as the world's sole superpower but expresses dismay at the vagaries of its political system. He offers strategic advice for dealing with China and goes on to discuss India's future, Islamic terrorism, economic growth, geopolitics and globalization, and democracy. Lee does not pull his punches, offering his unvarnished opinions on multiculturalism, the welfare state, education, and the free market. This little book belongs on the reading list of every world leader--including the one who takes the oath of office on January 20, 2013.
224 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2013
673 people are currently reading
6110 people want to read
About the author
Graham Allison
21 books170 followersLibrarian Note: Also writes under the name Graham T. Allison.
Graham Allison is Director of Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the bestselling author of Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap (2017); Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World (2013); Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (2004); and Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971, 1999). Founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, Dr. Allison has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense and advised the secretaries of defense under every president from Reagan to Obama. He has twice been awarded the Department of Defense's highest civilian award, the Distinguished Public Service Medal, and serves on the Advisory boards of the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.
Graham Allison is Director of Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the bestselling author of Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap (2017); Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World (2013); Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (2004); and Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971, 1999). Founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, Dr. Allison has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense and advised the secretaries of defense under every president from Reagan to Obama. He has twice been awarded the Department of Defense's highest civilian award, the Distinguished Public Service Medal, and serves on the Advisory boards of the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 341 reviews
November 3, 2024
Lots of otiginal thinking on the Asian politics and dynamics, China, Russia and other global powers.
Basically an outsized interview but with great insight and wisdom (mostly). Priginal take on ISIS. Very cautious view on certain counties but that's to be expected from a politition of this caliber.
Q:
When Lee took over, per capita income was about $400 a year; it is now more than $50,000. He inspired his polyglot population to become the intellectual and technical center of the Asia-Pacific. (c)
Q:
China can impose economic sanctions simply by denying access to its market of 1.3 billion people, whose incomes and purchasing power are increasing.4
Unlike other emergent countries, China wants to be China and accepted as such, not as an honorary member of the West.(c)
Q:
The Russian mistake was that they put so much into military expenditure and so little into civilian technology. So their economy collapsed. (c)
Q:
My first reaction to the phrase "peaceful rise" was to tell one of their think tanks, "It is a contradiction in terms; any rise is something that is startling." And they said, "What would you say?" I replied: "Peaceful renaissance, or evolution, or development." A recovery of ancient glory, an updating of a once great civilization. But it is already done. Now the Chinese have to construe it as best they can. (c)
Q:
Children there learn Chinese first. Then they learn English. They might go to the U.S. as a teenager and become fluent, but they have 4,000 years of Chinese epigrams in their head. (c)
Basically an outsized interview but with great insight and wisdom (mostly). Priginal take on ISIS. Very cautious view on certain counties but that's to be expected from a politition of this caliber.
Q:
When Lee took over, per capita income was about $400 a year; it is now more than $50,000. He inspired his polyglot population to become the intellectual and technical center of the Asia-Pacific. (c)
Q:
China can impose economic sanctions simply by denying access to its market of 1.3 billion people, whose incomes and purchasing power are increasing.4
Unlike other emergent countries, China wants to be China and accepted as such, not as an honorary member of the West.(c)
Q:
The Russian mistake was that they put so much into military expenditure and so little into civilian technology. So their economy collapsed. (c)
Q:
My first reaction to the phrase "peaceful rise" was to tell one of their think tanks, "It is a contradiction in terms; any rise is something that is startling." And they said, "What would you say?" I replied: "Peaceful renaissance, or evolution, or development." A recovery of ancient glory, an updating of a once great civilization. But it is already done. Now the Chinese have to construe it as best they can. (c)
Q:
Children there learn Chinese first. Then they learn English. They might go to the U.S. as a teenager and become fluent, but they have 4,000 years of Chinese epigrams in their head. (c)
March 26, 2020
On India:
"I am against a society which has no sense of nurturing its best to rise to the top. I am against a feudal society where your birth decides where you stay in the pecking order. The example of that, par excellence, is India's caste system."
On America:
"The ideas of individual supremacy ... when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working. Those who want a wholesome society where young girls and old ladies can walk in the streets at night, where the young are not preyed upon by drug peddlers, will not follow the American model.... The top 3 to 5% of a society can handle this free-for-all, this clash of ideas. If you do this with the whole mass, you will have a mess...."
"governments believed that they could always afford to support the poor and the needy: widows, orphans, the old and homeless, disadvantaged minorities, unwed mothers. Their sociologists expounded the theory that hardship and failure were due not to the individual person's character, but to flaws in the economic system. So charity became "entitlement," and the stigma of living on charity disappeared. Unfortunately, welfare costs grew faster than the government's ability to raise taxes to pay for it."
"One person, one vote is a most difficult form of government. From time to time, the results can be erratic. People are sometimes fickle. They get bored with stable, steady improvements in life, and in a reckless moment, they vote for a change for change's sake."
"Contrary to what American political commentators say, I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe that what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy. The exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to development. The ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society to establish conditions which improve the standard of living for the majority of its people, plus enabling the maximum of per- sonal freedoms compatible with the freedoms of others"
On islam:
"Among Muslims, especially in the Middle East, there is a profound belief that their time has come and that the West has put them down for too long.
Militant Islam feeds upon the insecurities and alienation that globalization generates among the less successful. And because globalization is largely U.S.-led and driven, militant Islam identifies America and Americans as the threat to Islam."
On humans in general:
It is the near-geniuses and the above-average who ultimately decide the shape of things to come.... We want an equal society. We want to give everybody equal opportunities. But, in the back of our minds, we never deceive ourselves that two human beings are ever equal in their stamina, in their drive, in their dedication, in their innate ability.'
I have always thought that humanity was animal-like, while Confucian theory says that it can be improved. I am not sure it can be, but it can be trained, it can be disciplined.... You can make a left-hander write with his or her right hand, but you cannot really change his or her natural-born instinct.
"I am against a society which has no sense of nurturing its best to rise to the top. I am against a feudal society where your birth decides where you stay in the pecking order. The example of that, par excellence, is India's caste system."
On America:
"The ideas of individual supremacy ... when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive. Asia can see it is not working. Those who want a wholesome society where young girls and old ladies can walk in the streets at night, where the young are not preyed upon by drug peddlers, will not follow the American model.... The top 3 to 5% of a society can handle this free-for-all, this clash of ideas. If you do this with the whole mass, you will have a mess...."
"governments believed that they could always afford to support the poor and the needy: widows, orphans, the old and homeless, disadvantaged minorities, unwed mothers. Their sociologists expounded the theory that hardship and failure were due not to the individual person's character, but to flaws in the economic system. So charity became "entitlement," and the stigma of living on charity disappeared. Unfortunately, welfare costs grew faster than the government's ability to raise taxes to pay for it."
"One person, one vote is a most difficult form of government. From time to time, the results can be erratic. People are sometimes fickle. They get bored with stable, steady improvements in life, and in a reckless moment, they vote for a change for change's sake."
"Contrary to what American political commentators say, I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe that what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy. The exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to development. The ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society to establish conditions which improve the standard of living for the majority of its people, plus enabling the maximum of per- sonal freedoms compatible with the freedoms of others"
On islam:
"Among Muslims, especially in the Middle East, there is a profound belief that their time has come and that the West has put them down for too long.
Militant Islam feeds upon the insecurities and alienation that globalization generates among the less successful. And because globalization is largely U.S.-led and driven, militant Islam identifies America and Americans as the threat to Islam."
On humans in general:
It is the near-geniuses and the above-average who ultimately decide the shape of things to come.... We want an equal society. We want to give everybody equal opportunities. But, in the back of our minds, we never deceive ourselves that two human beings are ever equal in their stamina, in their drive, in their dedication, in their innate ability.'
I have always thought that humanity was animal-like, while Confucian theory says that it can be improved. I am not sure it can be, but it can be trained, it can be disciplined.... You can make a left-hander write with his or her right hand, but you cannot really change his or her natural-born instinct.
April 3, 2018
I got a Chinese copy and read the Ebook of English the previous year, and still possessed the immense impulsion to read it again. The book and his other works scintilate his perceptive state visions and wisdom for international studies,genuinely illuminating and thought-provoking.
Acclaimed to be the founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew was one of the rare country leaders winning paramount respects both in Asian regions and western hemisphere. His preeminence not only lies in that he successfully transformed a backward city scaled state into a nation of great and unique significance and greatly improved his peoples living standards but also in that his political wit and wisdom that are still effectively illuminating leaders of many nations to some extent ,both big and small.
One detail that I conjured up is that when president Mr Obama initially took his presidency to commence his first state visit to China in 2009 , he first visited Singapore before he went to China. It is very likely that he thought it would be better to consult Mr LKY for his perspectives on how to deal with China or Sino-US relation stuff.
I will confine my attention to the first three chapters and articulate what I understand about the book.
The first two chapter are on how China and the United States' future will be like. The answer he reckons is an inevitable rise for China.But he thought rise is not a good word,fraught with provocative connotations and better to be changed to evolution or development,which were soft ones. The advantages for China are its population and economic influence on its neighboring nations and beyond. China can easily sanctioned a country merely by denying its access to its 1.3 million population market if it Wants to . And it was almost late for US to scramble for economic partners andinfluence exclusively both because these nations are within China's proximity geographically and because China has already built strong economic ties in the form of FTP and other mechanisms. So even the negotiations on US-leading TPP （Trans-Pacific Partnership） has reached an agreement , any country involved cannot sever the economic ties with China and exclusively rely on US, which they know so well.
while meantime they are all alert and weary about their own national interests in order not to plunge into the same historical destiny in which China in ancient times was the dominant power of the region. I read from the lines and could speculate that America's pivot to asia policy must have been influenced by Mr Lee kuan Yew's suggestions. US's military presence in pacific asia is absolutely necessary if it doesn't want to lose East Asia, the economic hut and engine for this century.
The two nations are both co-operative and competitive but not necessarily making each other adversaries ,which serves no interests for both and the world . For instance, global issues like climate change will not be settled with each other's absence.
The advantages for the united states are its creativity, entrepreneuring spirit , its universal ideals and English language which is widely used across the globle.
The united states can appeal global talents in its faver and get them fitting quickly but for China, Chinese language is extremely difficult to learn and its culture is not easy for global talents to fit in.
Well, I want to complement his ideas with some of my understandings. The first is why China will inevitably grow to be a global power with its uniqueness besides Mr Lee's analysis. The second I want to talk about is the language issue.
I need to focus on the second one to save me some time. Chinese language indeed posed a barrier for attracting global talents. And as far as I read Mr Lee once advised Chinese leaders to make the country English the first language ,but even himself knew that it would be unfathomable not only because of China's vast territory but because its varied and distinct cultures.
That was a mission impossible.But China can send its talented young people to America and other regions to learn the cutting edged technology and managerial expertise and brought them back. But I think what Mr Lee failed to mention is that Chinese people's civilian creativity and mass enthusiasm for entrepreneurship, which emerged just recent years. I can be sure that power and magnitude will be staggering and stuning, which is quite even beyond goverments' expectations. Take "single day "shopping spree for instance, one day's volume of transactions online reached stuning 91.2 billion RMB this year, a staggering number. Those ubiquitous online shops are just some visible examples of its domestic consumption power whose potential is far away from fully tapped. The mass entrepreneurship and innovation is on the surge.
For western talents working in China, I believe it won't pose them immense challenges because more and more young people are becoming bilingual, a favorable trend for both. But I do hope the Chinese people should be more inclusive and forge tolerable atmosphere for attracting global talents; they are fools if they don't grasp the trend.
I intend to leave the first one next time .
Anyway It is a great and important , instrutive book for which I plan to do some note-taking when I read it for a third time.
Acclaimed to be the founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew was one of the rare country leaders winning paramount respects both in Asian regions and western hemisphere. His preeminence not only lies in that he successfully transformed a backward city scaled state into a nation of great and unique significance and greatly improved his peoples living standards but also in that his political wit and wisdom that are still effectively illuminating leaders of many nations to some extent ,both big and small.
One detail that I conjured up is that when president Mr Obama initially took his presidency to commence his first state visit to China in 2009 , he first visited Singapore before he went to China. It is very likely that he thought it would be better to consult Mr LKY for his perspectives on how to deal with China or Sino-US relation stuff.
I will confine my attention to the first three chapters and articulate what I understand about the book.
The first two chapter are on how China and the United States' future will be like. The answer he reckons is an inevitable rise for China.But he thought rise is not a good word,fraught with provocative connotations and better to be changed to evolution or development,which were soft ones. The advantages for China are its population and economic influence on its neighboring nations and beyond. China can easily sanctioned a country merely by denying its access to its 1.3 million population market if it Wants to . And it was almost late for US to scramble for economic partners andinfluence exclusively both because these nations are within China's proximity geographically and because China has already built strong economic ties in the form of FTP and other mechanisms. So even the negotiations on US-leading TPP （Trans-Pacific Partnership） has reached an agreement , any country involved cannot sever the economic ties with China and exclusively rely on US, which they know so well.
while meantime they are all alert and weary about their own national interests in order not to plunge into the same historical destiny in which China in ancient times was the dominant power of the region. I read from the lines and could speculate that America's pivot to asia policy must have been influenced by Mr Lee kuan Yew's suggestions. US's military presence in pacific asia is absolutely necessary if it doesn't want to lose East Asia, the economic hut and engine for this century.
The two nations are both co-operative and competitive but not necessarily making each other adversaries ,which serves no interests for both and the world . For instance, global issues like climate change will not be settled with each other's absence.
The advantages for the united states are its creativity, entrepreneuring spirit , its universal ideals and English language which is widely used across the globle.
The united states can appeal global talents in its faver and get them fitting quickly but for China, Chinese language is extremely difficult to learn and its culture is not easy for global talents to fit in.
Well, I want to complement his ideas with some of my understandings. The first is why China will inevitably grow to be a global power with its uniqueness besides Mr Lee's analysis. The second I want to talk about is the language issue.
I need to focus on the second one to save me some time. Chinese language indeed posed a barrier for attracting global talents. And as far as I read Mr Lee once advised Chinese leaders to make the country English the first language ,but even himself knew that it would be unfathomable not only because of China's vast territory but because its varied and distinct cultures.
That was a mission impossible.But China can send its talented young people to America and other regions to learn the cutting edged technology and managerial expertise and brought them back. But I think what Mr Lee failed to mention is that Chinese people's civilian creativity and mass enthusiasm for entrepreneurship, which emerged just recent years. I can be sure that power and magnitude will be staggering and stuning, which is quite even beyond goverments' expectations. Take "single day "shopping spree for instance, one day's volume of transactions online reached stuning 91.2 billion RMB this year, a staggering number. Those ubiquitous online shops are just some visible examples of its domestic consumption power whose potential is far away from fully tapped. The mass entrepreneurship and innovation is on the surge.
For western talents working in China, I believe it won't pose them immense challenges because more and more young people are becoming bilingual, a favorable trend for both. But I do hope the Chinese people should be more inclusive and forge tolerable atmosphere for attracting global talents; they are fools if they don't grasp the trend.
I intend to leave the first one next time .
Anyway It is a great and important , instrutive book for which I plan to do some note-taking when I read it for a third time.
August 28, 2014
This book is written in an interview style and is quick and easy to read. A good portion of it is basically a racist rant. He starts off disparaging HIspanics, then Indians, and then Islam, blatantly stating that America will be ruined if Hispanics aren't quickly assimilated into WASP culture, that Indians who grow up close to their culture will be lazy and corrupt, and that Islam is a religion of extremism (if all 1.3 billion Muslims were terrorists we'd be in serious trouble). This outlook is extreme but somewhat reflective of the segregationist mindset which permeates Singapore so its interesting from that perspective.
Regarding his insights on global geopolitics - intelligent readers familiar with international relations theory and looking for more details on these subjects will be disappointed by his mostly superficial and often misinformed analysis. He states that scholars should be pursuing venture capital and entrepreneurship over history and poetry - and it seems from reading this book that he has never read a legitimate academic history book in his life. Once again the book reads more as a rant about what countries or societies should be doing, without much thought into the realities and complexities they face. An example is India where he advocates a less democratic and more authoritarian political system. There are some interesting insights sprinkled in here, particularly around the rise of China and his formula for success in Singapore, but these are still relatively high level.
Regarding neo-liberalism - the book is subtly pro-neoliberalism, as he advocates free trade agreements, liberalization of economies in developing nations, etc without any economic evidence as to their benefits (and in fact Singapore's success was in large part due to its calculated introduction of a very selective number of these policies slowly over the decades - but this basic level of detail is not mentioned in the book). However he does bring up the inequality created when these policies are implemented as one of the largest issues of our time, without offering any potential solutions.
