With the death of Fidel Castro we are presented with an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast two rather authoritarian leaders and the results they engendered in their home countries. I won’t go into Castro’s successes – there were none – simply because the Cuba of 2016 is essentially the same as the day he took over. No, I’d rather take a quick look at the leader of Singapore, and what he did to take his country out of the shambles of post-colonialism and into the league of first world nations.
Lee Kuan Yew was the father of Modern Singapore. A politician of the highest order (read: A Leader) Yew was responsible for the development of Singapore into what became known as an Asian Tiger Economy, leveraging what he felt was the only natural resource they had – Singapore’s people.
Yes, he had a deep-water port, but the island nation had not enough fresh water. Yes, he 
had industrious people, but he also lacked most other natural resources. It was a conundrum of the highest order. To avoid being sucked into the larger neighboring country of Malaysia, which he at one time sought to join to ameliorate his country’s shortcomings, Yew essentially built a country out of scratch.
He eschewed populist policies. In a word, he led.
He favored pragmatic long-term social and economic measures. He adopted meritocracy and multi-racialism as governing principles. He made English the common language to integrate its immigrant society and to facilitate trade with the West. At the same time, he mandated bilingualism in the schools to preserve students’ mother tongue and ethnic identity. Yes, he curtailed civil liberties by banning public protests and asserting near-total media control, and even went so far as to bring libel suits against his opponents. His argument was that such disciplinary measures were necessary for political stability, which together with rule of law, were essential for economic progress. One cannot argue with the result: Singapore is a modern power-house. Its people are healthy, wealthy, and, because of the education system that Yew presided over, quite wise.
He had an approach that centered on one question: Does it work? He didn’t throw away big ideas or theories, or even discount them per se. He simply asked that they (the idea, the solution, whatever) meet one simple, pragmatic standard: Does it work? It is the Git-R-Dun style of leadership that I hope our new president will take to heart.
Try it out the next time you study a philosophy, a value, an approach, a theory, an ideology…it doesn’t matter if the source was a great thinker of antiquity or your grandmother. Has it worked? Let us call this, “Lee Kuan Yew’s Rule,” to make it easy to remember.
He wrote:
My life is not guided by philosophy or theories. I get things done and leave others to extract the principles from my successful solutions. I do not work on a theory. Instead, I ask: what will make this work? If, after a series of solutions, I find that a certain approach worked, then I try to find out what was the principle behind the solution. So, Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, I am not guided by them…I am interested in what works…Presented with the difficulty or major problem or an assortment of conflicting facts, I review what alternatives I have if my proposed solution does not work. I choose a solution which offers a higher probability of success, but if it fails, I have some other way. Never a dead end.
We were not ideologues. We did not believe in theories as such. A theory is an attractive proposition intellectually. What we faced was a real problem of human beings looking for work, to be paid, to buy their food, their clothes, their homes, and to bring their children up…I had read the theories and maybe half believed in them.
But we were sufficiently practical and pragmatic enough not to be cluttered up and inhibited by theories. If a thing works, let us work it, and that eventually evolved into the kind of economy that we have today. Our test was: does it work? Does it bring benefits to the people?…The prevailing theory then was that multinationals were exploiters of cheap labor and cheap raw materials and would suck a country dry…Nobody else wanted to exploit the labor. So why not, if they want to exploit our labor? They are welcome to it…. We were learning how to do a job from them, which we would never have learnt… We were part of the process that disproved the theory of the development economics school, that this was exploitation. We were in no position to be fussy about high-minded principles.
In Cuba, Castro was preeminently fussy about high-minded principles, most of which now lie in the dustbin of history’s stupid ideas. His people while literate, are abjectly poor and skilled in virtually nothing other than raising sugar cane.
12,000 miles to the west, in Singapore, Lew Kuan Yew took care of his people and allowed them to flourish. What else is a leader paid to do?
