Why Don't the Chinese Learn from Singapore?

Why Don't the Chinese Learn from Singapore?, Bryan Caplan asks:

I can vaguely understand why Western democracies won't deign to emulate Singapore's miraculously cheap and effective health care system. But when the Chinese ignore Singapore and copy Western socialized medicine, I can only roll my eyes in disgust.
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If I didn't know anything else, I'd be tempted to see this as an atavistic "back to Mao" movement. But alas, it's Western advisors who are to blame.
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Admittedly, if the goal of the plan is to maintain the popularity of the Communst Party rather than deliver low-cost quality health care, the foreign advisors may have it right. After all their crimes against humanity, the Chinese Communists almost desperately need to "show that they care."

Why they hate Singapore

Chua Lee Hoong cites Madam Yeong Yoon Ying, press secretary to Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, on why the West hates Singapore:

Singapore is an example to other countries of how the free market plus the rule of law, and stable macro-economic policies, can lead to progress and success, but without Western-style "liberal" democracy.

Populations Expanding Where It Is Most Difficult to Grow Food

The New York Times notes that populations are expanding fastest where it is most difficult to grow food — and they're not referring to Hong Kong and Singapore, but sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East:

The world's population is projected to grow to 9 billion before 2050. Proportionally, the countries in Northern Africa and the Middle East are among the fastest growing. But those are the world's driest regions, and by 2050, fresh water there will be twice as scarce.

We in the West may not be caught in a Malthusian Trap, but we seem determined to ignore the unintended side-effects of our aid to less developed countries that are.

The Inverted Pendulum of Whiggery

In sharing his Jacobite history of the world, Mencius Moldbug suggests that the "W-force" of leftism — or Whiggery — behaves as an inverted pendulum, perhaps with a bit of a delay loop:

As an "absolute" monarch, the best strategy for maintaining your rule is to preserve your sovereignty entirely intact. Ripping off chunks of it and throwing them to the wolves only seems to encourage the critters.

Why was this not obvious to the kings and princes of old Europe? Perhaps it was obvious. The trouble was that absolute monarchy was always an ideal, never a reality. Every sovereign in history has been a creature of politics — not democratic politics, perhaps, but politics still. At the very least, a king who loses the support of the army is finished. So the pendulum is not quite vertical, and it's all too easy to let it do what it obviously wants to do.

The inverted-pendulum model suggests that, for a stable and coherent nondemocratic state, eliminating politics requires very little repressive energy. Singapore, Dubai and China, for example, all have their secret police — as did the 19th-century Hapsburgs. Each of these governments is very different from the others, but they are all terrified of the W-force. Yet they manage to restrain it, without either falling prey to democracy or opening death camps.

Residents of these countries can think whatever they like. They can even say whatever they like. It is only when they actually organize that they get in trouble. If you don't want the Ministry of Public Security to bother you, don't start or join an antigovernment movement. Certainly this is not ideal — I don't think this blog would be tolerated in China, and my image of the ideal state is one in which you can start all the antigovernment movements you want, as long as they don't involve guns or bombs. However, when we compare this level of infringement of personal freedom to the experience of daily life under Stalin or Hitler, we are comparing peanuts to pumpkins.

Why does China not tolerate peaceful antigovernment politics? Because "people power" can defeat the People's Liberation Army? No. Because China is not a perfectly stable state, and it knows that quite well. Within the Chinese Communist Party, there is politics galore. One move that is off-limits for contending figures within the Chinese regime, however, is imposing one's will on one's adversaries by means of mob politics. Almost everyone in any position of responsibility in the PRC today was personally scarred by the Cultural Revolution, in which China felt all the vices of democracy and none of its virtues. Only by outlawing politics can the Party hold itself together.

Note that in 1989 the Chinese government broke the cardinal rule of Whig government: never fire on a mob. As John F. Kennedy put it, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Not only did the Chinese government make peaceful revolution impossible — they made peaceful revolution violent. And the result? Violent revolution? No — twenty years of peace, unparalleled prosperity, and personal if not political freedom. As philosophers say, one white raven refutes the assertion that all ravens are black.

Nabi Studios

BusinessWeek has done a "game maker profile" on tiny niche developer Nabi Studios, creators of Toribash — which seemed tailor-made for someone like me, but which didn't hold my attention when I took a look a while back:

In Toribash, an online fighting game populated by characters that resemble ball-and-stick rag dolls, players design their own black-belt martial arts moves. The resulting movements are hyperrealistic: Lithe fighters leap, cartwheel, and spin-kick one another, severing heads and limbs, notching points for each hit.

I question the use of "hyperrealistic" to describe "severing heads and limbs" in unarmed combat — but the movements are, or can be, hyperrealistic.

Here's where things get more interesting, from a business perspective:

But Toribash's founder, Hampus Söderström, didn't want to make just another fighting game. He wanted to create an online community where users could design and share their own fighting techniques alongside the no-holds-barred brawling. So Söderström included a wide range of community building tools — including chat, wikis, and discussion boards — outside of the main game play. The developer's site also hosts an active marketplace where users can sell and buy virtual additions for the game's characters for cash or credits.

In the last two years, Toribash has become a virtual community with more than 42,000 members. Its members even flip-kick one another as they chat, exchange ideas in a public forums, and give direct feedback to the game's developers. On meticulously maintained wiki pages and discussion boards, players collaborate, designing complex fighting moves and sharing combat tips. To date, the game has received almost 30 official updates while gamers have played Toribash more than 3 million times on the official servers, with top players racking up 20,000-plus games.
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Söderström is a gaming newbie. After 10 years in his native Sweden as a Unix programmer at IBM (IBM) and Swedish telecom companies, he moved to Singapore in 2004. In his spare time, he worked on designing a game that combined simple animation, physics, and user-generated martial arts. Eight months later, he had created Toribash (tori is the Japanese martial arts term for "the defender"). After completing the beta version, Söderström sensed he had come up with something that was both popular and potentially profitable.

But without game industry experience, Söderström also knew he needed help. In 2006, he brought in a community manager, a graphics designer, and a developer to form Nabi Studios. And he quickly adopted the business model of letting users play for free and encouraging them to pay for character enhancements that could fund the company. In Toribash, players win credits with each victory, but they can also buy additional credits with real cash. The average Toribash accessory sells for about $35 (or 35,000 Tori Credits), though Söderström says he recently sold special, limited-edition blood color (the game is often gruesome) for $500. This, says Söderström, is the company's only source of revenue.

It's lucrative, too. So far, Söderström has made enough money to hire four more staffers in Singapore as well as three part-timers around the world. His current challenge is managing the game's virtual economy: So many users are playing games and winning credits—or converting their cash into more Tori Credits—that it's created a glut of credits, driving down their value. "This definitely was not something we initially thought would be part of the game," he says.

Pop-Up Cities

Rapidly growing China is looking to build Pop-Up Cities, "bright green metropolises" that don't make the mistakes of existing cities:

These new megacities could evolve into sprawling, polluting megaslums. Or they could define a new species of world city. Unlike New York or London, they are blank slates — less affluent, perhaps, but also free from legacy designs and technologies tailored to the world of the 19th and 20th centuries. That is a huge advantage. It took Boston 20 years and more than $14 billion just to reroute a freeway underground. New York can hardly install a second network of water pipes. Most of Los Angeles is too spread out for fast public transit or combined heat and power plants. And because these cities are so isolated from agricultural land, most of the food that locals eat gets shipped hundreds of miles. "Shanghai today is making 90 percent of the mistakes that American cities made," Burdett argues — spreading out, building up single-family homes, replacing naturally mixed-use neighborhoods with isolated zones for living, shopping, and working, and connecting it all with car travel. But fixing these problems is still possible.

Dongtan, outside of Shanghai, is meant to be such a green city:

Their first decision was big. Dongtan needed more people. Way more. Shanghai's planning bureau figured 50,000 people should live on the site — they assumed a green island should not be crowded — and the other international architects had agreed, drafting Dongtan as an American-style suburb with low-rise condos scattered across the plot and lots of lawns and parks in between. "It's all very nice to have little houses in a green field," Gutierrez says. But that would be an environmental disaster. If neighborhoods are spread out, then people need cars to get around. If population is low, then public transportation is a money loser.

But how many more people? Double? Triple? The team found research on energy consumption in cities around the world, plotted on a curve according to population density. Up to about 50 residents per acre, roughly equivalent to Stockholm or Copenhagen, per capita energy use falls fast. People walk and bike more, public transit makes economic sense, and there are ways to make heating and cooling more efficient. But then the curve flattens out. Pack in 120 people per acre, like Singapore, or 300 people, like Hong Kong, and the energy savings are negligible. Dongtan, the team decided, should try to hit that sweet spot around Stockholm.