Regarding his insights on global geopolitics - intelligent readers familiar with international relations theory and looking for more details on these subjects will be disappointed by his mostly superficial and often misinformed analysis. He states that scholars should be pursuing venture capital and entrepreneurship over history and poetry - and it seems from reading this book that he has never read a legitimate academic history book in his life. Once again the book reads more as a rant about what countries or societies should be doing, without much thought into the realities and complexities they face. An example is India where he advocates a less democratic and more authoritarian political system. There are some interesting insights sprinkled in here, particularly around the rise of China and his formula for success in Singapore, but these are still relatively high level.
Regarding neo-liberalism - the book is subtly pro-neoliberalism, as he advocates free trade agreements, liberalization of economies in developing nations, etc without any economic evidence as to their benefits (and in fact Singapore's success was in large part due to its calculated introduction of a very selective number of these policies slowly over the decades - but this basic level of detail is not mentioned in the book). However he does bring up the inequality created when these policies are implemented as one of the largest issues of our time, without offering any potential solutions.
March 6, 2015
Highly recommended. Another book in the spirit of The Prince focused on understanding populations and politics as they are, not was we wish them to be. This is a fascinating compilation of Lee Kuan Yew's observations on government, citizens, management, Singapore, the West and the East over the last several decades. Some of the portions I found most interesting include:
"Democracy should not be made an alibi for inertia. There are many examples of authoritarian governments whose economies have failed. There are as many examples of democratic governments who have achieved superior economic performance. The real issue is whether any country's political system, irrespective of whether it is democratic or authoritarian, can forge a consensus on the policies needed for the economy to grow and create jobs for all, and can ensure that these basic policies are implemented consistently without large leakage."
"When those in office regard the power vested in them as a personal prerogative, they inevitably enrich themselves, promote their families, and favor their friends. The fundamental structures of the modern state are eroded, like the supporting beams of a house after termites have attacked them"
"We must not go against what is historically inevitable"
"I learned to ignore criticism and advice from experts and quasiexperts, especially academics in the social and political sciences. They have pet theories on how a society should develop to approximate their ideal, especially how poverty should be reduced and welfare extended. I always try to be correct, not politically correct."
"So long as you run this one person, one vote, the easiest of appeals that can be made to the ground are the simple, emotional ones, not economic development and progress and all these other things they do not understand, but simple things: pride in race, in language, in religion, in culture."
"But I am convinced, personally, that we would have a better system if we gave every person over the age of 40 who has a family two votes, because he or she is likely to be more careful, voting also for his or her children."
"He or she is more likely to vote in a serious way than a capricious young person under 30.... At the same time, once a person gets beyond 65, then it is a problem."
"when authority is not backed by position, prestige, or usage, then it has to defend actively against challenge."
"For the acid test of any legal system is not the greatness or the grandeur of its ideal concepts, but whether, in fact, it is able to produce order and justice in the relationships between person and person, and between person and the state."
"To maintain this order with the best degree of tolerance and humanity is a problem...."
"To be successful, society must maintain a balance between nurturing excellence and encouraging the average to improve"
"Communism has failed. The welfare state of Western democracies has also failed."
"We have arranged help, but in such a way that only those who have no other choice will seek it. This is the opposite of attitudes in the West, where liberals actively encourage people to demand entitlements with no sense of shame, causing an explosion of welfare costs."
"If there is insecurity, there will be fewer investments."
"we buffer the lowest 20% to 25%, the weaker achievers, from the tough competition of the marketplace"
"We may have conquered space, but we have not learned to conquer our own primeval instincts and emotions that were necessary for our survival in the Stone Age, not in the space age.'"
"I have always thought that humanity was animal-like, while Confucian theory says that it can be improved. I am not sure it can be, but it can be trained, it can be disciplined.... You can make a left-hander write with his or her right hand, but you cannot really change his or her natural-born instinct."
"We read many things. The fact that it is in print and repeated by three, four authors does not make it true. They may all be wrong. But through my own experience ... I concluded: yes, there is a difference.'"
"Fredrich Hayek's book The Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism expressed with clarity and authority what I had long felt but was unable to express, namely the unwisdom of powerful intellects, including Albert Einstein, when they believed that a powerful brain can devise a better system and bring about more "social justice" than what historical evolution, or economic Darwinism, has been able to work out over the centuries."
"I would describe myself, in perhaps European terms, as between socialist and conservative. I would put myself as a liberal. As someone who believes in equal opportunities so that everybody gets an equal chance to do his best, and with a certain compassion to ensure that the failures do not fall through the floor.... I want to run the system as efficiently as possible, but make allowances for those who will not be doing well because nature did not give them enough, or they cannot make that extra effort.... I am a liberal in the classical sense of that word, in that I am not fixated on a particular theory of the world or of society. I am pragmatic. I am prepared to look at the problem and say, all right, what is the best way to solve it that will produce the maximum happiness and well-being for the maximum number of people?"
"You can read about it, but it is irrelevant if you do not relate it to yourself ... which I constantly do...."
"You must not overlook the importance of discussions with knowledgeable people."
"They built this big government house on a hill with Indian convict labor in 1868 to dominate the populations...."
"the ever-present danger of regression and even collapse...."
"For at 60, more than at 50, comes the realization of the transient nature of all earthly glories and successes"
"ephemeral quality of sensory joys and pleasures, when compared to intellectual, moral, or spiritual satisfactions. . . "
"I do not work on a theory. Instead, I ask: what will make this work"
"Choose a solution which offers a higher probability of success, but if it fails, I have some other way. Never a dead end"
"If history is on their side, that liberal democracy is inevitable, then just ignore me"
"The final test is life"
"I do not believe the American system is either desirable or affordable"
"Because one is a proven tested system, the other is not proven, why not let the other chap prove it first?"
"The final proof is what happens to the society"
"History does not repeat itself in the same way each time, but certain trends and consequences are constants. If you do not know history, you think short term. If you know history, you think medium and long term"
"To understand the present and anticipate the future, one must know enough of the past, enough to have a sense of the history of a people. One must appreciate not merely what took place, but, more especially, why it took place and in that particular way. This is true of individuals, as it is for nations. "
"Young people learn best from personal experience."
"Had they done this before they were drawn into the Vietnam War, they might well have chosen not to draw the battle line in Vietnam, but in Cambodia"
"Impress by the clarity of your ideas.... I speak as a practitioner"
"If I had not been able to reduce complex ideas into simple words and project them vividly for mass understanding, I would not be here today"
"Habit of ignoring unpalatable facts and avoiding unpleasant controversy."
"But it is possible to create a society in which everybody is given not equal rewards, but equal opportunities, and where rewards vary not in accordance with the ownership of property, but with the worth of a person's contribution to that society."
"I did not understand what a cosseted life would do to the spirit of enterprise of a people, diminishing their desire to achieve and succeed. I believed that wealth came naturally from wheat growing in the fields, orchards bearing fruit every summer, and factories turning out all that was needed to maintain a comfortable life. Only two decades later, when I had to make an outdated entrepot economy feed a people, did I realize we needed to create the wealth before we can share it. And to create wealth, high motivation and incentives are crucial to drive a people to achieve, to take risks for profit, or there will be nothing to share."
"You must want. That is the crucial thing. Before you have, you must want to have. And to want to have means to be able, first, to perceive what it is you want; secondly, how to discipline and organize yourself in order to possess the things you want-the industrial sinews of our modern economic base; and thirdly, the grit and the stamina, which means cultural mutations in the way of life in large parts of the tropical areas of the world where the human being has never found it necessary to work in the summer, harvest before autumn, and save up for the winter."
"You cannot have people just striving for a nebulous ideal"
"equate rewards to performance"
"forwardlooking good management"
"Realism and pragmatism are necessary to overcome new problems"
"avoidance of the buffet syndrome where, for a fixed price, you can take or eat as much as you want. That is why welfare and subsidies destroy the motivation to perform and succeed"
"the American state insisted on an adequate command of the American version of English before accepting the immigrants as citizens of the state ensured the unifying force of one common language in the people"
"When the British emissary Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing in 1793, bringing with him the marvels of the industrial revolution, the Emperor Qian Long was not impressed. The great emperor told the English nobleman, "There is nothing we lack nor do we need any of your country's manufactures.""
"Cradle-to-grave welfarism blunted the ambition of many budding entrepreneurs"
"Worse, high personal taxes dampened the desire of many to achieve wealth and success"
"respect for those starting new businesses"
"acceptance of failure in entrepreneurial and innovation efforts"
"tolerance for a high degree of income disparity"
"He mastered defense matters, read up the classics on strategy, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Liddell Hart."
"He subscribed to military journals to know the latest in military weaponry."
"He [Xi Jinping, the likely incoming president of China] is reserved-not in the sense that he will not talk to you, but in the sense that he will not betray his likes and dislikes. There is always a pleasant smile on his face, whether or not you have said something that annoyed him."
"Presidents do not get reelected if they give a hard dose of medicine to their people. So, there is a tendency to procrastinate, to postpone unpopular policies in order to win elections. So problems such as budget deficits, debt, and high unemployment have been carried forward from one administration to the next."
"India is a nation of unfulfilled greatness. Its potential has lain fallow, underused."
"Indians will go at a tempo which is decided by their constitution, by their ethnic mix, by their voting patterns, and the resulting coalition governments, which makes for very difficult decision-making."
"If Iran gets the bomb, Saudi Arabia will buy the bomb from Pakistan, the Egyptians will buy the bomb from someone, and then you have a nuclearized Middle East. Then it is only a matter of time before there is a nuclear explosion in the region."
"The Russian population is declining. It is not clear why, but alcoholism plays a role; so do pessimism, a declining fertility rate, and a declining life expectancy.... Siberia and Vladivostok are filling up with more and more Chinese. The lands on the bend of the Amur River will be repopulated by Chinese. Russians may suddenly decide that the future is worth living and bring more children into the world to reverse this demographic trend, but I do not see that shift occurring in the near future."
"Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, believing that all problems are solvable by a good government...."
"In the East, we start with self-reliance. In the West today, it is the opposite. The government says give me a popular mandate and I will solve all society's problems."
"In any given society, of the 1,000 babies born, there are so many percent near-geniuses, so many percent average, so many percent morons.... It is the near-geniuses and the above-average who ultimately decide the shape of things to come...."
"I put myself down as determined, consistent, persistent. I set out to do something. I keep on chasing it until it succeeds. That is all...."
"Democracy should not be made an alibi for inertia. There are many examples of authoritarian governments whose economies have failed. There are as many examples of democratic governments who have achieved superior economic performance. The real issue is whether any country's political system, irrespective of whether it is democratic or authoritarian, can forge a consensus on the policies needed for the economy to grow and create jobs for all, and can ensure that these basic policies are implemented consistently without large leakage."
"When those in office regard the power vested in them as a personal prerogative, they inevitably enrich themselves, promote their families, and favor their friends. The fundamental structures of the modern state are eroded, like the supporting beams of a house after termites have attacked them"
"We must not go against what is historically inevitable"
"I learned to ignore criticism and advice from experts and quasiexperts, especially academics in the social and political sciences. They have pet theories on how a society should develop to approximate their ideal, especially how poverty should be reduced and welfare extended. I always try to be correct, not politically correct."
"So long as you run this one person, one vote, the easiest of appeals that can be made to the ground are the simple, emotional ones, not economic development and progress and all these other things they do not understand, but simple things: pride in race, in language, in religion, in culture."
"But I am convinced, personally, that we would have a better system if we gave every person over the age of 40 who has a family two votes, because he or she is likely to be more careful, voting also for his or her children."
"He or she is more likely to vote in a serious way than a capricious young person under 30.... At the same time, once a person gets beyond 65, then it is a problem."
"when authority is not backed by position, prestige, or usage, then it has to defend actively against challenge."
"For the acid test of any legal system is not the greatness or the grandeur of its ideal concepts, but whether, in fact, it is able to produce order and justice in the relationships between person and person, and between person and the state."
"To maintain this order with the best degree of tolerance and humanity is a problem...."
"To be successful, society must maintain a balance between nurturing excellence and encouraging the average to improve"
"Communism has failed. The welfare state of Western democracies has also failed."
"We have arranged help, but in such a way that only those who have no other choice will seek it. This is the opposite of attitudes in the West, where liberals actively encourage people to demand entitlements with no sense of shame, causing an explosion of welfare costs."
"If there is insecurity, there will be fewer investments."
"we buffer the lowest 20% to 25%, the weaker achievers, from the tough competition of the marketplace"
"We may have conquered space, but we have not learned to conquer our own primeval instincts and emotions that were necessary for our survival in the Stone Age, not in the space age.'"
"I have always thought that humanity was animal-like, while Confucian theory says that it can be improved. I am not sure it can be, but it can be trained, it can be disciplined.... You can make a left-hander write with his or her right hand, but you cannot really change his or her natural-born instinct."
"We read many things. The fact that it is in print and repeated by three, four authors does not make it true. They may all be wrong. But through my own experience ... I concluded: yes, there is a difference.'"
"Fredrich Hayek's book The Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism expressed with clarity and authority what I had long felt but was unable to express, namely the unwisdom of powerful intellects, including Albert Einstein, when they believed that a powerful brain can devise a better system and bring about more "social justice" than what historical evolution, or economic Darwinism, has been able to work out over the centuries."
"I would describe myself, in perhaps European terms, as between socialist and conservative. I would put myself as a liberal. As someone who believes in equal opportunities so that everybody gets an equal chance to do his best, and with a certain compassion to ensure that the failures do not fall through the floor.... I want to run the system as efficiently as possible, but make allowances for those who will not be doing well because nature did not give them enough, or they cannot make that extra effort.... I am a liberal in the classical sense of that word, in that I am not fixated on a particular theory of the world or of society. I am pragmatic. I am prepared to look at the problem and say, all right, what is the best way to solve it that will produce the maximum happiness and well-being for the maximum number of people?"
"You can read about it, but it is irrelevant if you do not relate it to yourself ... which I constantly do...."
"You must not overlook the importance of discussions with knowledgeable people."
"They built this big government house on a hill with Indian convict labor in 1868 to dominate the populations...."
"the ever-present danger of regression and even collapse...."
"For at 60, more than at 50, comes the realization of the transient nature of all earthly glories and successes"
"ephemeral quality of sensory joys and pleasures, when compared to intellectual, moral, or spiritual satisfactions. . . "
"I do not work on a theory. Instead, I ask: what will make this work"
"Choose a solution which offers a higher probability of success, but if it fails, I have some other way. Never a dead end"
"If history is on their side, that liberal democracy is inevitable, then just ignore me"
"The final test is life"
"I do not believe the American system is either desirable or affordable"
"Because one is a proven tested system, the other is not proven, why not let the other chap prove it first?"
"The final proof is what happens to the society"
"History does not repeat itself in the same way each time, but certain trends and consequences are constants. If you do not know history, you think short term. If you know history, you think medium and long term"
"To understand the present and anticipate the future, one must know enough of the past, enough to have a sense of the history of a people. One must appreciate not merely what took place, but, more especially, why it took place and in that particular way. This is true of individuals, as it is for nations. "
"Young people learn best from personal experience."
"Had they done this before they were drawn into the Vietnam War, they might well have chosen not to draw the battle line in Vietnam, but in Cambodia"
"Impress by the clarity of your ideas.... I speak as a practitioner"
"If I had not been able to reduce complex ideas into simple words and project them vividly for mass understanding, I would not be here today"
"Habit of ignoring unpalatable facts and avoiding unpleasant controversy."
"But it is possible to create a society in which everybody is given not equal rewards, but equal opportunities, and where rewards vary not in accordance with the ownership of property, but with the worth of a person's contribution to that society."
"I did not understand what a cosseted life would do to the spirit of enterprise of a people, diminishing their desire to achieve and succeed. I believed that wealth came naturally from wheat growing in the fields, orchards bearing fruit every summer, and factories turning out all that was needed to maintain a comfortable life. Only two decades later, when I had to make an outdated entrepot economy feed a people, did I realize we needed to create the wealth before we can share it. And to create wealth, high motivation and incentives are crucial to drive a people to achieve, to take risks for profit, or there will be nothing to share."
"You must want. That is the crucial thing. Before you have, you must want to have. And to want to have means to be able, first, to perceive what it is you want; secondly, how to discipline and organize yourself in order to possess the things you want-the industrial sinews of our modern economic base; and thirdly, the grit and the stamina, which means cultural mutations in the way of life in large parts of the tropical areas of the world where the human being has never found it necessary to work in the summer, harvest before autumn, and save up for the winter."
"You cannot have people just striving for a nebulous ideal"
"equate rewards to performance"
"forwardlooking good management"
"Realism and pragmatism are necessary to overcome new problems"
"avoidance of the buffet syndrome where, for a fixed price, you can take or eat as much as you want. That is why welfare and subsidies destroy the motivation to perform and succeed"
"the American state insisted on an adequate command of the American version of English before accepting the immigrants as citizens of the state ensured the unifying force of one common language in the people"
"When the British emissary Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing in 1793, bringing with him the marvels of the industrial revolution, the Emperor Qian Long was not impressed. The great emperor told the English nobleman, "There is nothing we lack nor do we need any of your country's manufactures.""
