The Meritocratic Foundations of Singapore's Economic Culture

The Meritocratic Foundations of Singapore’s Economic Culture Master Thesis in Philosophy, Politics and Economics CEVRO Institute Author: Donovan Choy ([email protected]) Thesis advisor: Virgil Henry Storr Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 Methodology .................................................................................................................... 3 Conceiving culture as an interpretive framework in explaining economic development ............................................................................................................ 3 Understanding culture with qualitative methodology ................................................ 9 A Colonial History of Singapore’s Culture ..................................................................... 15 British classical liberalism in colonial Singapore .................................................... 15 The Political Economy of Post-Independence Singapore .............................................. 21 The political monopoly of the Singapore government ............................................ 22 Economic pragmatism as the answer to Singapore’s survival ............................... 24 Singapore’s Economic Culture ...................................................................................... 29 A meritocratic style of governance ............................................................................. 29 How meritocracy colours economic life .................................................................. 35 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 47 Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 50 Introduction Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world today. The city-state is grouped as one of the Four Asian Tiger economies for its economic boom since the rapid industrialisation of the mid-1960s. In just three decades from 1960 to 1990, Singapore’s income per capita increased by a factor of 28 from $427 to $11,864, a rate well above the East Asian & Pacific average in the same time period of $148 to $2598 (World Bank, a). Inflation rates also consistently remained well below world averages, while enjoying relative price stability. Singapore’s economic development has been looked at as an exemplary case study for the ideal developmental process. To what does Singapore owe its successful developmental growth? The Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman attributed Singapore’s ‘economic miracle’ to its market-friendly policies: low tax rates, relative lack of tariffs, absence of price controls and generally little regulations. Other economists however have disputed such a free market narrative, placing a greater emphasis on state involvement in Singapore’s development (Lim, 1983). The objective of this thesis does not aim to settle these key disputes in Singapore’s economic development literature. Much effort has been dedicated to studying the underlying institutional framework that Singapore’s developmental story took place within. While an important debate, little emphasis has been placed on the role of culture in this story. This thesis instead looks at the primacy of the prevailing ideas and cultural ethos that underlies Singapore’s post-independence developmental growth. I attempt to provide an explanation for Singapore’s economic success from a cultural viewpoint by exploring 1 the dominant cultural patterns and themes in Singapore society that shaped the ‘spirit’ of modern Singaporean capitalism. The argument in this thesis however is isolated to one such cultural explanation. My contention is this: there is a strong market-friendly meritocratic culture that underscores Singapore’s post-independence economic development. These attitudes are prominent in Singaporean cultural media products and the general rhetoric of the state, as I will show. The modern-day government has to a large extent reinforced this culture of meritocracy that can be traced back to Singapore’s institutional beginnings in its colonial history. The first section clarifies how I treat culture within an interpretive framework and why I choose a qualitative methodological approach for this thesis. The second and third sections lays the foundation for my main argument in the fourth. The second section surveys Singapore’s relatively laissez-faire economic history under British colonial rule from 1819 to 1965. The third section covers the history of Singapore’s post-independence modern economic development where Singapore saw its unprecedented economic growth. Both colonial and post-colonial periods of history are essential to explaining the main thesis because as I show, Singapore’s present economic culture originated from its colonial era and was largely supported by the modern government’s policies in accordance with the geographic and political circumstances of its times. The fourth section delves into the central thesis of my argument, where I trace and outline the pervasiveness of the meritocratic spirit in Singaporean economic life. I do this by analysing Singaporean society’s dominant cultural and media texts in politics, film and literature. Finally, I conclude. 2 Methodology Conceiving culture as an interpretive framework in explaining economic development This thesis examines the types of cultural patterns and themes that underlay Singapore’s post-independence economic development. In approaching culture, the methodological approach of this thesis rejects the conventional view of treating culture as a static source of capital by which social phenomena can be causally attributed to, or used to make analyses of comparative advantages between economies. Attaching capital to culture is problematic for a few reasons. Capital is conventionally thought of as a scarce resource. Its accumulation requires sacrificing present benefits in favour of future benefit, and consumption of capital requires sacrificing future gain for present gain. Conceiving culture as capital this way however is misleading because it is clear that culture is not a depletable resource that one can put to use like physical capital. Additionally, culture is not the same as physical capital in that we deliberately and consciously choose to acquire them, as in the case of a frugal consumer choosing to save a portion of his salary (Storr, 2013, p. 50-51). Most of the benefits we enjoy from our sociocultural networks are not a consequence of us having made a past sacrifice to order to have access to; these cultural benefits can be attributed to geographic and socioeconomic circumstances from accidents of birth. 3 This way of homogenising and generalising culture into a unitary lump of beliefs has an appealing convenience for social scientists. One can easily checklist these unitary categories of cultures to reach easy conclusions, for example, ‘pro-growth versus anti- growth’ or ‘high trust versus low trust’ (for example, see Tabellini, 2010). However, this convenience runs the risk of overlooking that cultures are richly diverse and are interrelated with one another. It obfuscates the heterogeneity of cultures and tries to reduce it down to a homogeneous blob in order to make cross-comparisons (Lavoie & Chamlee-Wright, 2000, p. 62). The result is a ‘thin’ description of culture that fails to go into much detail. But it is highly improbable to say that there can be one homogenous cultural trait within any society’s population matrix. While there may be certain traits within a society that hinders the activities of economic growth, there will also be traits that are aligned and promote growth. We might be able to say that there is a tendency for a certain nationalistic culture to possess certain similar traits (for instance, trustworthiness), but it must also be recognised that these traits are not universally held, held to varying degrees, are contingent on other beliefs and constantly contested. Whether certain cultural beliefs or attitudes promote or hinder economic growth is dependent on the context by which these beliefs are held. For instance, a collectivist culture that promotes unity and sacrifice for ‘the common good’ may be conducive for economic growth in a small society where division of labour is not highly specialised. However, the same culture will produce opposite economic outcomes in a large society where division of labour has the potential to be more specialised and the collective actions of millions are much harder to coordinate both as a logistic and epistemic matter. As one author puts it: 4 Problems arise when an attempt is made to jump all the way from generalised cultural characterizations to economic outcomes without taking into account all the intervening variables and the situational contexts. It is thus unscientific to try to draw up a universal list of positive and negative cultural values for economic development. What may be positive in some circumstances can be quite counterproductive under other conditions. (Pye, 2000, p. 254) Instead, what might be a far more productive endeavour for social scientists in studying culture is to first, acknowledge that every culture carries with its own comparative advantages and disadvantages, second, try and understand the culture within its unique social context. This is the approach that this thesis has attempted

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