Next, they had to figure out how high to build. A density rate of 50 people per acre could mean a lot of low buildings, or a handful of skyscrapers, or something in between. Here, the land made the decision for them. Dongtan's soil is squishy. Any building taller than about eight stories would need expensive work at the foundation to keep it upright. To give the place some variety and open up paths for summer wind and natural light, they settled on a range of four to eight stories across the city. Then, using CAD software, they started dropping blocks of buildings on the site and counting heads.

The results were startling. They could bump up Dongtan's population 10 times, to 500,000, and still build on a smaller share of the site than any of the other planners had suggested, leaving 65 percent of the land open for farms, parks, and wildlife habitat. A rough outline of the city, a real eco-city, began to take shape: a reasonably dense urban middle, with smart breaks for green space, all surrounded by farms, parks, and unspoiled wetland. Instead of sprawling out, the city would grow in a line along a public transit corridor.

That was the easy part. From there they needed to design ways to make efficient use of resources:

A power scheme started to take shape. Dongtan's plant would burn plant matter to drive a steam turbine and generate electricity. What to burn, though? They could have planted miscanthus, a tall, feathery grass. It sprouts fast and burns clean. But if Arup planted miscanthus fields, it would sacrifice lots of land to a single purpose. Then it struck them: rice husks. China already grows mountains of rice, and farmers just trash the husks. Dongtan could take a useless byproduct and use it to light the city.

Instead of building the plant far away and out of sight, Arup would put it up near the city center, capture waste heat, and pipe it throughout the town. With good insulation and smart design, the plant could heat and cool every building in Dongtan. "We can get something like 80 percent efficiency in our fuel conversion," says Chris Twinn, the Dongtan team's energy chief. "The Prius is probably only 20 percent efficient. The rest is wasted. Why are we satisfied with that?"

I'm not sure how burning rice husks for energy will work out, but piping heat makes good sense in a dense, urban environment — as long as you maintain the pipes.

Some of the additional ideas seem perfectly reasonable; some do not:

Arup investigated hollowing out the hills at the edge of the city and installing underground "plant factories" — stacked trays of organic crops, growing under solar-powered LEDs, that seem to yield as much as six times more produce per acre than conventional farming. Arup would run twin water networks throughout the city: one that supplies drinking water to kitchens and another that supplies treated waste water for toilet flushing and farm irrigation. Trucks delivering goods from across China would park at consolidation warehouses on the edge of the city, then load up shared, zero- emission delivery trucks to reduce traffic and save gas. Waste would be either recycled or gasified for energy, and the captured heat would be converted into more power; no more than 10 percent of the city's trash would be permitted to end up as landfill. To invite in cooling summer breezes, block winter winds, and reduce demand for heat and air-conditioning, they would position trees strategically and persuade the client to twist the city grid slightly off a traditional north-south axis (a feng shui idea that has become an almost inviolable rule of Chinese city planning).

I'd love to see an analysis of the costs and benefits of some of these ideas.

Bootstrapping Society

I recently read Lucifer's Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and I realized that it made terrible bed-time reading — because it was entirely too thought-provoking, and I couldn't get to sleep.

The premise is that a comet collides with the earth — or, rather, that many mountain-sized chunks of the comet collide with the earth — boiling the oceans, hurling tsunami waves to shore, triggering earthquakes, and sending enough water and dust into the air to ruin any hope of farming until next year.

Civilization breaks down, and few people are prepared for the disaster, which defied astronomers' calculations. What do you do when there's enough food for everyone for one month, and no more is coming for another year? One way or another, 11 out of 12 "survivors" are going to die. You'd better decide what to do quickly, because the refugees are on their way...

One of the heroes of the book, an übergeek JPL scientist, races back to his home as soon as "the Hammer" falls and frantically packs in plastic all the books mankind will need to rebuild civilization.

This is something I've been thinking about since I read Earth Abides years ago. What books go on the list? How do you rebuild 21st-century America, knowing that we haven't been able to bring most of the existing world to that level, even with a working example?