"Cradle-to-grave welfarism blunted the ambition of many budding entrepreneurs"
"Worse, high personal taxes dampened the desire of many to achieve wealth and success"
"respect for those starting new businesses"
"acceptance of failure in entrepreneurial and innovation efforts"
"tolerance for a high degree of income disparity"
"He mastered defense matters, read up the classics on strategy, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Liddell Hart."
"He subscribed to military journals to know the latest in military weaponry."
"He [Xi Jinping, the likely incoming president of China] is reserved-not in the sense that he will not talk to you, but in the sense that he will not betray his likes and dislikes. There is always a pleasant smile on his face, whether or not you have said something that annoyed him."
"Presidents do not get reelected if they give a hard dose of medicine to their people. So, there is a tendency to procrastinate, to postpone unpopular policies in order to win elections. So problems such as budget deficits, debt, and high unemployment have been carried forward from one administration to the next."
"India is a nation of unfulfilled greatness. Its potential has lain fallow, underused."
"Indians will go at a tempo which is decided by their constitution, by their ethnic mix, by their voting patterns, and the resulting coalition governments, which makes for very difficult decision-making."
"If Iran gets the bomb, Saudi Arabia will buy the bomb from Pakistan, the Egyptians will buy the bomb from someone, and then you have a nuclearized Middle East. Then it is only a matter of time before there is a nuclear explosion in the region."
"The Russian population is declining. It is not clear why, but alcoholism plays a role; so do pessimism, a declining fertility rate, and a declining life expectancy.... Siberia and Vladivostok are filling up with more and more Chinese. The lands on the bend of the Amur River will be repopulated by Chinese. Russians may suddenly decide that the future is worth living and bring more children into the world to reverse this demographic trend, but I do not see that shift occurring in the near future."
"Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, believing that all problems are solvable by a good government...."
"In the East, we start with self-reliance. In the West today, it is the opposite. The government says give me a popular mandate and I will solve all society's problems."
"In any given society, of the 1,000 babies born, there are so many percent near-geniuses, so many percent average, so many percent morons.... It is the near-geniuses and the above-average who ultimately decide the shape of things to come...."
"I put myself down as determined, consistent, persistent. I set out to do something. I keep on chasing it until it succeeds. That is all...."
May 8, 2018
The single star rating is 100% related to the copy and paste structure of the book. It is organized to be LKW’s responses to a series of questions but this is accomplished not by finding those questions in actual interviews and directly recording them but taking sentences and paragraphs from multiple different interviews and other materials and mashing them up. For example the material for just the first “answer” combines material from 2011, 1999, 2008, another separate interview in 2011, and 2009. This can be particularly frustrating when you come across a quote posited as forward looking about something that needs to happen in the next 5-10 years and realize the quote itself is over 10 years old. The biggest problem though is you can really feel the editors fingers on the scales.
February 9, 2020
For Americans who think that so-called liberal democracy is neither, and in any case is a dead end, successful modern societies with a different political model always intrigue. In the West, notable such are Hungary and Poland, who have effectively executed a mild and tentative turn away from the most extreme vices of liberal democracy, though there is a long way to go. Singapore, which has apparently successfully blended economic success, certain virtues, and limited democracy, offers another possible model, one with a longer track record. Unfortunately, Singapore’s example is of very limited use to a future well-run America, and this book of the thoughts of Lee Kuan Yew, who built modern Singapore, helps show why.
There are surprisingly few books, at least in English, on Singapore. (I did read John Curtis Perry’s Singapore: Unlikely Power, and was disappointed at its flatness and lack of insight.) I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps it’s a feeling of pedestrian authors that Singapore, other than economic success, shouldn’t be overly praised because it has always rejected liberal democracy, exacerbated by the common stereotype of it being a place where you get flogged for chewing gum. Even its economic success, which largely rejects the globalist ideologies of the neoliberal corporatists who control the West, isn’t celebrated as to its methods, merely as to its results. Our ruling class prefers to ignore that Singapore succeeded economically because of its strong industrial policies and direct government involvement in the economy, not because it threw open its borders to parasites or strove to become a libertarian oasis.
Today’s Singapore was, it appears everyone agrees, built primarily by Lee. But Lee, who died in 2015, didn’t write this 2013 book, nor did he even participate in it. Rather, it is the project of Graham Allison, an American academic expert on China and tireless self-promoter, notable most recently for his 2017 book, Destined for War, which analyzed the applicability of the “Thucydides Trap” to Chinese-American relations. Allison simply collected quotes of Lee’s made over forty years and cobbled them together into a set of fake interviews. The effect is a little weird. The “interviews” are posed in a question-and-answer format, grouped by major theme. However, since the narrative responses are stitched-together quotes often made decades apart, even though the stitching is competently done (probably not by Allison, but by the flunky he credits, one Ali Wynne), the responses often seem clunky and inorganic, even sometimes contradictory. If I were Lee, I would be angry that my thought over decades, which no doubt often underwent subtle, or not-so-subtle, corrections and changes, was assembled in this simplistic way and then offered as a complete summary of my beliefs. But nobody asked Lee for permission, and now he’s in no position to complain.
After reading this book, it seems likely that for his own time, place, and culture, Lee was the right man, but that says little about our society. For us, I think, his ideas are either obvious and prefigured by a vast body of earlier thought, or, incomplete, wrong, or irrelevant. Still, let’s get started. We begin with a brief Forward from Henry Kissinger, establishing Allison’s bona fides but telling us little except that Lee raised Singapore from poverty and made his country a player in Asia, which we knew already. Then, in a blatant appeal to authority and a successful exercise in padding the book, we get nearly twenty pages of quotes showing “who listens,” supposedly, when Lee talks. This includes everyone from Margaret Thatcher to the former CEO of Coca-Cola, praising Lee to the skies for his amazing intelligence, strategic vision, and general awesomeness. All this wastes the reader’s time and should be skipped.
Then we swing into the “interviews.” The biggest focus, no surprise given Singapore’s location and that its culture is Chinese (or rather a subset of Chinese, tied to the trade-oriented southern Chinese who originally settled Singapore under British suzerainty), is China. I am unclear why Lee is regarded as a China expert—maybe he successfully made predictions about China that came true, though if he did, it is not shown here. It’s not that anything Lee says is wrong, as far as I can tell (I’m certainly not a China expert myself). It’s that most of it is banal, at least in the world of 2013, or of 2020. China is growing fast and has great aspirations. Surrounding countries are concerned. The Chinese are going about it slowly and methodically. The Chinese are merit-focused. But they have certain problems, including a lack of the rule of law and an unimaginative, uncreative culture that does not permit a free exchange of ideas and, for all those reasons, comes up with no technological breakthroughs. The United States should adopt a balanced approach toward China, neither too conciliatory nor too aggressive. All true, I imagine, but nothing that is not obvious to someone paying any attention at all.
When he makes predictions about the future that are not obvious, Lee isn’t convincing. He says that “Technology is going to make [the Chinese] system of governance obsolete,” because everyone is going to be “well-informed,” and “because the numbers are so large,” you can’t just “placate and monitor a few people.” So far, though, the Chinese seem very successful in using technology to monitor and control everyone. Just ask the Uighurs, or those now earning a low social credit score. It’s not that Lee is afraid to say the unpalatable. For example, he denigrates the tiny minority of Chinese who militate for democracy but are beloved of Western liberals, saying crassly “Where are the students of Tiananmen now?” and apparently agreeing that Deng Xiaoping was correct to say that if 200,000 students had to be shot; it was better than the alternatives. It’s that Lee has nothing unpalatable to say that is also original. And he completely ignores what is by far the biggest problem China faces—because it screwed itself with the one-child policy, it will age and shrink dramatically during the twenty-first century, never reaching anywhere near its theoretical potential. I discuss this in my review of Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s Empty Planet, but Lee ignores this problem, which obviates pretty much every generic prediction he makes about China.
When he turns to talking about the United States, we begin to see that Lee has very one-dimensional, simplistic views. He does not understand the United States, at all, mostly because in this context and others, he thinks economics is everything, and culture only matters to the extent it affects economic thinking. In Lee’s pinched reading, therefore, the key to our past and present success is purely entrepreneurialism. Which is to some extent accurate, but that is only a small part of American culture, and one of much less importance than it used to be, as entrepreneurialism is crushed by government overreach and social mobility has slowed to a crawl. It is, however, the aspect of America most evident to a foreigner focused on economic matters.
As far as the bad parts of American society, Lee correctly sees that demands for unfettered, absolute individual freedom in America have grown to grotesque and immensely destructive proportions. But he has a television-oriented set of takeaways, namely that America is gripped by vagrancy, drugs, and guns, all of which are bad, very bad (Lee is especially petrified by private citizens having guns). His solution is more communitarianism, as led by elites, with a better ruling class than we have now. Only “the top 3 to 5% of a society can handle this free-for-all, this clash of ideas. If you do this with the whole mass, you will have a mess.” Well, the horse is out of that barn, but to that, Lee has no answer. And America needs to quit overspending. Again, much of this is accurate, but obvious. More importantly, it’s grossly incomplete, viewing America through a keyhole. We can do without Lee’s thoughts on America; they’re bush-league.
True, there is a good deal that is refreshingly retrograde about Lee. He is all about merit, and he’s not shy about it. “It is the near-geniuses and the above average who ultimately decide the shape of things to come.” People aren’t equal in talents and merit, they never will be equal, and to pretend otherwise is folly. No surprise, he doesn’t like democracy. To be sure, Singapore has a form of democracy, but Lee is, correctly, afraid the stupid masses will ruin it for everyone. Thus, the government should serve the people, but not be directly responsive to the people. He also thinks, as I do, that people with families should get more votes, and no votes should go to “a capricious young person under 30.” Lee would no doubt blanch at the insane proposals today for American sixteen-year-olds to vote—although, on the plus side, that would probably hasten the collapse of our own pseudo-democracy, and let us move on more quickly to the next thing, so maybe I should endorse it.
Lee is also retrograde about other cultures. His talk of India is interesting mostly for Lee’s thinly-veiled contempt for Indian society and culture, tempered with a recognition that India has a big, therefore relevant, economy. And when talking of Islam, Lee praises Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a civilizational clash and says that Islam will always be a threat unless it changes. He also enthusiastically and repeatedly endorses English as the only language that matters. Again, this is obvious, but our own self-hating elites have lied to us for decades, telling young people that it is critically necessary for success that they learn other languages. This is totally false, and always has been. It’s not necessary for economic success; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you may remember, we were told we must learn Japanese to compete in the global future. But competition is not the core reason we’re told it’s necessary. It’s because our ruling classes have the strange belief that Europeans are our betters and we must signal our obeisance to the new globalist order by learning the languages of others. For cultural refinement, or to pick up French girls, it might be useful to read French poetry, but for most utilitarian communication, the reality is that all educated Europeans and Asians learn English, because it is the lingua franca for the world, and probably still will be in five hundred years, so there is no practical imperative to learn anything but English.
Most of all, Lee is retrograde about immigration and so-called multicultural societies. Lee’s words are often cherry-picked to suggest that he thinks that immigration is a good thing, and a multicultural society an awesome one. But that’s not what he thinks at all. Instead, he thinks a rarefied slice of approved foreigners can benefit a society, if they don’t cause trouble. He says explicitly that the United States does a great job of mixing in such people in Silicon Valley—but beyond that, “Multiculturalism will destroy America,” because “large numbers of Mexicans and others from South and Central America will continue to come to the U.S. and spread their culture across the whole of the country,” and they will then “breed faster than the WASPs,” destroying the superior American culture. He also says that Americans came to an “empty continent and made the best of it”—because we “killed the Red Indians and took over the land and the buffaloes.” I don’t think Lee is going to be invited to any American college campuses anytime soon.
There are also worthwhile comments uttered in passing, such as “I think you are a born leader or you are not a leader.” This is God’s truth, but something universally denied by “educators” in America. For years, especially in business school, I had nothing but contempt for the many offered classes that purported to teach leadership (or negotiation, a closely related talent that also cannot be taught). They even pretended they could teach leadership to lawyers, even though a lawyer’s entire training, and the personality of almost all lawyers, is to be risk-averse, to avoid making decisions and let others make those decisions, the very antithesis of leadership. (That’s why law firms where lawyers run the business side are always incompetently run.) Teaching leadership is a total waste of time, and Lee saw that, to his credit.
But none of this is earthshattering, and Lee only incompletely addresses the most critical matter of all for Singapore, its looming population collapse. He accurately notes that “Demography, not destiny, will be the most critical factor for security and growth in the 21st century.” Immigration (of the right types of people only) isn’t enough; “much more active government involvement in encouraging or discouraging procreation may be necessary.” Yes, but Lee, however, totally fails to understand why people in modern societies have stopped having children. In fact, almost all of his talk about children is in the Russian context, not the Singaporean. He primly instructs Vladimir Putin that pessimism is the key Russian problem, and that he needs to “give Russians a hopeful outlook” so they will stop drinking and have children, because, by supposed contrast, “In America, people are optimistic and say I will bring a child into the world,” but in Russia, where prosperity fluctuates with oil prices, they are not optimistic. This is very dumb, and shows how limited Lee is as a thinker. The real reason that every advanced society, and most not advanced societies, in the world have a grossly inadequate number of children is not pessimism about the future, but a direct result of what Lee tried to achieve his whole life—increasing wealth, combined with what seems to necessarily come along with that, increasing selfishness and demands for autonomy, in that people will trade children for toys and pleasure, and closely tied pernicious phenomena, most of all that modern Western society denigrates women as mothers and celebrates them as spinster wine aunts, consumers increasing GDP while buying useless trinkets to fill the shelves of their sad, empty houses. In fact, disproving Lee entirely, the Russian birth rate has rebounded in recent years, from 1.16 to 1.75. Singapore’s has not.
Population, though, is merely the most glaring manifestation . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
There are surprisingly few books, at least in English, on Singapore. (I did read John Curtis Perry’s Singapore: Unlikely Power, and was disappointed at its flatness and lack of insight.) I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps it’s a feeling of pedestrian authors that Singapore, other than economic success, shouldn’t be overly praised because it has always rejected liberal democracy, exacerbated by the common stereotype of it being a place where you get flogged for chewing gum. Even its economic success, which largely rejects the globalist ideologies of the neoliberal corporatists who control the West, isn’t celebrated as to its methods, merely as to its results. Our ruling class prefers to ignore that Singapore succeeded economically because of its strong industrial policies and direct government involvement in the economy, not because it threw open its borders to parasites or strove to become a libertarian oasis.
Today’s Singapore was, it appears everyone agrees, built primarily by Lee. But Lee, who died in 2015, didn’t write this 2013 book, nor did he even participate in it. Rather, it is the project of Graham Allison, an American academic expert on China and tireless self-promoter, notable most recently for his 2017 book, Destined for War, which analyzed the applicability of the “Thucydides Trap” to Chinese-American relations. Allison simply collected quotes of Lee’s made over forty years and cobbled them together into a set of fake interviews. The effect is a little weird. The “interviews” are posed in a question-and-answer format, grouped by major theme. However, since the narrative responses are stitched-together quotes often made decades apart, even though the stitching is competently done (probably not by Allison, but by the flunky he credits, one Ali Wynne), the responses often seem clunky and inorganic, even sometimes contradictory. If I were Lee, I would be angry that my thought over decades, which no doubt often underwent subtle, or not-so-subtle, corrections and changes, was assembled in this simplistic way and then offered as a complete summary of my beliefs. But nobody asked Lee for permission, and now he’s in no position to complain.
After reading this book, it seems likely that for his own time, place, and culture, Lee was the right man, but that says little about our society. For us, I think, his ideas are either obvious and prefigured by a vast body of earlier thought, or, incomplete, wrong, or irrelevant. Still, let’s get started. We begin with a brief Forward from Henry Kissinger, establishing Allison’s bona fides but telling us little except that Lee raised Singapore from poverty and made his country a player in Asia, which we knew already. Then, in a blatant appeal to authority and a successful exercise in padding the book, we get nearly twenty pages of quotes showing “who listens,” supposedly, when Lee talks. This includes everyone from Margaret Thatcher to the former CEO of Coca-Cola, praising Lee to the skies for his amazing intelligence, strategic vision, and general awesomeness. All this wastes the reader’s time and should be skipped.
Then we swing into the “interviews.” The biggest focus, no surprise given Singapore’s location and that its culture is Chinese (or rather a subset of Chinese, tied to the trade-oriented southern Chinese who originally settled Singapore under British suzerainty), is China. I am unclear why Lee is regarded as a China expert—maybe he successfully made predictions about China that came true, though if he did, it is not shown here. It’s not that anything Lee says is wrong, as far as I can tell (I’m certainly not a China expert myself). It’s that most of it is banal, at least in the world of 2013, or of 2020. China is growing fast and has great aspirations. Surrounding countries are concerned. The Chinese are going about it slowly and methodically. The Chinese are merit-focused. But they have certain problems, including a lack of the rule of law and an unimaginative, uncreative culture that does not permit a free exchange of ideas and, for all those reasons, comes up with no technological breakthroughs. The United States should adopt a balanced approach toward China, neither too conciliatory nor too aggressive. All true, I imagine, but nothing that is not obvious to someone paying any attention at all.
