Quora Answer: Why Do More Countries Not Emulate Singapore’s Successful Form of Government Management & Planning?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Why do more countries not emulate Singapore’s successful form of government management and planning?” 

It is a question of values.  Different cultures value different things, which means priorities in development are different.  To emulate Singapore’s style of government management and planning requires adopting those values, which is not tenable in most places.  Some say that this is because Singapore has a unique proposition as a city state, situated at a geographically strategic place, but they miss the point.  When those values are adopted, most of these situations can be planned for. 

Firstly, Singapore’s government emphasises accountability.  Some mistake it for integrity, but integrity cannot be quantified.  Accountability can, through processes, systems and audits.  This means there is an emphasis on documentation, and exacting attention to detail.  This would require a civil service that recruits on the basis of those values before references and networking.  This was how it was done in the beginning. 

Accountability also means that just as the rewards are high, punishments are also harsh.  There is very little room for failure, because Singapore had little margin for that failure.  This meant every decision was weighed against profit and loss, victory or defeat, as if every interaction was transactional, and weighed against a strategic chess board. 

Secondly, there was an emphasis on meritocracy.  The primary purpose of meritocracy is not about justice or social mobility.  It is a means to break existing power structures, since this meritocracy was measured according to specific values, and a colonial language, as opposed to local ones.  People who were educated to rise to the top of such a meritocracy would have, in the course of that education, adopted those values. 

Everybody else was educated enough to become a cog in a growing economic machine.  This meant, in the beginning, an emphasis on the hard sciences, engineering, law, and finance.  When that foundation was met, we needed expansive thinkers, which explained the gradual increase in emphasis on social sciences and humanities. 

Thirdly, we always planned for the next three decades, or more.  It is not enough to plan for the now, because we would always be playing catch up with our neighbours who have better resources.  Rather, we planned for what we projected will be, and ensured we were there before everybody else, so that we became world leaders in specific areas. 

For example, our neighbours had oil and natural gas.  We had none.  So we made sure we had an educated workforce that would be able to man refineries, and brought in that expertise by inviting MNCs in a time when most other nations were being protectionist.  Singapore became the fourth largest refinery in the world, even though we had not a drop of oil.  We did not have to spend money drilling and transporting the oil.  People paid us to refine them, and we sold it for further profits. 

For example, Singapore is an exercise in social engineering.  Lee Kuan Yew and the first generation of independence leaders sold the pioneer generation the vision that we could be better than we were, but we had to make sacrifices.  That generation did, and that laid the foundation of what we have now.  This involved national development, security, and social engineering planning for the next several decades, so that we built on the work of each generation in a systematic, calculated manner, to move up the value chain. 

These are just three of a long list of values required to replicate the Singapore experience.  This requires a collectivist mindset, where the needs of the whole outweigh the wants of the individual.  It is shaped by harsh penalties for non-compliance, and economic rewards for adherence.  The government delivers a modern, wealthy city state with the possibility of social mobility, and the people contribute at all levels of society for that greater good. 

This is a society that produces engineers, scientists, accountants, financial advisors, and bureaucrats.  This is not a nation for free spirits, anarchists, libertarians, and individualists.  This is a society that values education for a purpose, not philosophers and artists.  The Singapore of the first fifty years of independence is not everybody’s flavour, and that is why it is not easily replicated elsewhere.  It worked here because when Singapore was newly independent, it was thought to have had little prospects.  We had nothing to lose.  It will not work in a nation with hundreds of years of history and tradition.  It will not work in a society with an abundance of a specific resource, since they have other options.  It will not work in a society that is stratified along inherited class structures.  These societies need to have a paradigm shift and change their values. 

Now that Singapore has arrived, somewhat, at the world stage, it has the means and the resources to admit and fund things that were considered luxuries in our formative years, like the arts, and humanities.  Now, they are another means to the next stage of development, and in the fourth industrial age, we need to shift our thinking beyond systems, and prepare for a future that would not admit the sort of positioning we have now.