Kevin Kelly has given the notion a bit of thought over at his Technium blog. There he notes that "A favorite fantasy game for engineers is to imagine how they might re-invent essential technology from scratch":

Occasionally tinkerers get to engage their fantasy. In February 1942, R. Bradley, a British Officer in the Royal artillery in World War II was captured and then held prisoner by Japanese in Singapore. Their camp was remote, supplies were almost non-existent, and they were treated roughly as POWs; when they rebelled they were locked in a confinement shed without food. But they were tinkerers, too. Together with some other POWs in his camp, Bradley stole hand tools from the Japanese soldiers and from these bits and pieces he transformed scrap metal into a miniature lathe. The small lathe was ingenious. It was tiny enough to be kept a secret, big enough to be useful. It could be disassembled into pieces that could be tucked in a backpack and moved in the camp’s many relocations. Since large pieces of metal were hard to acquire without notice, the tailstock of the lathe was two steel pieces dovetailed together. The original bed plate was cut with a cold chisel.

The lathe was a tool-making egg; it was used to manufacture more sophisticated items. With it the prisoners machined a duplicate key for the solitary confinement shed (!), and manufactured a hidden battery source for a secret radio. During the two years of their interment the lathe remade the tools — like taps and dies — which were first used to create it. A lather has those self-reproductive qualities.

That is a wonderful story, and he presents another such wonderful story of a fellow named Gingery who was able to bootstrap a full-bore machine shop from alley scraps by making rough tools that made better tools, which then made tools good enough to make "real" stuff.

Kelly runs with the notion of bootstrapping and suggests a Forever Book as a seed for regrowing society (or the technium):

Clearly such a library would have to be able to convey, among all the other things, how to make a library full of books, since that is in many ways an essential part of civilization. Thus we have the library that can self-replicate, the forever library. What is the smallest possible self-replicating forever library? It is possible that with digital technology it will someday be no bigger than a book today. And since it contains primarily information we could think of the self-replicating forever library as a self-replicating book, Forever Book.

Of course, engineers generally side-step the much larger issue of creating a society where technological progress is likely to happen, where it's rewarded, and where the fruits of ingenuity aren't immediately seized or declared heretical.

Would texts on anthropology and economics be more important than texts on engineering?

One colleague made the interesting suggesting of using texts full of practical know-how to ensure literacy. If everyone learns the basics of daily survival through books like The Foxfire Book — which covers "Hog Dressing, Log Cabin Building, Mountain Crafts and Foods, Planting by the Signs, Snake Lore, Hunting Tales, Faith Healing, Moonshining" — then perhaps they won't need literacy foisted upon them.

At any rate, I'd love to find a good book on bootstrapping technology.

When I read The Mysterious Island years ago, I realized that — unlike the Victorian-era engineer protagonist — I had no idea how to perform any useful chemical reactions without nicely labeled jars of simple compounds.

Frankly, in primitive conditions, I'm afraid I'd end up like the 20th-century American in Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early" (which is reason enough to buy The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century). In Viking-age Iceland, without modern infrastructure, he finds himself useless, as none of his technical innovations are practical.

Why Singapore is Superior Despite So Many Faults

Why Singapore is Superior Despite So Many Faults — from a military perspective:

The city of Singapore was founded by the British in 1819, on an island at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula. The British considered the local Malays rather too laid back, and brought in thousands of Chinese and Indians to work the booming port city. Within six years, the population exploded from a few hundred, to over 10,000. Two years later, Chinese became the most numerous ethnic group. They eventually came to dominate the rich port of Singapore, providing administrators, as well as traders and laborers. The British kept the key jobs, but otherwise ran a meritocracy. When Malaysia, which Singapore was a part of, became independent in 1963, many Chinese in Singapore protested being ruled by the Malay majority. The Malays also resented the more entrepreneurial and economically successful Chinese. Although most Singapore residents wanted to be part of Malaysia, it didn't work out. In 1965, Malaysia basically expelled Singapore, which become a separate, mainly Chinese, country. Over the next three decades, the Singaporean economy grew an average of nine percent a year, and Singapore became the wealthiest, on a per-capita basis, nation in the region.

With so much to defend, the Singaporeans developed, early on, a strong military. This was prompted by Britain withdrawing its garrison in 1971 and, in effect, telling the Singaporeans they had to defend themselves. Singapore asked Israel to help it develop a force similar to the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces). That is, a large reserve force, with a small active force to handle training and any immediate military needs. The two countries have been close allies ever since.

Thus Singapore has an active duty force of 60,000, most of them reservists undergoing training. There are only about 20,000 full time, professional troops. In wartime, there are 300,000 trained reserves who can be mobilized, plus nearly has many who have had military training, but are no longer in reserve units. Like Israel, Singapore can mobilize a force that can defeat any of its neighbors.