When he makes predictions about the future that are not obvious, Lee isn’t convincing. He says that “Technology is going to make [the Chinese] system of governance obsolete,” because everyone is going to be “well-informed,” and “because the numbers are so large,” you can’t just “placate and monitor a few people.” So far, though, the Chinese seem very successful in using technology to monitor and control everyone. Just ask the Uighurs, or those now earning a low social credit score. It’s not that Lee is afraid to say the unpalatable. For example, he denigrates the tiny minority of Chinese who militate for democracy but are beloved of Western liberals, saying crassly “Where are the students of Tiananmen now?” and apparently agreeing that Deng Xiaoping was correct to say that if 200,000 students had to be shot; it was better than the alternatives. It’s that Lee has nothing unpalatable to say that is also original. And he completely ignores what is by far the biggest problem China faces—because it screwed itself with the one-child policy, it will age and shrink dramatically during the twenty-first century, never reaching anywhere near its theoretical potential. I discuss this in my review of Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s Empty Planet, but Lee ignores this problem, which obviates pretty much every generic prediction he makes about China.
When he turns to talking about the United States, we begin to see that Lee has very one-dimensional, simplistic views. He does not understand the United States, at all, mostly because in this context and others, he thinks economics is everything, and culture only matters to the extent it affects economic thinking. In Lee’s pinched reading, therefore, the key to our past and present success is purely entrepreneurialism. Which is to some extent accurate, but that is only a small part of American culture, and one of much less importance than it used to be, as entrepreneurialism is crushed by government overreach and social mobility has slowed to a crawl. It is, however, the aspect of America most evident to a foreigner focused on economic matters.
As far as the bad parts of American society, Lee correctly sees that demands for unfettered, absolute individual freedom in America have grown to grotesque and immensely destructive proportions. But he has a television-oriented set of takeaways, namely that America is gripped by vagrancy, drugs, and guns, all of which are bad, very bad (Lee is especially petrified by private citizens having guns). His solution is more communitarianism, as led by elites, with a better ruling class than we have now. Only “the top 3 to 5% of a society can handle this free-for-all, this clash of ideas. If you do this with the whole mass, you will have a mess.” Well, the horse is out of that barn, but to that, Lee has no answer. And America needs to quit overspending. Again, much of this is accurate, but obvious. More importantly, it’s grossly incomplete, viewing America through a keyhole. We can do without Lee’s thoughts on America; they’re bush-league.
True, there is a good deal that is refreshingly retrograde about Lee. He is all about merit, and he’s not shy about it. “It is the near-geniuses and the above average who ultimately decide the shape of things to come.” People aren’t equal in talents and merit, they never will be equal, and to pretend otherwise is folly. No surprise, he doesn’t like democracy. To be sure, Singapore has a form of democracy, but Lee is, correctly, afraid the stupid masses will ruin it for everyone. Thus, the government should serve the people, but not be directly responsive to the people. He also thinks, as I do, that people with families should get more votes, and no votes should go to “a capricious young person under 30.” Lee would no doubt blanch at the insane proposals today for American sixteen-year-olds to vote—although, on the plus side, that would probably hasten the collapse of our own pseudo-democracy, and let us move on more quickly to the next thing, so maybe I should endorse it.
Lee is also retrograde about other cultures. His talk of India is interesting mostly for Lee’s thinly-veiled contempt for Indian society and culture, tempered with a recognition that India has a big, therefore relevant, economy. And when talking of Islam, Lee praises Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a civilizational clash and says that Islam will always be a threat unless it changes. He also enthusiastically and repeatedly endorses English as the only language that matters. Again, this is obvious, but our own self-hating elites have lied to us for decades, telling young people that it is critically necessary for success that they learn other languages. This is totally false, and always has been. It’s not necessary for economic success; in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you may remember, we were told we must learn Japanese to compete in the global future. But competition is not the core reason we’re told it’s necessary. It’s because our ruling classes have the strange belief that Europeans are our betters and we must signal our obeisance to the new globalist order by learning the languages of others. For cultural refinement, or to pick up French girls, it might be useful to read French poetry, but for most utilitarian communication, the reality is that all educated Europeans and Asians learn English, because it is the lingua franca for the world, and probably still will be in five hundred years, so there is no practical imperative to learn anything but English.
Most of all, Lee is retrograde about immigration and so-called multicultural societies. Lee’s words are often cherry-picked to suggest that he thinks that immigration is a good thing, and a multicultural society an awesome one. But that’s not what he thinks at all. Instead, he thinks a rarefied slice of approved foreigners can benefit a society, if they don’t cause trouble. He says explicitly that the United States does a great job of mixing in such people in Silicon Valley—but beyond that, “Multiculturalism will destroy America,” because “large numbers of Mexicans and others from South and Central America will continue to come to the U.S. and spread their culture across the whole of the country,” and they will then “breed faster than the WASPs,” destroying the superior American culture. He also says that Americans came to an “empty continent and made the best of it”—because we “killed the Red Indians and took over the land and the buffaloes.” I don’t think Lee is going to be invited to any American college campuses anytime soon.
There are also worthwhile comments uttered in passing, such as “I think you are a born leader or you are not a leader.” This is God’s truth, but something universally denied by “educators” in America. For years, especially in business school, I had nothing but contempt for the many offered classes that purported to teach leadership (or negotiation, a closely related talent that also cannot be taught). They even pretended they could teach leadership to lawyers, even though a lawyer’s entire training, and the personality of almost all lawyers, is to be risk-averse, to avoid making decisions and let others make those decisions, the very antithesis of leadership. (That’s why law firms where lawyers run the business side are always incompetently run.) Teaching leadership is a total waste of time, and Lee saw that, to his credit.
But none of this is earthshattering, and Lee only incompletely addresses the most critical matter of all for Singapore, its looming population collapse. He accurately notes that “Demography, not destiny, will be the most critical factor for security and growth in the 21st century.” Immigration (of the right types of people only) isn’t enough; “much more active government involvement in encouraging or discouraging procreation may be necessary.” Yes, but Lee, however, totally fails to understand why people in modern societies have stopped having children. In fact, almost all of his talk about children is in the Russian context, not the Singaporean. He primly instructs Vladimir Putin that pessimism is the key Russian problem, and that he needs to “give Russians a hopeful outlook” so they will stop drinking and have children, because, by supposed contrast, “In America, people are optimistic and say I will bring a child into the world,” but in Russia, where prosperity fluctuates with oil prices, they are not optimistic. This is very dumb, and shows how limited Lee is as a thinker. The real reason that every advanced society, and most not advanced societies, in the world have a grossly inadequate number of children is not pessimism about the future, but a direct result of what Lee tried to achieve his whole life—increasing wealth, combined with what seems to necessarily come along with that, increasing selfishness and demands for autonomy, in that people will trade children for toys and pleasure, and closely tied pernicious phenomena, most of all that modern Western society denigrates women as mothers and celebrates them as spinster wine aunts, consumers increasing GDP while buying useless trinkets to fill the shelves of their sad, empty houses. In fact, disproving Lee entirely, the Russian birth rate has rebounded in recent years, from 1.16 to 1.75. Singapore’s has not.
Population, though, is merely the most glaring manifestation . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
November 4, 2024
I disagreed with some of LKY’s perspectives but always found his points of view backed by immense clarity of thought. He’s shockingly frank, practical and articulate. Great, easy read!
August 14, 2020
Such an insanely smart and competent leader. We'll forever miss your insights.
November 27, 2019
I knew very little about Lee kuan Yew prior to stumbling across his name on Goodreads. I will admit that I still know very little about the guy who purportedly was the founding father of a Singapore who famously helped turn the nation from a third world country to a first world one in a single generation. I hardly yet understand what this means. Ah well. It was not needed for reading this text.
This book was styled in a interview format as yew was asked many questions where were fundamental to his expertise. From what it means for a state to be successful, what is the fundamental nature of governance, what is it that helps predict which nations will do well moving forward and so on. And of course on the relationship of the united states, china and its future prospects
His commentary was quite insightful, and I will explain some of it:
- His assessment on china is that they desire to be a powerhouse, rather than an honorary western nation. They are different in America and have social stringencies which make them less likely to produce innovations through entrepreneurial activity *(note this is a testable claim). Nevertheless they will continue to grow within a similar framework to America's as they speedily turn into a market economy. He expects that china will overtake America as the predominant economic power house of the globe (something many of us anticipate), but seems to think they are unlikely to confront America militarily and fall into the thucydidean trap given America's military dominance.
- On the nature of States/democracy he made a very interesting claim that it was not the political structure which indicates whether a state will be successful or not, but rather the people who are in it. Or in his words
"To get good government, you must have good people in charge of government. I have observed in the last 40 years that even with a poor system of government, but with good strong people in charge, people get passable government with decent progress. On the other hand, I have seen many ideal systems of government fail. Britain and France between them wrote over 80 constitutions for their different colonies. Nothing wrong with the constitution, with the institutions and the checks and the balances. But the societies did not have the leaders who could work those institutions, nor the people who respected those institutions…The leaders who inherited these constitutions were not equal to the job, and their countries failed, and their system collapsed in riots, in coups, and in revolution "
This of course is a poignant idea which brings to question whether if we have such "good people" in the governments across the globe and if the progressive extremism will come back to bite us within our various nations.
- He stressed the need for education. In other words, the necessity to cultivate the bright young talented youth of a nation towards productive careers which can strengthen the economy through innovations.
Overall, this served to be a stimulating read and Im glad that I picked it up on a whim
This book was styled in a interview format as yew was asked many questions where were fundamental to his expertise. From what it means for a state to be successful, what is the fundamental nature of governance, what is it that helps predict which nations will do well moving forward and so on. And of course on the relationship of the united states, china and its future prospects
His commentary was quite insightful, and I will explain some of it:
- His assessment on china is that they desire to be a powerhouse, rather than an honorary western nation. They are different in America and have social stringencies which make them less likely to produce innovations through entrepreneurial activity *(note this is a testable claim). Nevertheless they will continue to grow within a similar framework to America's as they speedily turn into a market economy. He expects that china will overtake America as the predominant economic power house of the globe (something many of us anticipate), but seems to think they are unlikely to confront America militarily and fall into the thucydidean trap given America's military dominance.
- On the nature of States/democracy he made a very interesting claim that it was not the political structure which indicates whether a state will be successful or not, but rather the people who are in it. Or in his words
"To get good government, you must have good people in charge of government. I have observed in the last 40 years that even with a poor system of government, but with good strong people in charge, people get passable government with decent progress. On the other hand, I have seen many ideal systems of government fail. Britain and France between them wrote over 80 constitutions for their different colonies. Nothing wrong with the constitution, with the institutions and the checks and the balances. But the societies did not have the leaders who could work those institutions, nor the people who respected those institutions…The leaders who inherited these constitutions were not equal to the job, and their countries failed, and their system collapsed in riots, in coups, and in revolution "
This of course is a poignant idea which brings to question whether if we have such "good people" in the governments across the globe and if the progressive extremism will come back to bite us within our various nations.
- He stressed the need for education. In other words, the necessity to cultivate the bright young talented youth of a nation towards productive careers which can strengthen the economy through innovations.
Overall, this served to be a stimulating read and Im glad that I picked it up on a whim
December 11, 2014
Until I read this short book I did not know much about Yew except that he took over Singapore after World War II and is the founding father of modern Singapore. Yew was Prime Minister from 1959-1990.
Graham Allison and Robert Blackwell two leading strategic thinkers asked Yew questions and also put together information from his voluminous writings and speeches. The book is mainly in a question and answer format, the result is this concise, but important book.
I found myself engrossed in the incisive wisdom presented by Yew. I really enjoyed the following comment in the book. “China tells us that countries big and small are equal, that it is not a hegemon; but when we do something they do not like, they say you have made 1.3 billion people unhappy. So please know your place.” When asked if India will match China’s rise? Yew said “Not likely, India is not a real country. Instead, it is 32 separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line.” I think Yew’s comments about China are right on the mark. When asked by the authors will China accept its place within the postwar order created by the United States? Yew answered, “No. It is China’s intention to become the greatest power in the world—and to be accepted as China, not as an honorary member of the West.” One comment he made has got my attention. Yew said “The United States focuses on individual rights but has failed to pair this with individual responsibility.
Yew is 90 years old and his comments on the United States are pertinent to many of the debates in which we are enmeshed today. This book has triggered my interest to learn more about this most insightful man. I read this as an audio book downloaded from Audible. Michael McConnohie and Francis Chau narrated the book.
Graham Allison and Robert Blackwell two leading strategic thinkers asked Yew questions and also put together information from his voluminous writings and speeches. The book is mainly in a question and answer format, the result is this concise, but important book.
I found myself engrossed in the incisive wisdom presented by Yew. I really enjoyed the following comment in the book. “China tells us that countries big and small are equal, that it is not a hegemon; but when we do something they do not like, they say you have made 1.3 billion people unhappy. So please know your place.” When asked if India will match China’s rise? Yew said “Not likely, India is not a real country. Instead, it is 32 separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line.” I think Yew’s comments about China are right on the mark. When asked by the authors will China accept its place within the postwar order created by the United States? Yew answered, “No. It is China’s intention to become the greatest power in the world—and to be accepted as China, not as an honorary member of the West.” One comment he made has got my attention. Yew said “The United States focuses on individual rights but has failed to pair this with individual responsibility.
Yew is 90 years old and his comments on the United States are pertinent to many of the debates in which we are enmeshed today. This book has triggered my interest to learn more about this most insightful man. I read this as an audio book downloaded from Audible. Michael McConnohie and Francis Chau narrated the book.
April 28, 2020
When the master speaks, you listen.
Beyond the enormous impact LKY had as a statesmen, I believe LKY was the best political thinker of the 20th century. I try to read everything I can from LKY and while this book is not ideal, it unearthed a lot of great content I would otherwise have not been exposed to.
Beyond the enormous impact LKY had as a statesmen, I believe LKY was the best political thinker of the 20th century. I try to read everything I can from LKY and while this book is not ideal, it unearthed a lot of great content I would otherwise have not been exposed to.
November 29, 2014
Lee said "I understood Deng Xiaoping when he said: if 200,000 students have to be shot, shoot them, because the alternative is China in chaos for another 100 years.... Deng understood, and he released it stage by stage. Without Deng, China would have imploded."
Don't you know that China has been in chaos since communists spread and occupation?
Don't you know that China has been in chaos since communists spread and occupation?
July 8, 2021
Since this is a collection of several interviews, few ideas were old. Nothing too fresh if you've heard Lee Kuan Yew in other contexts before.
August 6, 2025
I read this thinking that I was going to learn about Lee Kuan Yew and/or how Singapore was established, yet I was pleasantly surprised that it was a compilation of Yew’s insights on a variety of topics including the future of the US, China, Russia, India, and the Middle East; what makes a great leader, government, and economy; and his thoughts on geopolitics and political systems/democracy. He was clearly really well informed about the world, and it was refreshing to get an outside perspective on how the world views the US. I wish American government officials read this to improve how the US is run and functions. It’s no wonder that Singapore cried when such a man died.
My takeaways below:
- Strength of US is entrepreneurial spirit and creativity and influx of ideas from around the world but weakness are focus on individualism and its implementation of democracy
- The US can help China integrate globally and avoid being an enemy with China, given China’s inevitable assent as a global power due to its large population (large population = many potential consumers)
- China’s rise will be restricted by its culture of conformity and challenges in assimilating newcomers
- Russia is on the decline
- India’s bureaucracy and mass diversity makes it country of unfulfilled potential
- Radical Islamist terrorism in the Middle East requires moderate Muslims to speak out against the people who preach the radical ideas. A military approach kills the terrorists but doesn’t solve the root cause.
- Culture, discipline, and education prevails over political system
- Blending the best of East and West is best, like Singapore does.
- Welfare and equal support for everyone is not as good for the economy as equal opportunities. Motivate the best to progress society, and reward more to those who contribute more to society because a country doesn’t have unlimited resources.
- Talking to knowledgeable people is more efficient than reading
- Practical solutions that work are better than theoretical ones. Only do what’s proven and don’t change what’s worked forever if stakes are high, like running a country.
- To succeed and think long-term, must have lots of data about people and individuals. Study history and people’s past to understand the present and predict the future.
- Clarity of speech (using simple English) is of utmost importance.
