A word of advice, Mr. Friedman: Let Singapore be Singapore, and America be America.
Last month, Thomas Friedman wrote a glowing account of governance in Singapore. This, I believe, isn’t the first time Friedman has written positively of the nanny state; given the sorry state of U.S. government nowadays, the prospect of Singaporean-style authoritarianism does appear to be a reasonable alternative — except it’s not.
It’s not that I disagree with Friedman. A Singaporean myself, I can testify to the government’s sterling standards and the widespread success its created. Rather, my criticism with Friedman is that his analysis is superficial. After making several observations, his conclusion degenerates into something like a pep talk, with little applicative purpose. I quote:
America never would or should copy Singapore’s less-than-free politics. But Singapore has something to teach us about ‘attitude’ – about taking governing seriously and thinking strategically.
While this may be inspiring, Friedman makes a fatal mistake here. In order to properly understand Singapore’s government, you just can’t disentangle its “less-than-free politics” from its “attitude” and treat them as independent from each other, since it is Singapore’s political institutions that drive its government’s success. A closer analysis of these institutions will reveal that they are hardly applicable to the U.S., thus making Friedman’s observations nice to know, but ultimately pointless.
The first concerns the size of the state. In any given country, there exists a fixed level of political power, and this power is shared between the state and society. For America, the state is weak but the society is strong. Using its elaborate system of checks and balances, the whole project of American democracy is to try and limit the state’s power as much as possible.
In Singapore, it’s the polar opposite. The state is leviathan, intimately involved in directing every sphere of society. Singapore’s citizens willingly concede their political power, trusting the state to deliver economic success on their behalf.
This configuration of power explains why Singapore adapts so efficiently. To borrow the analogy used in the article, once the government determines that the wind is blowing in a certain direction, it directs its resources accordingly. In America, if there is a change in wind direction, people will vote to determine whether the wind is really blowing that way, or if the liberals just made that up. Next, assuming that the wind really is blowing, people then vote to determine how resources should be used.
Now I won’t go into which configuration is better – that question obviously merits a lengthier response. My point here is that America will never accept Singapore’s configuration of power, where the state is strong and society is weak. It is distinctly un-American.
The second concerns the use of monetary incentives in the public service. If you want to understand pragmatism in Singapore, look at the payroll of our public servants. The top 30 most handsomely paid politicians in the world all come from Singapore; and even though Obama governs a country with 60 times as many people than Singapore, he is paid about 10% of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (2008 figures) salary.
Singapore’s pragmatic logic goes like this. Forget patriotism, or service to your country. If you want the right person for the job, design the right pay scheme. Firstly, a handsome salary will pay a person into integrity – why accept a bribe if one can gain so much more by staying clean? Secondly, make the salary performance-based. By anchoring bonuses to the country’s economic growth, public servants don’t just work out of duty to their fellow citizens. They are safeguarding their own interests, since its their own livelihoods at stake.
Again, I won’t go into whether I think this is reasonable (consider, for example, the size of our politicians’ paychecks with the fact that Singapore’s gini-coefficient ranks one of the highest in the world). My basic point is that this comprises a vital part of Singapore’s political infrastructure, and it thus has no applications for America. Given the size of the budget deficit, not only is this fiscally impossible; it’s also something that Americans will find morally abhorrent.
Therefore, if any meaningful applications were to be drawn from Friedman’s article, it would involve importing Singapore’s institutions to the United States. And since that will never materialize, that essentially makes Friedman’s article meaningless. Because America can’t learn from Singapore, it simply shouldn’t.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons