Today, the world is mourning the passing of Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of the modern state of Singapore and its longtime Prime Minister.
Under his leadership, Singapore famously went “from 3rd world to 1st” in a matter of decades. Lee placed a heavy importance on the value of education and invested aggressively in making the population ready to join an increasingly globalized workforce.
That bet paid off spectacularly - to the point where Singapore is now the most expensive city in the world to live in and one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.
This growth has not been without controversy however. Lee popularized a form of aggressive authoritarianism paired with free market economics. Throughout his time in power and continuing through till today, political dissenters are regularly imprisoned and a strict moral code is enshrined in law. (To the point where gum chewing carries a $500 fine… seriously)
In 1994, there was also a famous case of an American, named Michael J. Fay, who was sentenced to be “caned” and imprisoned after being charged with committing vandalism. This turn of events caused a minor crisis for the Clinton administration who eventually managed to have the number of lashes reduced to 6 because of diplomatic pressure and international pleas for leniency.
To this day there also continues to be effectively one party rule in Singapore and Mr. Lee’s son currently sits in the Prime Ministers office.
While elections are now nominally free, there are still tight controls on the press which has helped Lee’s People’s Action Party (PAP) to remain hugely popular. In the last election in 2011, 81 members of parliament were from the PAP and only 6 were elected from the opposition.
Recent years have seen improvements in the area of transparency and good governance however. Singapore ranked first, tied with New Zealand and Denmark, in Transparency International’s Anti-Corruption Perception Index in 2010.
Lee Kuan Yew is certainly not the only regime that’s had success using this pro-free market, anti-free speech model. China, Rwanda, the United Arab Emirates, and Brunei among many others, have all seen massive economic growth at the end of the past century without a corresponding increase in political freedoms. Indeed, there is a strong argument to be made that the stability created by these regimes helps to nurture an environment where business feels comfortable taking risks.
This debate isn’t going away anytime soon either: China’s growing global influence and its creation of a new development bank that will award funding to countries without tying those loans to democratic reforms, ensures that we will likely see many more Lee Kuan Yews.
If they can be anywhere near as successful at lifting their populations out of poverty, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
While I personally might be deeply uncomfortable with the kind of society he promulgated, there’s no doubt he was a vital actor in creating momentum to end extreme poverty.