How Our Civilization Can Fall

Orson Scott Card summarizes Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, the opening chapter of Michael Grant's The Rise of the Greeks, which describes the collapse of the eastern Mediterranean economy, and Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It before imagining How Our Civilization Can Fall:

Here's how it happens: America stupidly and immorally withdraws from the War on Terror, withdrawing prematurely from Iraq and leaving it in chaos. Emboldened, either Muslims unite against the West (unlikely) or collapse in a huge war between Shiites and Sunnis (already beginning). It almost doesn't matter, because in the process the oil will stop flowing.

And when the oil stops flowing, Europe and Japan and Taiwan and Singapore and South Korea all crash economically; Europe then has to face the demands of its West-hating Muslim "minority" without money and without the ruthlessness or will to survive that would allow them to counter the threat. The result is accommodation or surrender to Islam. The numbers don't lie — it is not just possible, it is likely.

America doesn't crash right away, mind you. But we still have a major depression, because we have nowhere to sell our goods. And depending on what our desperate enemies do, it's a matter of time before we crash as well.
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It takes two generations for the dark ages to reach America. But they will come, if we allow this nightmare to begin. Because once you reach the tipping point, there's no turning back, as the Emperor Justinian discovered.

Our global economic system is a brilliant creation, imperfect of course, but powerful and effective in creating more prosperity for more people than ever in the history of the world. It is a creation of America's military and America's benign government of the world — so benign they pretend we don't govern it.

Our enemies and most of our "allies" and many of our own citizens are working as hard as possible to bring the whole thing crashing down, though that is not at all what they intend.

They just haven't learned the lessons — the principles — of how great economic empires are maintained. They only look at the political dogmas du jour and spout their platitudes. People like me are ridiculed for seeing the big picture and learning the lessons of history.

I actually recommend reading the whole article rather than just his ending Jeremiad, which simply sounds alarmist.

Are cities the new countries?

In Are cities the new countries?, Finlo Rohrer notes that large cities — like Shanghai, Mexico City, Tokyo, New York, and London — share more in common with one another than with their home nations:

[London Mayor Ken Livingstone] joked: "Having been to Singapore and seen how successful it was I think anything short of a fully independent city state is a lost opportunity, with its own foreign and defence policies thrown in."
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"It will cost £2 billion to fix the Tube and £1.5bn to benefit from the effects of the 2012 Olympics, yet [Londoners] subsidise the rest of the UK to the tune of £20 billion a year."

Swiss Fight Against Tax Cheats Aids Singapore's Banking Quest

Swiss Fight Against Tax Cheats Aids Singapore's Banking Quest:

For decades, the ultrarich looking for discreet banking services gravitated to Switzerland, where account secrecy was sacrosanct. But when Swiss authorities acceded to pressure from the European Union to discourage tax evasion, the door opened for a new challenger to woo the world's wealthy: Singapore.
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In Singapore's asset-management business, which includes private-banking, total funds under management rose to more than $356 billion at the end of 2004, from $94 billion at the end of 1998, according to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the nation's financial regulator. Roman Scott, a director of Boston Consulting Group in Singapore, estimates private-banking assets account for about $125 billion of the total.

The spice of life

According to The spice of life, most "Indian" restaurants serve Bangladeshi food:

It was in the 1840s that lascars started jumping ship in the port of London (and Singapore, Southampton and New York too) and setting themselves up as cooks. Given that they all came from the same jungly patch of what is now Bangladesh, it was inevitable that their particular rice-heavy, pork-free cuisine came to represent 'Indian food' to the casual British mind. Even now, of the 8,000 Indian restaurants in Britain, the vast majority are run by Bangladeshis who come from what is still known at home as the 'Seaman's Zone'

'Get Me to the Church on Time'

'Get Me to the Church on Time' shares yet another story about Singapore's zany social engineers:

After exhorting citizens to smile more, flush toilets after use, be courteous on the road and to have more babies, Singapore is zeroing in on rude wedding guests in its latest bid to improve etiquette.

Infuriated by reports of weddings marred by tardy guests, the government-led Singapore Kindness Movement launched a 'Punctuality Drive at Wedding Dinners' campaign for a second straight year, a spokeswoman for the group said on Friday.

