Next year will see the 50th anniversary of the creating of Singapore, widely hailed as one of the most successful of the Asian tigers. In that short space of time, the tiny nation state has grown into one of the world's largest financial cities and most important ports. It has done so by becoming the partner every nation wants to work with: efficient, trustworthy and stable. In education, healthcare and economic competitiveness, Singapore routinely occupies a high position in global rankings. So it's not surprising that commentators like Thomas Friedman often point to Singapore as doing well what the west does badly.
That polarization - between Singapore where everything works and the west, where nothing seems to - is alluring, not least in its simplicity. In a brilliant new book about their country, Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus, Donald Low and Sudhir Vadaketh dare something few Singaporeans attempt: they question this orthodox view of Singapore and ask how fit for the future their country is. In doing so, they do something infinitely more subtle and profound than identify weaknesses in national policy; they implicitly question many of the central assumptions on which all developed nations today are pinning their hopes for the future.
Competitive Meritocracy but Rising Inequality
Commentators routinely praise the competitive nature of Singapore's schools and civil service. Slavish devotion to exams and credentials, they like to believe, is what bring the best to the top. In the early days of Singapore's independence, this principle was coupled with the belief that everyone should have a fair shot at success. But as inequality has risen and social mobility has declined, those values look more like a justification for elitism. Does preserving this meritocracy does more to protect those in power than enable those who aspire to it?
Without social mobility and the continuing expansion of choices to the multi-ethnic population, meritocracy can come to feel like intrinsic, existential superiority: the sense that some are intrinsically more deserving than others. The bubble of money and power is isolating, severing the connections between governors and the governed. The surprise that greeted the 2011 election, in which the opposition to the governing PAP made significant gains, illustrated just how self-referential many in power had become.
With some of the longest working hours in the developed world, some of the least happy workers in the world and a population over half of which would emigrate if they could, Singapore's society represents a more than statistical challenge. That trickle-down is now widely discredited as an economic defense for inequality only further exposes it to challenge. That a few are so wealthy and so powerful is no longer seen as providing a wider social benefit; indeed the rich may pose a bigger social threat than the poor.
Read the rest of the article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margaret-heffernan-/the-limits-of-ideology...