My takeaways below:
- Strength of US is entrepreneurial spirit and creativity and influx of ideas from around the world but weakness are focus on individualism and its implementation of democracy
- The US can help China integrate globally and avoid being an enemy with China, given China’s inevitable assent as a global power due to its large population (large population = many potential consumers)
- China’s rise will be restricted by its culture of conformity and challenges in assimilating newcomers
- Russia is on the decline
- India’s bureaucracy and mass diversity makes it country of unfulfilled potential
- Radical Islamist terrorism in the Middle East requires moderate Muslims to speak out against the people who preach the radical ideas. A military approach kills the terrorists but doesn’t solve the root cause.
- Culture, discipline, and education prevails over political system
- Blending the best of East and West is best, like Singapore does.
- Welfare and equal support for everyone is not as good for the economy as equal opportunities. Motivate the best to progress society, and reward more to those who contribute more to society because a country doesn’t have unlimited resources.
- Talking to knowledgeable people is more efficient than reading
- Practical solutions that work are better than theoretical ones. Only do what’s proven and don’t change what’s worked forever if stakes are high, like running a country.
- To succeed and think long-term, must have lots of data about people and individuals. Study history and people’s past to understand the present and predict the future.
- Clarity of speech (using simple English) is of utmost importance.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 12, 2022
“There is a continual need to balance between a successful, competitive society, and a cohesive, compassionate one. That requires judgment, to strike a bargain or social contract. Each society must arrive at that optimum point for itself. Between the two ends, the highly competitive and the excessively equal, lies a golden mean. This point will move with time and changing values”
I now know my answer to the ice breaker question "if you could have dinner with one person who would it be? " It would be Lee Kuan Yew
I now know my answer to the ice breaker question "if you could have dinner with one person who would it be? " It would be Lee Kuan Yew
August 24, 2022
Good overview of the work and thinking of a very impressive man.
October 10, 2025
A fascinating time-capsule of LKY's 2013 worldview, with more than a few accurate predictions about the changing geopolitical order vis-a-vis China/US.
June 29, 2023
A must-read, especially in the context of changing world order between the last decade and the current. And, in general, there are some life nuggets even at an individual level from one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century.
March 18, 2020
This is the collection of Lee Kuan Yew's opinions, but it's not complete. Great book if you start learning about East Asia and their culture.
این کتاب را خواندم چرا که به پیشرفت سنگاپور و آرای رهبر سابق آن کنجکاو شده بودم. لی کوان یو به قول خودش این کشور را از جهان سوم به اول رساند.کتاب کوچک و خواندنی است: مجموعه ای از مصاحبه ها در موضوعات مختلف، از مدیریت جهانی گرفته تا اهمیت آموزش و پرورش و زبان.
این کتاب را خواندم چرا که به پیشرفت سنگاپور و آرای رهبر سابق آن کنجکاو شده بودم. لی کوان یو به قول خودش این کشور را از جهان سوم به اول رساند.کتاب کوچک و خواندنی است: مجموعه ای از مصاحبه ها در موضوعات مختلف، از مدیریت جهانی گرفته تا اهمیت آموزش و پرورش و زبان.
September 22, 2014
Not much to gain if you’ve already read his autobiography, watched a few of his videos, or read some of his speeches. The value comes in the focus on the flaws of Western democracy, which he tread more delicately in his late 90's/2000 autobiography. Allison et al do drill down to the very essence of the man and there are quite a few gems.
The key takeaway from LKY’s style of pragmatism is that he has strong views on generalized principles while tempering them with localized exceptions. To a typical Westerner they would seem to be inconsistent, but if you throw out the pretense of egalitarianism, they make sense.
For example, LKY praises Singapore’s diversity and cosmopolitan atmosphere as well as America’s ability to assimilate immigrants. However, he comes down very hard on multiculturalism. To paraphrase Mark Steyn: The British colonialists were much more multicultural than most modern multiculturalists – they knew all about other cultures, spoke obscure languages, had lived in places far flung, and had a firm grasp of history – they just knew which culture was objectively better. Though not highlighted in the book, LKY has previously spoken about the difficulty of dealing with Muslims in Singapore (once challenged on TV why he took seemingly inconsistent views towards evangelical fundamentalist Muslims and Christians: “Christians don’t strap bombs to their chests.”). Furthermore, he likes to stress that people are not equal and that no amount of social engineering will change this fact. He takes this to the more controversial level by saying that most abilities are 70% genetic and that different people (races, nationalities, regions) will have superior/inferior attributes.
Another example of contrast is LKY’s idealized society of one governed by elites vs. his distrust of theories of the elites. Ironically he cites Hayek’s Fatal Conceit as a strong influence on his role as social planner. Perhaps LKY is more Popperian than Hayekian in that he views all social theories as simply that until tested. He refuses to wed himself to any particular ideology. A parallel axis is his fundamental distrust of pluralism and laissez faire while seeing inherent benefits in chaotic order of entrepreneurial societies like the US.
Abridged abridged LKY....
Future of China
The mistake of Germany and Japan was their effort to challenge the existing order. The Chinese are not stupid; they have avoiding this mistake…The Chinese have calculated that they need 30 to 40, maybe 50 years of peace and quiet to catch up, build their system, change it from the communist system to the market system.
[They may never equal the Anglophone world because they have] cultural habits that limit imagination and creativity, reward conformity; a language that shapes thinking through epigrams and 4000 years of texts that suggest everything worth saying has already been said, and said better by earlier writers.
I do not believe you can impose on other countries standards which are alien and totally disconnected with their past. So to ask China to become a democracy, when in its 5000 years of recorded history it never counter heads; all rulers ruled by right of being the emperor, and if you disagree, you chop off heads, not count heads.
Future of the US
In the presidential system, your personal appearance on TV is decisive, whereas in a parliamentary system, the PM, before he becomes the PM, has been a MP, and probably a minister, and in Britain the people have sized you up over a period of time…and they have come to certain conclusions as to what kind of person you are, what kind of depth you have, what kind of sincerity you have in what you say…Your presidents, I mean like Jimmy Carter…my name is Jimmy Carter, I am a peanut farmer, I am running for president. The next thing you know, he was the president!
I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe that what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy…[for example] the Philippines has an American-style constitution, one of the most difficult to operate in the world.
The expansion of the right of the individual to behave or misbehave as he or she pleases has come at the expense of orderly society…it has a lot to do with the erosion of the moral underpinnings of a society and the diminution of personal responsibility. The top 3 to 5% of a society can handle this free-for-all, this clash of ideas. If you do this with the whole mass, you will have a mess.
Multiculturalism will destroy America. There is a danger that large numbers of Mexicans and others from South and Central America will continue to come to the US and spread their culture across the whole of the country. If they breed faster than the WASPs and are living with them, whose culture will prevail? Will the WASPs change them, or will the immigrants change the existing culture? They will change each other, but it would be sad for American culture to be changed even partially.
A well-ordered society with a long unbroken history, like Britain or Japan, has its national solidarity and its establishment based on the kind and the royal family, a religion and the elders of the church, the elite in the ruling parties who alternate power, the elite in the public service and armed forces, the elite in commerce, industry, and in the professions.
Future of US-China relations
If the US attempts to humiliate China, keep it down, it will assure itself an enemy. If instead it accepts China as a big, powerful, rising state, and gives it a seat in the boardroom, China will take that place for the foreseeable future.
W: The most compelling argument I’ve heard from LKY doesn’t make an appearance in the book but can be found in LKY’s autobiography on US foreign relations: “I argued that if a nation on the rise, with an excess of energy, was not allowed to export its goods and services, its only alternative would be to expand and capture territory, incorporate the population, and integrate it to make for a bigger economic unit. That was why nations had empires which they controlled as one trading bloc…if trade in goods and services was blocked, then China would revert to its historical solution of small warring states conquering one another to gain control of more territory and people until they became one colossal continental empire.”
Future of India
“Only over half of each Indian cohort completes primary school, a big loss”
W: Suppose the question is : which way is the causality in India? Are they uneducated because they’re poor/misgoverned or is there a third variable at play?
Somewhat surprised by LKY’s praise of Nehru and Congress and little mention of the progress under Rao and BJP (1991-2004) as well as the achievements of Modi in Gujarat
Future of Islamic Extremism
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the cause of Islamic terrorism…terrorism would continue even if the Middle East problem were solved. Saudi Arabia has generously financed the missionary movement by building mosques and religious schools and paying for preachers throughout the world, spreading the teachings and practices of its austere version of Wahhabist Islam.
(Said in 2011) If the US leaves Iraq prematurely, jihadists everywhere will be emboldened to take the battle to Washington and its friends and allies. Having defeated the Russians in Afghanistan and the US in Iraq, they will believe that they can change the world. Even worse, if civil war breaks out in Iraq, the conflict will destabilize the whole Middle East, as it will draw in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey.
Future of National Economic Growth
I offered every parent a choice of English and their mother tongue, in whatever order they chose. By their free choice, plus the rewards of the marketplace over a period of 30 years, we have ended up with English first and the mother tongue second.
The Roman and British Empires were examples in history of how trade flourished for hundreds of years under the protection of a comprehensive unified system of laws.
We draw our talent from only 3 million people. A short mountain range is unlikely to have peaks that can equal Mount Everest. You need a long mountain range like the Himalayas unless you are special people like the Jews in Israel. With a population of four million Jews, they have the talents of a population of more than 40 million. Everyone knows that Shanghainese are the brightest and sharpest people. But few know why. It is because, for over 150 years, ever since it became a treaty port for the foreign powers, it has drawn the ambitious, energetic, and talented from the Yangtze Delta, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and other provinces along the river, a catchment of some 200-300 million.
Future of Geopolitics and Globalization
Russia’s future is no different than it was 10 years ago or even 20 years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed, except that it has lost its hold on energy resources in the Caucasus and Kazakhstan. It has been unable to develop an economy that generates wealth independent of energy and natural resources.
The global financial crisis was caused by excesses of the liberal system of regulations and the belief that a completely free market will allow enormous innovation and allocate capital to the most profitable enterprises with the highest return.
Future of Democracy
In the West, especially after WWII, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by family…In the East, we start with self-reliance. In the West today, it is the opposite.
I learned to ignored criticism and advice from experts and quasi-experts, especially academics in social and political sciences. They have pet theories on how a society should develop to approximate their ideal, especially how poverty should be reduced and welfare extended. I always try to be correct, not politically correct.
Between being loved and feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I am meaningless.
I am not intellectually convinced that one person, one vote is the best. We practice it because that is what the British bequeathed us, and we have not really found a need to challenge. But I am convinced, personally, that we would have a better system if we gave every person over the age of 40 who has a family two votes, because he or she is likely to be more careful, voting also for his or her children. He or she is more likely to vote in a serious way than a capricious young person under 30 … at the same time, once a person gets beyond 65, then it is a problem. Between the ages of 40 and 60 is ideal, and at 60 they should go back to one vote, but that will be difficult to arrange.
I understood Deng Xiaoping when he said: if 200,000 students have to be shot, shoot them, because the alternative is China in chaos for 100 years…Deng understood, and he released it stage by stage. Without Deng, China would have imploded.
How Lee Kuan Yew Thinks
Frederich Hayek’s book The Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism expressed with clarity and authority what I had long felt but was unable to express, namely the unwisdom of powerful intellects, including Einstein, when they believed that a powerful brain can devise a better system and bring about more “social justice” than what historical evolution, or economic Darwinism, has been able to work out over the centuries.
The Japanese invasion of Singapore was the single biggest political education of my life because, for three and a half years, I saw the meaning of power and how power and politics and government went together, and I also understood how people trapped in a power situation responded because they had to live.
China’s stagnation was caused by its arrogance and complacency. It refused to learn from the West. When the British emissary Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing in 1793, bringing with him the marvels of the industrial revolution, the Emperor Qian Long was not impressed. The great emperor told the English nobleman, “There is nothing we lack nor do we need any of your country’s manufactures.” The price China paid for this arrogance was 200 years of decline and decay, while Europe and America forged ahead.
I believe 70-80% of a person’s capability, proclivities, temperament is genetic.
Shell had the best system of [selecting leaders], and the government switched from 40 attributes to three, which they called “helicopter qualities”…What are they? Power of analysis; logical grasp of the facts; concentration on the basic points, extracting the principles. You score high marks in mathematics, you have got it. But that is not enough.
The key takeaway from LKY’s style of pragmatism is that he has strong views on generalized principles while tempering them with localized exceptions. To a typical Westerner they would seem to be inconsistent, but if you throw out the pretense of egalitarianism, they make sense.
For example, LKY praises Singapore’s diversity and cosmopolitan atmosphere as well as America’s ability to assimilate immigrants. However, he comes down very hard on multiculturalism. To paraphrase Mark Steyn: The British colonialists were much more multicultural than most modern multiculturalists – they knew all about other cultures, spoke obscure languages, had lived in places far flung, and had a firm grasp of history – they just knew which culture was objectively better. Though not highlighted in the book, LKY has previously spoken about the difficulty of dealing with Muslims in Singapore (once challenged on TV why he took seemingly inconsistent views towards evangelical fundamentalist Muslims and Christians: “Christians don’t strap bombs to their chests.”). Furthermore, he likes to stress that people are not equal and that no amount of social engineering will change this fact. He takes this to the more controversial level by saying that most abilities are 70% genetic and that different people (races, nationalities, regions) will have superior/inferior attributes.
Another example of contrast is LKY’s idealized society of one governed by elites vs. his distrust of theories of the elites. Ironically he cites Hayek’s Fatal Conceit as a strong influence on his role as social planner. Perhaps LKY is more Popperian than Hayekian in that he views all social theories as simply that until tested. He refuses to wed himself to any particular ideology. A parallel axis is his fundamental distrust of pluralism and laissez faire while seeing inherent benefits in chaotic order of entrepreneurial societies like the US.
Abridged abridged LKY....
Future of China
The mistake of Germany and Japan was their effort to challenge the existing order. The Chinese are not stupid; they have avoiding this mistake…The Chinese have calculated that they need 30 to 40, maybe 50 years of peace and quiet to catch up, build their system, change it from the communist system to the market system.
[They may never equal the Anglophone world because they have] cultural habits that limit imagination and creativity, reward conformity; a language that shapes thinking through epigrams and 4000 years of texts that suggest everything worth saying has already been said, and said better by earlier writers.
I do not believe you can impose on other countries standards which are alien and totally disconnected with their past. So to ask China to become a democracy, when in its 5000 years of recorded history it never counter heads; all rulers ruled by right of being the emperor, and if you disagree, you chop off heads, not count heads.
Future of the US
In the presidential system, your personal appearance on TV is decisive, whereas in a parliamentary system, the PM, before he becomes the PM, has been a MP, and probably a minister, and in Britain the people have sized you up over a period of time…and they have come to certain conclusions as to what kind of person you are, what kind of depth you have, what kind of sincerity you have in what you say…Your presidents, I mean like Jimmy Carter…my name is Jimmy Carter, I am a peanut farmer, I am running for president. The next thing you know, he was the president!
I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe that what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy…[for example] the Philippines has an American-style constitution, one of the most difficult to operate in the world.
The expansion of the right of the individual to behave or misbehave as he or she pleases has come at the expense of orderly society…it has a lot to do with the erosion of the moral underpinnings of a society and the diminution of personal responsibility. The top 3 to 5% of a society can handle this free-for-all, this clash of ideas. If you do this with the whole mass, you will have a mess.
Multiculturalism will destroy America. There is a danger that large numbers of Mexicans and others from South and Central America will continue to come to the US and spread their culture across the whole of the country. If they breed faster than the WASPs and are living with them, whose culture will prevail? Will the WASPs change them, or will the immigrants change the existing culture? They will change each other, but it would be sad for American culture to be changed even partially.
A well-ordered society with a long unbroken history, like Britain or Japan, has its national solidarity and its establishment based on the kind and the royal family, a religion and the elders of the church, the elite in the ruling parties who alternate power, the elite in the public service and armed forces, the elite in commerce, industry, and in the professions.
Future of US-China relations
If the US attempts to humiliate China, keep it down, it will assure itself an enemy. If instead it accepts China as a big, powerful, rising state, and gives it a seat in the boardroom, China will take that place for the foreseeable future.
W: The most compelling argument I’ve heard from LKY doesn’t make an appearance in the book but can be found in LKY’s autobiography on US foreign relations: “I argued that if a nation on the rise, with an excess of energy, was not allowed to export its goods and services, its only alternative would be to expand and capture territory, incorporate the population, and integrate it to make for a bigger economic unit. That was why nations had empires which they controlled as one trading bloc…if trade in goods and services was blocked, then China would revert to its historical solution of small warring states conquering one another to gain control of more territory and people until they became one colossal continental empire.”
Future of India
“Only over half of each Indian cohort completes primary school, a big loss”
W: Suppose the question is : which way is the causality in India? Are they uneducated because they’re poor/misgoverned or is there a third variable at play?