About 800,000 'punctuality reminders' have been sent to hotels, which usually plan weddings in Singapore. These are passed to couples to include with invitations, and contain a gracious 'thank you' for guests who turn up on time.

I didn't realize this:

Older relatives often show up late at Chinese wedding banquets to show their importance. But the government is incensed that younger people are doing it too.

The Idea Trap

Bryan Caplan's The Idea Trap explains why poor countries don't catch up to rich countries:

If we look around the world, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that bad performance is not self-correcting. One of the most important facts about economic growth is that, on average, poor countries do not catch up to rich countries. The main reason seems to be that poor countries consistently have bad policies. Many of these countries are democracies. But they almost never elect a candidate on the theme 'We need to copy the policies of more successful countries like Hong Kong and Singapore, and turn our backs on our failed national political tradition.'

Thus, the least pleasant places in the world to live normally have three features in common: First, low economic growth; second, policies that discourage growth; and third, resistance to the idea that other policies would be better. I have a theory to explain this curious combination. Imagine that the three variables I just named — growth, policy, and ideas — capture the essence of a country's economic/political situation. Then suppose that three "laws of motion" govern this system. The first two are almost true by definition:

  1. Good ideas cause good policies.
  2. Good policies cause good growth.

The third law is much less intuitive:

  3. Good growth causes good ideas.

The third law only dawned on me when I was studying the public's beliefs about economics, and noticed that income growth seems to increase economic literacy, even though income level does not. In other words, poor people whose income is rising — like recent immigrants — have more than the average amount of economic sense; rich people whose income is falling — like the Kennedy family — have less.

Thus:

A society can get stuck in an "idea trap," where bad ideas lead to bad policy, bad policy leads to bad growth, and bad growth cements bad ideas.

For Its Own Reasons, Singapore Is Getting Rather Gay-Friendly

One of my favorite quirky statistics is the high correlation between high-tech industry and gay population. I'd forgotten where I'd read about, but a quick web search on "technology correlation cities" brought up Technology and Tolerance: Diversity and High Tech Growth:

Perhaps our most striking finding is that a leading indicator of a metropolitan area's high-technology success is a large gay population. Frequently cited as a harbinger of redevelopment and gentrification in distressed urban neighborhoods, the presence of gays in a metro area signals a diverse and progressive environment and provides a barometer for a broad spectrum of amenities attractive to adults, especially those without children. To some extent, the gay and lesbian population represents what might be called the "last frontier" of diversity in our society. [...] In our statistical analyses, the gay index does better than other individual measures of social and cultural diversity as a predictor of high-tech location. The correlations are exceedingly high and consistently positive and significant. The results of a variety of multivariate regression analyses support this finding. The gay index is positively and significantly associated with the ability of a region both to attract talent and to generate high-tech industry.

It sounds like the social engineers in Singapore have read the research. From For Its Own Reasons, Singapore Is Getting Rather Gay-Friendly:

'Singapore's become much more tolerant and open,' says Sean Ho, surveying the raucous scene at the dance party. Mr. Ho, a 33-year-old information-technology consultant, was decked out in a T-shirt proclaiming 'Choose Sin' in large, red letters and 'gapore' in smaller print. 'They are giving us a lot more space,' he says.

The driving force behind this change appears to be economic. One consideration: reaping so-called pink dollars from gay tourists. The August dance party and related events, including plays and art exhibitions with gay themes, pulled in about 2,500 foreign visitors and about $6 million, according to event organizers.

Singapore's more relaxed attitude toward homosexuality is also part of a broader government strategy to transform the small former British colony into a creative, idea-driven economy. That, Singapore's leaders realize, will require some loosening up, as well as a serious effort to change the world's perception of Singapore as a rigid, authoritarian place.

Gum Returns to Singapore After 12 Years

Singapore wouldn't work as a fictional nation. No one would find it remotely plausible. From Gum Returns to Singapore After 12 Years:

Ultra-tidy Singapore is lifting its notorious ban on chewing gum after 12 long years — but only for registered users. Gum dealers face jail if they break the rules.

Before Singaporeans think about unwrapping a pack of the Wrigley's Orbit gum that's just started selling here — and only in pharmacies — they have to submit their names and ID card numbers. If they don't, pharmacists who sell them gum could be jailed up to two years and fined $2,940.

Why did Singapore back down on its ban?

Gum became a sticking point months ago in Singapore's free trade talks with Washington, when Representative Philip Crane of the U.S. state of Illinois — home of chewing gum giant Wrigley — pressed the issue.

Singapore compromised, agreeing to allow only the sale of "therapeutic" gum in pharmacies. The free trade pact took effect Jan. 1.

The Health Sciences Authority, responding to questions from The Associated Press, said it's allowed the sale of 19 "medicinal" and "dental" gum products.

Wrigleys' Orbit, which the company claims is good for teeth, hit pharmacy shelves just days ago. Pfizer's Nicorette, a nicotine gum meant to help smokers kick their addiction, has been available since March.

Affirmative Action Around the World

In his review, Carl Cohen calls Affirmative Action Around the World, by Thomas Sowell, "exactly what its title announces: an empirical study of what the consequences really are, and really have been, in the five major nations in which affirmative action — the term now commonly used to denote ethnic preferences — has been long ensconced: India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and the United States." And what are the consequences? "Intergroup hostility, dishonesty, and further proliferation in spite of manifest failure."

India's story:

In India, ethnic preferences have been established longer than in any other nation. "Positive discrimination" goes back to British rule, and was built into the Indian constitution in 1947. Originally intended to last for only twenty years, the preferences have been extended repeatedly in time. Originally devised to benefit only "untouchables" (a now forbidden term, replaced by "scheduled castes" or "Dalits"), they have been repeatedly expanded in reach. The benefits are no longer regarded as transitory; the beneficiaries, including members of many other "backward classes," now comprise more than three-quarters of the Indian population.

Preferential quotas have been limited by Indian courts to 50 percent of the available places at universities and elsewhere; but making use of those quotas requires "complementary resources" of education that the intended beneficiaries simply do not have. Therefore, the quotas for the most seriously deprived in India often go unfilled. On the other hand, quotas for "other backward classes" rarely go unfilled. Upshot: the great majority of the reserved places go to those who deserve them least.
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Race preference does not wind down; it winds up. Proliferation is the rule.

In Malaysia, Chinese laborers were first brought to the peninsula to work the rubber plantations:

The Chinese, adopting a frugal style and investing heavily in the education of their children, pulled themselves from the plantations and built businesses across the country; they have come to dominate retail establishments in Malaysia, of which they owned 85 percent by 1980. Corporate ownership by Chinese has also soared. Chinese incomes are double those of Malays.

In 1965, Malaysians willingly divested themselves of a great mass of powerful Chinese by expelling Singapore, which became a separate country and remains very largely a Chinese city — and greatly prosperous. But, although the expulsion of Singapore made the Malay majority politically secure, and somewhat reduced its economic domination by the Chinese minority, it did not stop the intellectual advance of the Chinese who remained. In 1969, more than half the officers in the Malaysian army were ethnic Chinese; as long as university admissions were determined by examination results, only 20 percent of the places went to Malays, and most of the rest to ethnic Chinese.

The majority, competing unsuccessfully, had to be protected. The Malay government set out to achieve racial balance in employment, giving formal preferences to Malays in hiring. But there seemed no alternative to continuing reliance on the better-educated Chinese and Indian minorities in fields where their technical skills were needed. And so admission to universities was altered as well. Group membership was emphasized over individual performance, and, to increase the number of Malays yet further, the Malay language became the only medium of instruction in schools as well as in universities.

The ethnic preferences that have pervaded Malaysia in recent decades were not designed to pull an oppressed minority from the depths; their purpose was to protect the relatively less competent majority from the intellectual and economic advances of more competent ethnic minorities. What, then, do we learn from Malaysia? We learn that the inferior performance of some ethnic groups is not always a consequence of discrimination against them. On the contrary, even the imposition of discriminatory advantages favoring a majority cannot obscure the fact that some groups prove less competent than others.

In Sri Lanka, preferences led to bloody slaughter:

Sri Lanka, in the second half of the 20th century, experienced a steep social deterioration whose exact causes are difficult to specify. What began as ethnic tension between the Sinhalese majority in the south and the Tamil minority in the north became bloody slaughter. The substantial preferences given to the Sinhalese (awarded, as in Malaysia, to protect a less competent majority) certainly played a role in exacerbating these tensions.
[...]
Deliberately exacerbating racial tensions for the sake of political gain — we learn from the case of Sri Lanka — promotes hatred of a kind and of a degree almost impossible to reverse. What begins with race preference ends with race riots.

What about Nigeria?