Somewhat surprised by LKY’s praise of Nehru and Congress and little mention of the progress under Rao and BJP (1991-2004) as well as the achievements of Modi in Gujarat
Future of Islamic Extremism
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the cause of Islamic terrorism…terrorism would continue even if the Middle East problem were solved. Saudi Arabia has generously financed the missionary movement by building mosques and religious schools and paying for preachers throughout the world, spreading the teachings and practices of its austere version of Wahhabist Islam.
(Said in 2011) If the US leaves Iraq prematurely, jihadists everywhere will be emboldened to take the battle to Washington and its friends and allies. Having defeated the Russians in Afghanistan and the US in Iraq, they will believe that they can change the world. Even worse, if civil war breaks out in Iraq, the conflict will destabilize the whole Middle East, as it will draw in Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey.
Future of National Economic Growth
I offered every parent a choice of English and their mother tongue, in whatever order they chose. By their free choice, plus the rewards of the marketplace over a period of 30 years, we have ended up with English first and the mother tongue second.
The Roman and British Empires were examples in history of how trade flourished for hundreds of years under the protection of a comprehensive unified system of laws.
We draw our talent from only 3 million people. A short mountain range is unlikely to have peaks that can equal Mount Everest. You need a long mountain range like the Himalayas unless you are special people like the Jews in Israel. With a population of four million Jews, they have the talents of a population of more than 40 million. Everyone knows that Shanghainese are the brightest and sharpest people. But few know why. It is because, for over 150 years, ever since it became a treaty port for the foreign powers, it has drawn the ambitious, energetic, and talented from the Yangtze Delta, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and other provinces along the river, a catchment of some 200-300 million.
Future of Geopolitics and Globalization
Russia’s future is no different than it was 10 years ago or even 20 years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed, except that it has lost its hold on energy resources in the Caucasus and Kazakhstan. It has been unable to develop an economy that generates wealth independent of energy and natural resources.
The global financial crisis was caused by excesses of the liberal system of regulations and the belief that a completely free market will allow enormous innovation and allocate capital to the most profitable enterprises with the highest return.
Future of Democracy
In the West, especially after WWII, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by family…In the East, we start with self-reliance. In the West today, it is the opposite.
I learned to ignored criticism and advice from experts and quasi-experts, especially academics in social and political sciences. They have pet theories on how a society should develop to approximate their ideal, especially how poverty should be reduced and welfare extended. I always try to be correct, not politically correct.
Between being loved and feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I am meaningless.
I am not intellectually convinced that one person, one vote is the best. We practice it because that is what the British bequeathed us, and we have not really found a need to challenge. But I am convinced, personally, that we would have a better system if we gave every person over the age of 40 who has a family two votes, because he or she is likely to be more careful, voting also for his or her children. He or she is more likely to vote in a serious way than a capricious young person under 30 … at the same time, once a person gets beyond 65, then it is a problem. Between the ages of 40 and 60 is ideal, and at 60 they should go back to one vote, but that will be difficult to arrange.
I understood Deng Xiaoping when he said: if 200,000 students have to be shot, shoot them, because the alternative is China in chaos for 100 years…Deng understood, and he released it stage by stage. Without Deng, China would have imploded.
How Lee Kuan Yew Thinks
Frederich Hayek’s book The Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism expressed with clarity and authority what I had long felt but was unable to express, namely the unwisdom of powerful intellects, including Einstein, when they believed that a powerful brain can devise a better system and bring about more “social justice” than what historical evolution, or economic Darwinism, has been able to work out over the centuries.
The Japanese invasion of Singapore was the single biggest political education of my life because, for three and a half years, I saw the meaning of power and how power and politics and government went together, and I also understood how people trapped in a power situation responded because they had to live.
China’s stagnation was caused by its arrogance and complacency. It refused to learn from the West. When the British emissary Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing in 1793, bringing with him the marvels of the industrial revolution, the Emperor Qian Long was not impressed. The great emperor told the English nobleman, “There is nothing we lack nor do we need any of your country’s manufactures.” The price China paid for this arrogance was 200 years of decline and decay, while Europe and America forged ahead.
I believe 70-80% of a person’s capability, proclivities, temperament is genetic.
Shell had the best system of [selecting leaders], and the government switched from 40 attributes to three, which they called “helicopter qualities”…What are they? Power of analysis; logical grasp of the facts; concentration on the basic points, extracting the principles. You score high marks in mathematics, you have got it. But that is not enough.
February 4, 2017
Why read this book? Because world leader's have said LKY is one of the smartest leaders they have ever met.
The book isn't to look back at 50 years of Singapore but present LKY's opinion of the world ahead (circa 2013)
Some of the stuff he says is relevant today in a the era of PresidentCheetos, such as how to deal with China but not isolating it but by economically competing S.Asia. Then there are things like how Mexican culture will spread in the US that I don’t agree with. He too contradicts that by saying that one of the US' strengths is the embrace of immigrants. Also, he does have a bit of a fixed mindset, and yes, is a undoubtedly a bit of a strongman. I do like his belief in discipline and a hard-ass approach, I find other ideas anachronistic and non=progressive.
CHINA
Wants to be #1 -- Other smaller Asian countries are uneasy
Strategies in place:
○ Out build and out sell everyone else
○ Focus on education
○ Diplomacy, not force i.e. put their heads down and work for the next 40-50 years to catch up with the US in GDP terms vs. mistakes re armaments Jp and Germany made and also have the rest of South Asia grow with them via trade to expand their influence
Challenges:
○ Language, hard to attract foreign talent to go there
○ Cultural -- lack of free flow of ideas
○ Graft & the lack of a judicial framework
○ Rising income inequality
Political framework:
he doesn’t see the country become a democracy // on Xi Jinping; "he has iron in his soul" and went through more tribulation than Hu Jintao
USA
US isn't in decline -- "Historically, the U.S. has demonstrated a great capacity for renewal and revival"
Main strengths:
"Americans have a can-do approach to life: everything can be broken up, analyzed, and redefined. Whether it can or it cannot, Americans believe it can be solved, given enough money, research, and effort."
"entrepreneurial spirit" with a lot of people starting up cos, failing and doing it over again
"the individual’s position in society. In American culture, an individual’s interest is primary. This makes American society more aggressively competitive, with a sharper edge and higher performance."
"It is a country that embraces immigrants."
Concerns about the US:
Democracy: "to win votes you have to give more and more. And to beat your opponent in the next election, you have to promise to give more away. So it is a never-ending process of auctions"
"the American voter has shown a disinclination to listen to their political leaders when they debate the hard issues.
The presidential system is less likely to produce good government than a parliamentary system. In the presidential system, your personal appearance on TV is decisive," in a Parliamentary system you have to rise up in the ranks and be vetted
The US systems leads to a "leader, one who can present himself and his programs in a polished way… I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality.
"I believe that what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy"
Concerns over US culture
"breakdown of civil society"
"The ideas of individual supremacy… when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive.
"In the U.S., the community’s interests have been sacrificed because of the human rights of drug traffickers and drug consumers."
" sense of cultural supremacy which leads the American media to pick on [other countries] … Because we have not complied with their ideas of how we should govern ourselves."
"Multiculturalism will destroy America. There is a danger that large numbers of Mexicans and others from South and Central America will continue to come to the U.S. and spread their culture across the whole of the country."
How does it remain #1?
"The 21st century will be a contest for supremacy in the Pacific, because that is where the growth will be … If the U.S. does not hold its ground in the Pacific, it cannot be a world leader"
"To hold ground in the Pacific, the U.S. must not let its fiscal deficits come to grief."
"The U.S. must not let its preoccupation with the Middle East— Iraq, Iran, the Israelis, and oil— allow others, especially China, to overtake its interests in Southeast Asia. The Chinese are not distracted. They are looking for energy everywhere, and they are making friends everywhere"
China & USA
Chance of confrontation
Low -- no ideological differences -- competitors, not adversaries
"China will not let an international court arbitrate territorial disputes in the South China Sea, so the presence of U.S. firepower in the Asia-Pacific will be necessary if the United Nations Law of the Sea is to prevail."
The role of US stability in the world
"The world has developed because of the stability America established. If that stability is rocked, we are going to have a different situation."
Changes to US policy as China rises
"Americans believe their ideas are universal— the supremacy of the individual and free, unfettered expression. But they are not— never were. In fact, American society was so successful for so long not because of these ideas and principles, but because of a certain geopolitical good fortune, an abundance of resources and immigrant energy, a generous flow of capital and technology from Europe, and two wide oceans that kept conflicts of the world away from American shores.
The U.S. cannot stop China’s rise. It just has to live with a bigger China, which will be completely novel for the U.S.,
The U.S. Congress is against any new free-trade agreements. If the next Congress continues to oppose FTAs, valuable time will be lost, and it may be too late to try again.
Do not treat China as an enemy from the outset.
On the influence US can have on China
It is the U.S., more than any other country, that can integrate China into the international community… The difficulty arises from America’s expressed desire to make China more democratic. China resents and resists this as interference in its domestic matters.
If the U.S. attempts to humiliate China, keep it down, it will assure itself an enemy. If instead it accepts China as a big, powerful, rising state and gives it a seat in the boardroom, China will take that place for the foreseeable future. So if I were an American, I would speak well of China
This is the fundamental choice that the United States has to make: to engage or to isolate China. You cannot have it both ways. The best way to quicken the pace and direction of political change in China is to increase her trade and investment links with the world. Then her prosperity will depend increasingly on the compatibility of her economic system with those of the major trading nations.
India
Constraints because of a democratic government & culture
Bureaucracy and caste system are the enemy of meritocracy
Complex political system makes it hard for decision-making
It's not a real country ...nation states along a rail line the British put down
Average civil servant seems himself as a regulator more than a facilitator
Indian economic strengths
Superior governance and quality of ROE in the private sector
Transparent & functional capital markets
Demographic dividend -- but needs job creation let it become a curse
"India’s system of democracy and rule of law gives it a long-term advantage over China, although in the early phases, China has the advantage of faster implementation of its reforms."
Challenges
Red tape, lack of infra, labor laws
Post independence, bought into mechanization and planning -- then in the 90s, focused on having to dismantling the inefficient SOEs
Other relic of historical legacy is the emphasis on fairness of distribution, "Equality of incomes gives no incentive to the resourceful and the industrious to outperform & be competitive"
Islamic Extremism
Its unprecedented in that it's global -- "Islam has not been a problem, contemporary radical Islam is a problem"
The roots are in the belief the West has put them down -- it feeds on the alienation that globalization has generated and globalization is largely US led
Tracing the rise, "price of oil quadrupled in 1973, Saudi Arabia has generously financed the missionary movement -- overthrow of the Shah in Iran in 1979… has had a profound impact on Muslim beliefs in Islam’s power. Finally, the participation of large numbers of Southeast Asian Muslims in the jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s and the 1990s has radicalized significant numbers of the Southeast Asian Muslims"
A large part of the issue is the Saudis financing madrasas
Islam doesn't help because it believes in assimilation vs. other religions
Key objectives of the Islamists: it's the right time to exert superiority of Islam, get the oil and build the caliphate
If Muslims in Europe and the US don't distance themselves from extremists, they will be ostracized
Whether it becomes a bigger problem depends on what happens in Saudi Arabia and other oil states
It's up to moderate Muslims to win the struggle and "eventually, the fight will boil down to one between Muslims who want to return to the Islam of the 11th century (when Islam shut out the outside world and cut itself off from new ideas) and those who want to see a modern Islam attuned to the 21st century"
On Economic Growth
Lessons to learn from Singapore's rise to a first-world country?
○ Embraces everyone who wants to join
○ Make haste slowly, don’t foist change, let it happen gradually
○ Didn’t do what other countries that gained independence did in Asia viz. embrace socialism
Chief drivers of growth for Singapore
quality of man power \ immigration double edged sword \ scholars and innovators should be welcome \ people matter so education does too \ creativity of leadership to see what's worked elsewhere and bring it home \ spirit of entrepreneurship
Core competencies of workers today: Greater autonomy, self supervision, enterprising, English
On Geopolitics & Globalization
Biggest global challenges: Eurozone disintegration / North Korea / Jp stagnation / Middle east and their building the bomb
GFC: causes were liberal regulations and the belief the free market will correctly allocate capital while what really happens is institutions maximize their own wealth
What needs to be done to compete in a globalizing world? Think globally, collaborate \ life long learning \ international in your outlook, embrace global talent, be wary of nationalism \ foster education in the youth
Globalization can not be reversed because you can't take away the tools that created it viz cheaper transportation & communication \ protectionism will inevitably lead to conflict
On the future of democracy
The role of government: to provide people with a framework within which they can fulfill their needs. The business of a government is to… make firm decisions so that there can be certainty and stability in the affairs of the people. The art of government is utilizing to the maximum the limited resources at the country’s disposal.
Good government raises standards, doesn’t just maintain them
The role of a leader: It is the duty of leaders to instill confidence in the people so that they will stand up to be counted
The test of leadership lies not merely in echoing fears and doubts, especially when these fears and doubts, however real, are capable of solution and of being rendered irrational and unfounded \ A nation is great not by its size alone. It is the will, the cohesion, the stamina, the discipline of its people, and the quality of their leaders which ensure it an honorable place in history.
On popular opinion: I learned to ignore criticism and advice from experts and quasi-experts, especially academics in the social and political sciences \ One has got to get over the temptation of the news media capturing one’s soul. Never mind what the news media say \ There are moments when you have to be thoroughly unpopular. But at the end of your term, you should have brought about sufficient benefits so that the people realize what you did was necessary and will vote for you again.
Requirements for democracy: mobilize opinion \ honest political parties and a vigilant electorate to choose \ citizens who are willing to accept sacrifice for the long run
Risks:: people are fickle and emotional arguments win \ voters aren't rational and don’t always face rational choices \ order needs to precede law and while universal rights are great, they cant be blindly applied
On balance in society: society needs to nurture excellence and encourage the average \ need competitiveness and collaboration
On how he thinks
Fundamental principles
Humans are inherently vicious \ it's assumed all men and women are equal, but is equality realistic?
The world is too diverse for a single ideology to dominate
His approach to policymaking
Liberal pragmatist to produce the most happiness for the most number of people
Be a gentleman, do no evil, try and do good, loyal to family and faithful to his wife
The belief that the interest of society > individual, vs. the US
He looks at other societies and tries to relate it back to himself otherwise its irrelevant -- have discussions with knowledgeable people
do not try to impress by big words. Impress by the clarity of your ideas…
Paradigms he uses
The first corroboration of logic is when it becomes reality
Acid test is performance not promises
It's not theory or philosophy that guides him but practical considerations
On societies and progress
Civilizations emerge when societies are given challenges to overcome and when those challenges are just right, societies flourish. But for that they need determined leadership, efficient administration and social discipline
"society should make it worth people’s while to give their best to the country. No society has existed in history where all people were equal and obtained equal rewards. If that were to be practiced, and the lazy and the incompetent were paid as much as the industrious and the intelligent"
You must want. That is the crucial thing. Before you have, you must want to have. And to want to have means to be able, first, to perceive what it is you want; secondly, how to discipline and organize yourself in order to possess the things you want— the industrial sinews of our modern economic base; and thirdly, the grit and the stamina,
You need a striving society that's clear about what it wants, equal chances to show they are better than the other, forward looking management and to retain dynamisms, a multi racial lingual immigrant society without losing your original culture
British society stagnated because of cradle to grave welfare, discoveries slowed because the rich were viewed with disdain, while the US has emphasized personal independence, respect for those starting new businesses, acceptance of entrepreneurial failure, tolerance for income disparity
On successful leaders
Talk about a fixed mindset! "I believe 70– 80% of a person’s capability, proclivities, temperament is genetic. The day you are conceived, at least 70% has already been fixed in the womb"
Powers of analysis; logical grasp of the facts; concentration on the basic points, extracting the principles.
The book isn't to look back at 50 years of Singapore but present LKY's opinion of the world ahead (circa 2013)
Some of the stuff he says is relevant today in a the era of PresidentCheetos, such as how to deal with China but not isolating it but by economically competing S.Asia. Then there are things like how Mexican culture will spread in the US that I don’t agree with. He too contradicts that by saying that one of the US' strengths is the embrace of immigrants. Also, he does have a bit of a fixed mindset, and yes, is a undoubtedly a bit of a strongman. I do like his belief in discipline and a hard-ass approach, I find other ideas anachronistic and non=progressive.
CHINA
Wants to be #1 -- Other smaller Asian countries are uneasy
Strategies in place:
○ Out build and out sell everyone else
○ Focus on education
○ Diplomacy, not force i.e. put their heads down and work for the next 40-50 years to catch up with the US in GDP terms vs. mistakes re armaments Jp and Germany made and also have the rest of South Asia grow with them via trade to expand their influence
Challenges:
○ Language, hard to attract foreign talent to go there
○ Cultural -- lack of free flow of ideas
○ Graft & the lack of a judicial framework
○ Rising income inequality
Political framework:
he doesn’t see the country become a democracy // on Xi Jinping; "he has iron in his soul" and went through more tribulation than Hu Jintao
USA
US isn't in decline -- "Historically, the U.S. has demonstrated a great capacity for renewal and revival"
Main strengths:
"Americans have a can-do approach to life: everything can be broken up, analyzed, and redefined. Whether it can or it cannot, Americans believe it can be solved, given enough money, research, and effort."
"entrepreneurial spirit" with a lot of people starting up cos, failing and doing it over again
"the individual’s position in society. In American culture, an individual’s interest is primary. This makes American society more aggressively competitive, with a sharper edge and higher performance."
"It is a country that embraces immigrants."
Concerns about the US:
Democracy: "to win votes you have to give more and more. And to beat your opponent in the next election, you have to promise to give more away. So it is a never-ending process of auctions"
"the American voter has shown a disinclination to listen to their political leaders when they debate the hard issues.
The presidential system is less likely to produce good government than a parliamentary system. In the presidential system, your personal appearance on TV is decisive," in a Parliamentary system you have to rise up in the ranks and be vetted
The US systems leads to a "leader, one who can present himself and his programs in a polished way… I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality.
"I believe that what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy"
Concerns over US culture
"breakdown of civil society"
"The ideas of individual supremacy… when carried to excess, have not worked. They have made it difficult to keep American society cohesive.
"In the U.S., the community’s interests have been sacrificed because of the human rights of drug traffickers and drug consumers."
" sense of cultural supremacy which leads the American media to pick on [other countries] … Because we have not complied with their ideas of how we should govern ourselves."
"Multiculturalism will destroy America. There is a danger that large numbers of Mexicans and others from South and Central America will continue to come to the U.S. and spread their culture across the whole of the country."
How does it remain #1?
"The 21st century will be a contest for supremacy in the Pacific, because that is where the growth will be … If the U.S. does not hold its ground in the Pacific, it cannot be a world leader"
"To hold ground in the Pacific, the U.S. must not let its fiscal deficits come to grief."
"The U.S. must not let its preoccupation with the Middle East— Iraq, Iran, the Israelis, and oil— allow others, especially China, to overtake its interests in Southeast Asia. The Chinese are not distracted. They are looking for energy everywhere, and they are making friends everywhere"
China & USA
Chance of confrontation
Low -- no ideological differences -- competitors, not adversaries
"China will not let an international court arbitrate territorial disputes in the South China Sea, so the presence of U.S. firepower in the Asia-Pacific will be necessary if the United Nations Law of the Sea is to prevail."
The role of US stability in the world
"The world has developed because of the stability America established. If that stability is rocked, we are going to have a different situation."
Changes to US policy as China rises
"Americans believe their ideas are universal— the supremacy of the individual and free, unfettered expression. But they are not— never were. In fact, American society was so successful for so long not because of these ideas and principles, but because of a certain geopolitical good fortune, an abundance of resources and immigrant energy, a generous flow of capital and technology from Europe, and two wide oceans that kept conflicts of the world away from American shores.
The U.S. cannot stop China’s rise. It just has to live with a bigger China, which will be completely novel for the U.S.,
The U.S. Congress is against any new free-trade agreements. If the next Congress continues to oppose FTAs, valuable time will be lost, and it may be too late to try again.
Do not treat China as an enemy from the outset.
On the influence US can have on China
It is the U.S., more than any other country, that can integrate China into the international community… The difficulty arises from America’s expressed desire to make China more democratic. China resents and resists this as interference in its domestic matters.
If the U.S. attempts to humiliate China, keep it down, it will assure itself an enemy. If instead it accepts China as a big, powerful, rising state and gives it a seat in the boardroom, China will take that place for the foreseeable future. So if I were an American, I would speak well of China
This is the fundamental choice that the United States has to make: to engage or to isolate China. You cannot have it both ways. The best way to quicken the pace and direction of political change in China is to increase her trade and investment links with the world. Then her prosperity will depend increasingly on the compatibility of her economic system with those of the major trading nations.
India
Constraints because of a democratic government & culture
Bureaucracy and caste system are the enemy of meritocracy
Complex political system makes it hard for decision-making
It's not a real country ...nation states along a rail line the British put down
Average civil servant seems himself as a regulator more than a facilitator
Indian economic strengths
Superior governance and quality of ROE in the private sector
Transparent & functional capital markets
Demographic dividend -- but needs job creation let it become a curse
"India’s system of democracy and rule of law gives it a long-term advantage over China, although in the early phases, China has the advantage of faster implementation of its reforms."
Challenges
Red tape, lack of infra, labor laws
Post independence, bought into mechanization and planning -- then in the 90s, focused on having to dismantling the inefficient SOEs
Other relic of historical legacy is the emphasis on fairness of distribution, "Equality of incomes gives no incentive to the resourceful and the industrious to outperform & be competitive"
Islamic Extremism
Its unprecedented in that it's global -- "Islam has not been a problem, contemporary radical Islam is a problem"
The roots are in the belief the West has put them down -- it feeds on the alienation that globalization has generated and globalization is largely US led
Tracing the rise, "price of oil quadrupled in 1973, Saudi Arabia has generously financed the missionary movement -- overthrow of the Shah in Iran in 1979… has had a profound impact on Muslim beliefs in Islam’s power. Finally, the participation of large numbers of Southeast Asian Muslims in the jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s and the 1990s has radicalized significant numbers of the Southeast Asian Muslims"
A large part of the issue is the Saudis financing madrasas
Islam doesn't help because it believes in assimilation vs. other religions
Key objectives of the Islamists: it's the right time to exert superiority of Islam, get the oil and build the caliphate
If Muslims in Europe and the US don't distance themselves from extremists, they will be ostracized
Whether it becomes a bigger problem depends on what happens in Saudi Arabia and other oil states
It's up to moderate Muslims to win the struggle and "eventually, the fight will boil down to one between Muslims who want to return to the Islam of the 11th century (when Islam shut out the outside world and cut itself off from new ideas) and those who want to see a modern Islam attuned to the 21st century"
On Economic Growth
Lessons to learn from Singapore's rise to a first-world country?
○ Embraces everyone who wants to join
○ Make haste slowly, don’t foist change, let it happen gradually
○ Didn’t do what other countries that gained independence did in Asia viz. embrace socialism
Chief drivers of growth for Singapore
quality of man power \ immigration double edged sword \ scholars and innovators should be welcome \ people matter so education does too \ creativity of leadership to see what's worked elsewhere and bring it home \ spirit of entrepreneurship
Core competencies of workers today: Greater autonomy, self supervision, enterprising, English
On Geopolitics & Globalization
Biggest global challenges: Eurozone disintegration / North Korea / Jp stagnation / Middle east and their building the bomb
GFC: causes were liberal regulations and the belief the free market will correctly allocate capital while what really happens is institutions maximize their own wealth
What needs to be done to compete in a globalizing world? Think globally, collaborate \ life long learning \ international in your outlook, embrace global talent, be wary of nationalism \ foster education in the youth
Globalization can not be reversed because you can't take away the tools that created it viz cheaper transportation & communication \ protectionism will inevitably lead to conflict
On the future of democracy
The role of government: to provide people with a framework within which they can fulfill their needs. The business of a government is to… make firm decisions so that there can be certainty and stability in the affairs of the people. The art of government is utilizing to the maximum the limited resources at the country’s disposal.
Good government raises standards, doesn’t just maintain them
The role of a leader: It is the duty of leaders to instill confidence in the people so that they will stand up to be counted
The test of leadership lies not merely in echoing fears and doubts, especially when these fears and doubts, however real, are capable of solution and of being rendered irrational and unfounded \ A nation is great not by its size alone. It is the will, the cohesion, the stamina, the discipline of its people, and the quality of their leaders which ensure it an honorable place in history.
On popular opinion: I learned to ignore criticism and advice from experts and quasi-experts, especially academics in the social and political sciences \ One has got to get over the temptation of the news media capturing one’s soul. Never mind what the news media say \ There are moments when you have to be thoroughly unpopular. But at the end of your term, you should have brought about sufficient benefits so that the people realize what you did was necessary and will vote for you again.
Requirements for democracy: mobilize opinion \ honest political parties and a vigilant electorate to choose \ citizens who are willing to accept sacrifice for the long run
Risks:: people are fickle and emotional arguments win \ voters aren't rational and don’t always face rational choices \ order needs to precede law and while universal rights are great, they cant be blindly applied
On balance in society: society needs to nurture excellence and encourage the average \ need competitiveness and collaboration
On how he thinks
Fundamental principles
Humans are inherently vicious \ it's assumed all men and women are equal, but is equality realistic?
The world is too diverse for a single ideology to dominate
His approach to policymaking
Liberal pragmatist to produce the most happiness for the most number of people
Be a gentleman, do no evil, try and do good, loyal to family and faithful to his wife
The belief that the interest of society > individual, vs. the US
He looks at other societies and tries to relate it back to himself otherwise its irrelevant -- have discussions with knowledgeable people
do not try to impress by big words. Impress by the clarity of your ideas…
Paradigms he uses
The first corroboration of logic is when it becomes reality
Acid test is performance not promises
It's not theory or philosophy that guides him but practical considerations
On societies and progress
Civilizations emerge when societies are given challenges to overcome and when those challenges are just right, societies flourish. But for that they need determined leadership, efficient administration and social discipline
"society should make it worth people’s while to give their best to the country. No society has existed in history where all people were equal and obtained equal rewards. If that were to be practiced, and the lazy and the incompetent were paid as much as the industrious and the intelligent"
You must want. That is the crucial thing. Before you have, you must want to have. And to want to have means to be able, first, to perceive what it is you want; secondly, how to discipline and organize yourself in order to possess the things you want— the industrial sinews of our modern economic base; and thirdly, the grit and the stamina,
You need a striving society that's clear about what it wants, equal chances to show they are better than the other, forward looking management and to retain dynamisms, a multi racial lingual immigrant society without losing your original culture
British society stagnated because of cradle to grave welfare, discoveries slowed because the rich were viewed with disdain, while the US has emphasized personal independence, respect for those starting new businesses, acceptance of entrepreneurial failure, tolerance for income disparity
On successful leaders
Talk about a fixed mindset! "I believe 70– 80% of a person’s capability, proclivities, temperament is genetic. The day you are conceived, at least 70% has already been fixed in the womb"
Powers of analysis; logical grasp of the facts; concentration on the basic points, extracting the principles.
January 7, 2018
I got interested in Lee Kuan due to of course his work in Singapore but more so due to my burgeoning interest in foreign policies. It is a fascinating subject in its own right where one needs to access a country just like one would access a human character and personality. This text will be less about book or Lee Kun. He is a legendary leader and master in governance. But rather about how his views and analysis can be used and can shape our mind set with regard to governance and world around.
Lee is out and out pragmatist. He desist fundamental democratic principles like ‘One person one vote’, ‘Assumed Innocence in law’, ‘Keeping individual freedom at cost of community’ etc. He also with equal conviction desists fundamental communistic principles like ‘Equality for all – Equal wages’, ‘Closing economy’, ‘Over-Centralization of power and policies’ etc. What he believes in is pragmatic solution to each incoming problem. Without much focus on age old and shoved theories, one should focus on probabilities of most favourable outcome. Having abled people, well educated, well established, in Trump words ‘Stable Genius’ who have character of giving back maximum to society because they are capable enough. Lee is completely in agreement with taking harsh decisions, if you know they will yield long term benefits. He criticizes democracy for not been able to do so due to plenty of fundamental reasons. He ‘understands’ Xiaoping’s stand of killing even 200000 students during Tiananmen massacre or else face 100 years of unstable and slow China.
This is the background over which he lays his vision of progress, development and happiness in society. I think Leeism would be favourable to our current regime’s challenging policies on economic front. A generation must be ready to burn and bear policy changes which might be unpopular but are more probable of yielding benefits in long term.
Further, the focus Lee puts on education, single language, culture and skill development of youth, is immense. He firmly stands that USA has imbibed cohesiveness and openness. They foster innovation, excellence and entrepreneurship. Their culture of starting from scratch, their overview towards failure, and their ability to step out again is something to be learned by all nations. Current state of USA is rather unappeasable. They are completely going against their strengths. Due to ever going technology and communication advances, it is completely illogical of them to forgo their core strengths. But when you have case of mental illness against chief of 50 states, there is not much left to be debated.
Yet, India can learn importance of international language and quality education. At this juncture, India needs to create local leaders who are well learned, and have zeal to give back. This is possible through quality education and quality jobs so that best of best stay here. Also, they need to open arms to world, giving them viable alternate by strengthening infrastructure and stable government (which currently exists). How much this stable government is exercising openness and inclusion rather than achieving their personal fundamental goals is left to mass to decide.
Again, this is a good read for any one with interest in foreign policies and Singapore’s miraculous development. There are a lot of other pointers touched in book. So it’s a goodread.
Lee is out and out pragmatist. He desist fundamental democratic principles like ‘One person one vote’, ‘Assumed Innocence in law’, ‘Keeping individual freedom at cost of community’ etc. He also with equal conviction desists fundamental communistic principles like ‘Equality for all – Equal wages’, ‘Closing economy’, ‘Over-Centralization of power and policies’ etc. What he believes in is pragmatic solution to each incoming problem. Without much focus on age old and shoved theories, one should focus on probabilities of most favourable outcome. Having abled people, well educated, well established, in Trump words ‘Stable Genius’ who have character of giving back maximum to society because they are capable enough. Lee is completely in agreement with taking harsh decisions, if you know they will yield long term benefits. He criticizes democracy for not been able to do so due to plenty of fundamental reasons. He ‘understands’ Xiaoping’s stand of killing even 200000 students during Tiananmen massacre or else face 100 years of unstable and slow China.
This is the background over which he lays his vision of progress, development and happiness in society. I think Leeism would be favourable to our current regime’s challenging policies on economic front. A generation must be ready to burn and bear policy changes which might be unpopular but are more probable of yielding benefits in long term.
Further, the focus Lee puts on education, single language, culture and skill development of youth, is immense. He firmly stands that USA has imbibed cohesiveness and openness. They foster innovation, excellence and entrepreneurship. Their culture of starting from scratch, their overview towards failure, and their ability to step out again is something to be learned by all nations. Current state of USA is rather unappeasable. They are completely going against their strengths. Due to ever going technology and communication advances, it is completely illogical of them to forgo their core strengths. But when you have case of mental illness against chief of 50 states, there is not much left to be debated.
Yet, India can learn importance of international language and quality education. At this juncture, India needs to create local leaders who are well learned, and have zeal to give back. This is possible through quality education and quality jobs so that best of best stay here. Also, they need to open arms to world, giving them viable alternate by strengthening infrastructure and stable government (which currently exists). How much this stable government is exercising openness and inclusion rather than achieving their personal fundamental goals is left to mass to decide.
Again, this is a good read for any one with interest in foreign policies and Singapore’s miraculous development. There are a lot of other pointers touched in book. So it’s a goodread.
March 20, 2021
This book is a recompilation of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's speeches, articles and thoughts - organized in a Q&A format, which makes it easy to digest. It will give you a quick but comprehensive understanding of PM Lee's vision, his uncompromised values, and his rule of law. He was a remarkable leader whose thoughts on the world (spoken 10, 15, 20 years ago) still hold true today - some are actually even more relevant today more than ever.
If we judge this book under this lens: a quick comprehensive summary of PM Lee's views, then this book excels at it. However, if you are already familiar with PM Lee, and you are looking for something more in depth about his life, about his actions, an analysis of his mandate and legacy - then this book falls short.
As such, I suggest you determine first what you are looking to get out of this book prior to diving in. Nevertheless, this book will still be worth your time.
There are plenty more - it is really remarkable how clear and precise his thoughts and principles were. In some cases, very extreme, and might take some time to digest and swallow. However, tying it all together, you can understand how Singapore became a leading nation - not by chance, not even by hard work (which there was tons of) - but by having a leader who was able to see 50 years in the future, and a clear understanding of the past.
If we judge this book under this lens: a quick comprehensive summary of PM Lee's views, then this book excels at it. However, if you are already familiar with PM Lee, and you are looking for something more in depth about his life, about his actions, an analysis of his mandate and legacy - then this book falls short.
As such, I suggest you determine first what you are looking to get out of this book prior to diving in. Nevertheless, this book will still be worth your time.
As always, here are some interesting passages:
About China:
"China will inevitably catch up to the U.S. in absolute GDP. But its creativity may never match America’s, because its culture does not permit a free exchange and contest of ideas."
"China faces enormous economic problems—a disparity in income between the rich coastal cities and the inland provinces, and in income within the coastal cities. They have got to watch that carefully or they might get severe discontent and civil disorder."
About Singapore, and speaking a universal language:
"While Singapore shares with China many of the core philosophical tenets of Confucianism, we worked over the past 40 years to establish English as our first language, and Chinese as the second. Why? Certainly not by accident or without provoking strong opposition. We did so to open ourselves to the world and allow ourselves to engage and embrace the main forces of discovery and invention and creativity that occur not only in the language but also in the mentality of English."
About the US:
"What has made the U.S. economy preeminent is its entrepreneurial culture…Entrepreneurs and investors alike see risk and failure as natural and necessary for success. When they fail, they pick themselves up and start afresh."
"For the next 10, 15, 20 years, the U.S. will remain the most enterprising, innovative economy because of its leading-edge technology, both in the civilian and military fields…You will lose that gradually over 30, 40, 50 years unless you are able to keep on attracting talent, and that is the final contest, because the Chinese and other nations are going to adopt parts of what you have done to fit their circumstances, and they are also going around looking for talented people and building up their innovative, enterprising economies."
"The American culture…is that we start from scratch and beat you. That is why I have confidence that the American economy will recover. They were going down against Japan and Germany in manufacturing. But they came up with the Internet, Microsoft and Bill Gates, and Dell…What kind of mindset do you need for that? It is part of their history."
About difference of ideologies between the East and the West
"One fundamental difference between American and Oriental culture is the individual’s position in society. In American culture, an individual’s interest is primary. This makes American society more aggressively competitive, with a sharper edge and higher performance."
About democracy, and its fractured system:
"Presidents do not get reelected if they give a hard dose of medicine to their people. So, there is a tendency to procrastinate, to postpone unpopular policies in order to win elections. So, problems such as budget deficits, debt, and high unemployment have been carried forward from one administration to the next"
"America must have leaders who are prepared to lead and know what is good for America and do it, even if they lose their reelection. A system of governance that does not allow them to do a quiet U-turn when they identify problems is malfunctioning.
"Security, prosperity, and the consumer society plus mass communications have made for a different kind of person getting elected as leader, one who can present himself and his programs in a polished way…I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes, in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising…A spin doctor is a high-income professional, one in great demand. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill, a Roosevelt, or a de Gaulle can emerge"
"Contrary to what American political commentators say, I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe that what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy. The exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to development. The ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society to establish conditions which improve the standard of living for the majority of its people, plus enabling the maximum of personal freedoms compatible with the freedoms of others in society."
"When you have popular democracy, to win votes you have to give more and more. And to beat your opponent in the next election, you have to promise to give more away. So it is a never-ending process of auctions—and the cost, the debt being paid for by the next generation"
About wealth generation vs welfare:
"There will always be a tussle within societies, as underachievers want more support, but addressing their needs must be done in a way that does not kill incentive."
About India, and the limitations of its current democratic system:
"Indians will go at a tempo which is decided by their constitution, by their ethnic mix, by their voting patterns, and the resulting coalition governments, which makes for very difficult decision-making.3 It is part of the constitutional system which has been accepted by the people and is established now. There will be a constant tinkering around with state boundaries, linguistic affinities, caste quotas…All those adjustments detract from a dynamic meritocracy and prevent India from maximizing its potential."
"I am against a society which has no sense of nurturing its best to rise to the top. I am against a feudal society where your birth decides where you stay in the pecking order. The example of that, par excellence, is India’s caste system."
"India is such a diverse country—it is not one nation, but 32 different nations speaking 330 different dialects…In China, it is 90% Han Chinese all speaking the same language, with different accents, but reading the same script. If you stand up in Delhi and speak in English, out of 1.2 billion people, maybe 200 million will understand you. If you speak in Hindi, maybe 250 million will understand you. If you speak in Tamil, 80 million people will understand you."
There are plenty more - it is really remarkable how clear and precise his thoughts and principles were. In some cases, very extreme, and might take some time to digest and swallow. However, tying it all together, you can understand how Singapore became a leading nation - not by chance, not even by hard work (which there was tons of) - but by having a leader who was able to see 50 years in the future, and a clear understanding of the past.
August 6, 2022
LÝ QUANG DIỆU - BÀN VỀ TRUNG QUỐC, HOA KỲ & THẾ GIỚI | G. Alison, R. D. Blackwill & A. Wyne
4.5/5 🌟
☕ Cuốn sách là tuyển tập các bài viết, bài phỏng vấn trực tiếp và phát biểu phong phú, chia sẻ góc nhìn và quan điểm của Lý Quang Diệu - thủ tướng đầu tiên của nước Cộng hoà Singapore 1959 - 1990 về nhiều vấn đề thời cuộc: sự "trỗi dậy hoà bình" của Trung Quốc, lo ngại về vai trò đứng đầu của Hoa Kỳ, viễn cảnh tương lai về mối quan hệ Mỹ - Trung, địa chính trị và toàn cầu hoá.
☕ Cuốn sách này tuy không dày nhưng sẽ cung cấp nhiều chia sẻ hay ho và khách quan từ cựu thủ tướng Singapore Lý Quang Diệu, người mà chính trị gia Hoa Kỳ Henry A. Kissenger đã nhận định rằng "không chỉ là một trong những thủ lĩnh có ảnh hưởng mạnh mẽ ở thời đại chúng ta, mà còn là một nhà tư tưởng được thừa nhận nhờ sự nhạy bén chiến lược đặc biệt của ông".
☕ Cuốn sách sẽ phù hợp cho các bạn quan tâm về các vấn đề toàn cầu, đặc biệt là Mỹ - Trung, như một cánh cửa đến với nhập môn quan hệ quốc tế.
#lyquangdieu #banvetrungquochoakyvathegioi
☕ Điểm mình yêu thích ở cuốn sách này:
1. Cách thức triển khai: Câu hỏi & Câu trả lời
Cuốn sách không đi theo lối mòn về cách thức trình bày, mà có chút mới lạ bởi cách đặt câu hỏi rõ ràng và tinh tế từ nhóm biên soạn và cách trả lời thẳng thắn, sâu sắc và gai góc từ Lý Quang Diệu.
Cuốn sách được cấu thành 10 chương, đầu mỗi chương đều có các câu hỏi sẽ thảo luận trong chương đó và kết thúc cuốn sách chính là các đúc kết hết sức rõ ràng và ngắn gọn từ nhóm biên soạn.
2. Dịch thuật & biên soạn: Với cuốn sách này, nội dung phiên dịch thực sự là một điểm cộng lớn. Điều này giúp tất cả các chương đều được dịch một cách dễ hiểu, ngắn gọn và súc tích, thậm chí thể hiện được sự sắc sảo và lập trường vững chắc của ông.
☕ Điểm mình mong muốn cuốn sách sẽ làm tốt hơn:
Nếu đặt lên bàn cân với cuốn "One man views the world" do chính thủ tướng Lý Quang Diệu chấp bút, cá nhân mình thấy cuốn sách "Lý Quang Diệu - Bàn về Trung Quốc, Hoa Kỳ và thế giới", đặc biệt với ba chương đầu bàn về Trung Quốc và Hoa Kỳ, có nội dung không quá khác biệt, tức nội dung có sự tương tự. Điều này, thực ra, tương đối dễ hiểu, vì cuốn sách chính là tổng hợp những chia sẻ và phỏng vấn từ chính Lý Quang Diệu.
☕ Tuy vậy, đây thực sự là một quyển sách hay, chứa đựng nhiều đúc kết thú vị và sâu sắc, khi 10 chương chính là 10 vấn đề đều được nhìn nhận dưới đôi mắt quan sát tinh tế, sau đó được phân tích bằng phong cách lập luận thường thấy ở ông: thẳng thắn đến mức gai góc, đơn giản nhưng vẫn sâu sắc.
4.5/5 🌟
☕ Cuốn sách là tuyển tập các bài viết, bài phỏng vấn trực tiếp và phát biểu phong phú, chia sẻ góc nhìn và quan điểm của Lý Quang Diệu - thủ tướng đầu tiên của nước Cộng hoà Singapore 1959 - 1990 về nhiều vấn đề thời cuộc: sự "trỗi dậy hoà bình" của Trung Quốc, lo ngại về vai trò đứng đầu của Hoa Kỳ, viễn cảnh tương lai về mối quan hệ Mỹ - Trung, địa chính trị và toàn cầu hoá.
☕ Cuốn sách này tuy không dày nhưng sẽ cung cấp nhiều chia sẻ hay ho và khách quan từ cựu thủ tướng Singapore Lý Quang Diệu, người mà chính trị gia Hoa Kỳ Henry A. Kissenger đã nhận định rằng "không chỉ là một trong những thủ lĩnh có ảnh hưởng mạnh mẽ ở thời đại chúng ta, mà còn là một nhà tư tưởng được thừa nhận nhờ sự nhạy bén chiến lược đặc biệt của ông".
☕ Cuốn sách sẽ phù hợp cho các bạn quan tâm về các vấn đề toàn cầu, đặc biệt là Mỹ - Trung, như một cánh cửa đến với nhập môn quan hệ quốc tế.
#lyquangdieu #banvetrungquochoakyvathegioi
☕ Điểm mình yêu thích ở cuốn sách này:
1. Cách thức triển khai: Câu hỏi & Câu trả lời
Cuốn sách không đi theo lối mòn về cách thức trình bày, mà có chút mới lạ bởi cách đặt câu hỏi rõ ràng và tinh tế từ nhóm biên soạn và cách trả lời thẳng thắn, sâu sắc và gai góc từ Lý Quang Diệu.
Cuốn sách được cấu thành 10 chương, đầu mỗi chương đều có các câu hỏi sẽ thảo luận trong chương đó và kết thúc cuốn sách chính là các đúc kết hết sức rõ ràng và ngắn gọn từ nhóm biên soạn.
2. Dịch thuật & biên soạn: Với cuốn sách này, nội dung phiên dịch thực sự là một điểm cộng lớn. Điều này giúp tất cả các chương đều được dịch một cách dễ hiểu, ngắn gọn và súc tích, thậm chí thể hiện được sự sắc sảo và lập trường vững chắc của ông.
☕ Điểm mình mong muốn cuốn sách sẽ làm tốt hơn:
Nếu đặt lên bàn cân với cuốn "One man views the world" do chính thủ tướng Lý Quang Diệu chấp bút, cá nhân mình thấy cuốn sách "Lý Quang Diệu - Bàn về Trung Quốc, Hoa Kỳ và thế giới", đặc biệt với ba chương đầu bàn về Trung Quốc và Hoa Kỳ, có nội dung không quá khác biệt, tức nội dung có sự tương tự. Điều này, thực ra, tương đối dễ hiểu, vì cuốn sách chính là tổng hợp những chia sẻ và phỏng vấn từ chính Lý Quang Diệu.
☕ Tuy vậy, đây thực sự là một quyển sách hay, chứa đựng nhiều đúc kết thú vị và sâu sắc, khi 10 chương chính là 10 vấn đề đều được nhìn nhận dưới đôi mắt quan sát tinh tế, sau đó được phân tích bằng phong cách lập luận thường thấy ở ông: thẳng thắn đến mức gai góc, đơn giản nhưng vẫn sâu sắc.
October 22, 2022
Lee Kuan Yew is unquestionably one of the most interesting statesmen of the late 20th Century. His leadership of Singapore transformed it from a small, third-world city-state, into a wealthy, financial center of Southeast Asia. I find his life story to be fascinating. He saw firsthand how the balance of power changed in Asia from World War II until his death in 2015. I think his insights and analysis are quite penetrating—lots of wisdom. He understands the problems and opportunities faced by the US, China, and India. Lee is right to bring realism and pragmatism into his comprehension of how culture and values do affect the social cohesion (or lack thereof) that leaks into domestic and foreign policy. Americans, Chinese, and Indians do not all share the same dreams.
That said, I think his prescriptive advice is poor. I don't think his experience of making Singapore into a compassionate-authoritarian, city-state is something that others should imitate. He stifled some press freedoms and shut down discussions about some controversial topics. Lee would say that one has to break some eggs to make an omelet, but I don't think that would be acceptable in the West. His counter to my concern would be that a government's promotion of human rights should be focused on issues of education and economic policy and less so on protections for people who strongly voice opposition. I also disagree with his stance that nature is most important. I actually think nurture and nature are quite interdependent.
Lastly, I think the structure of the book is disappointing. Some of the "interviews" are pulled from old speeches from the 1990s and early 2000s. While the authors acknowledge this, Lee's line of thinking is not the most current at the time of writing.
That said, I think his prescriptive advice is poor. I don't think his experience of making Singapore into a compassionate-authoritarian, city-state is something that others should imitate. He stifled some press freedoms and shut down discussions about some controversial topics. Lee would say that one has to break some eggs to make an omelet, but I don't think that would be acceptable in the West. His counter to my concern would be that a government's promotion of human rights should be focused on issues of education and economic policy and less so on protections for people who strongly voice opposition. I also disagree with his stance that nature is most important. I actually think nurture and nature are quite interdependent.
Lastly, I think the structure of the book is disappointing. Some of the "interviews" are pulled from old speeches from the 1990s and early 2000s. While the authors acknowledge this, Lee's line of thinking is not the most current at the time of writing.
September 21, 2019
This book is a compilation of different interviews, speeches and essays from and with Lee Kuan Yew, the man who made Singapore what it is today; a prosperous and successful First World country. He is respected by many, and world leaders listen to his views and advice.
What makes this book so good is the fact that many things Yew claimed and predicted years ago are actually coming true today. He has a clear mind and a brilliant view on things which he explains in a comprehensible manner that makes it look almost obvious.
Themes like the emergence of China as a world power, global warming, Islam, innovation and democracy are dealt with by Yew in a clear and penetrating way. The setup of the book makes it look even sharper since it contains paragraph after paragraph of quotes by the great Yew. Nevertheless this book provides a brief and concise look into the brain of a much celebrated man. Not too hard, not too easy too. A great little book as an intro to Lee Kuan Yew.
What makes this book so good is the fact that many things Yew claimed and predicted years ago are actually coming true today. He has a clear mind and a brilliant view on things which he explains in a comprehensible manner that makes it look almost obvious.
Themes like the emergence of China as a world power, global warming, Islam, innovation and democracy are dealt with by Yew in a clear and penetrating way. The setup of the book makes it look even sharper since it contains paragraph after paragraph of quotes by the great Yew. Nevertheless this book provides a brief and concise look into the brain of a much celebrated man. Not too hard, not too easy too. A great little book as an intro to Lee Kuan Yew.
November 22, 2019
Багато хто вбачає в ідеях Лі Куан Ю расизм, шовінізм і ще купу інших негативних "-ізмів". Зрештою, сам пан Лі відкрито визнає, що не вважає всіх людей рівними (і я з цим погоджуюся). Але вважає за необхідне, щоб всім людям були створені одинакові можливості для розвитку.
Мені здається, щоб оцінити і зрозуміти цю визначну людину, слід постаратися абстрагуватися і максимально уважно, об'єктивно та аналітично читати цю книгу.
Якщо "З третього світу в перший" — це ґрунтовний і послідовний виклад історії Сингапуру та його дипломатичних відносин з іншими державами, то ця книга стала коротким викладом основних тез, такою собі есенцією світогляду Лі Куан Ю.
Мені здається, щоб оцінити і зрозуміти цю визначну людину, слід постаратися абстрагуватися і максимально уважно, об'єктивно та аналітично читати цю книгу.
Якщо "З третього світу в перший" — це ґрунтовний і послідовний виклад історії Сингапуру та його дипломатичних відносин з іншими державами, то ця книга стала коротким викладом основних тез, такою собі есенцією світогляду Лі Куан Ю.
July 3, 2021
What an incredible book. I had known for a long time that Lee Kuan Yew’s passing away brought the entire nation of Singapore down to tears, where even the sky cried; but I had never truly understood how incredible Lee Kuan Yew was, that is, until I read this book and was astonished by the mind of Lee Kuan Yew. I loved every part of this book, and more so about how well Lee Kuan Yew articulates his ideas. The last chapter, How Lee Kuan Yew Thinks, is by far my favorite. This was a short book, yet it offered so much to me…
May 24, 2024
It's interesting to see how much of a critical thinker LKY was and how much of a no-nonsense, strike-at-the-heart kinda guy he was, it's refreshing to see zero sugar-coating from a contemporary thinker and more so, from a politician - exactly the sort of leader that you'd need during harsh times; I often wonder how he would fair in today's mega sensitive political environment.
As for his predictions, I was surprised to see how accurate he was, he is however only human and got a few things off here and there but to have that level of foresight at that age and from that period of time, it's pretty impressive.
I read this book because I'm trying to hit a market that encompasses all of ASEAN for my venture, I think a decade of change is coming and LKY's vision for ASEAN is about to come to fruition.
I'm so excited for what's coming.
As for his predictions, I was surprised to see how accurate he was, he is however only human and got a few things off here and there but to have that level of foresight at that age and from that period of time, it's pretty impressive.
I read this book because I'm trying to hit a market that encompasses all of ASEAN for my venture, I think a decade of change is coming and LKY's vision for ASEAN is about to come to fruition.
I'm so excited for what's coming.
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