Preferences and quotas are justified in Nigeria by the demand, expressly formulated in the constitution of 1979, that national activities should "reflect the federal character of the country." This "federal character" principle has been extended to school admissions, to promotions in school, and even to membership on the national soccer team. Every activity must "look like Nigeria." Intergroup tensions have become very sharp; almost every policy issue becomes a matter of racial dispute accompanied by charges of ethnic corruption. These disputes often turn bitter, and become fights.
[...]
Sowell points out that in the 1990�s, when the Katafs, formerly lagging behind the Hausa, closed the gap between the two groups, relations became more polarized, not less.
[...]
To reduce discord, separate ethnic enclaves have been carved out and given formal status. Thus, having given rise to a deadly spoils system, ethnic heterogeneity is mitigated by a gerrymandered homogeneity. The lesson from Nigeria? When racial balance is advanced by granting preferences that are deeply resented, diversity produces not greater racial harmony but greater racial conflict.

And America?

The fifth of the five great nations dealt with in this book is the United States of America. The appropriate lesson(s) here? All of the above.

What Makes a Terrorist?

What Makes a Terrorist? by James Q. Wilson starts with a brief history of terrorism — "until the nineteenth century, religion was usually the only acceptable justification of terror" — then explains Professor Jerrold Post's division of terrorists into two (ambiguously named) categories: anarchic ideologues (either right- or left-wing anarchists) and nationalists (either nationalistic or religious terrorists).

Anarchist or ideological groups include the Red Army Faction in Germany (popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang), the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Weathermen in America. The German government carried out a massive inquiry into the Red Army Faction and some right-wing terrorist groups in the early 1980s. (Since it was done in Germany, you will not be surprised to learn that it was published in four volumes.) The Red Army members were middle-class people, who came, in about 25 percent of the cases, from broken families. Over three-fourths said they had severe conflicts with their parents. About one-third had been convicted in juvenile court. They wanted to denounce �the establishment� and bourgeois society generally, and joined peer groups that led them steadily into more radical actions that in time took over their lives. Italians in the Red Brigades had comparable backgrounds.

Ideological terrorists offer up no clear view of the world they are trying to create. They speak vaguely about bringing people into some new relationship with one another but never tell us what that relationship might be. Their goal is destruction, not creation. To the extent they are Marxists, this vagueness is hardly surprising, since Marx himself never described the world he hoped to create, except with a few glittering but empty generalities.

A further distinction: in Germany, left-wing terrorists, such as the Red Army Faction, were much better educated, had a larger fraction of women as members, and were better organized than were right-wing terrorists. Similar differences have existed in the United States between, say, the Weather Underground and the Aryan Nation. Left-wing terrorists often have a well-rehearsed ideology; right-wing ones are more likely to be pathological.

Interestingly, Post groups nationalistic terrorists with religious terrorists:

By contrast, nationalistic and religious terrorists are a very different matter. The fragmentary research that has been done on them makes clear that they are rarely in conflict with their parents; on the contrary, they seek to carry out in extreme ways ideas learned at home. Moreover, they usually have a very good idea of the kind of world they wish to create: it is the world given to them by their religious or nationalistic leaders. These leaders, of course, may completely misrepresent the doctrines they espouse, but the misrepresentation acquires a commanding power.

Marc Sageman at the University of Pennsylvania has analyzed what we know so far about members of al-Qaida. Unlike ideological terrorists, they felt close to their families and described them as intact and caring. They rarely had criminal records; indeed, most were devout Muslims. The great majority were married; many had children. None had any obvious signs of mental disorder. The appeal of al-Qaida was that the group provided a social community that helped them define and resist the decadent values of the West. The appeal of that community seems to have been especially strong to the men who had been sent abroad to study and found themselves alone and underemployed.

A preeminent nationalistic terrorist, Sabri al-Bana (otherwise known as Abu Nidal), was born to a wealthy father in Jaffa, and through his organization, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, also known as the Abu Nidal Organization, sought to destroy Israel and to attack Palestinian leaders who showed any inclination to engage in diplomacy. He was hardly a member of the wretched poor.

Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova have come to similar conclusions from their analysis of what we know about deceased soldiers in Hezbollah, the Iran-sponsored Shiite fighting group in Lebanon. Compared with the Lebanese population generally, the Hezbollah soldiers were relatively well-to-do and well-educated young males. Neither poor nor uneducated, they were much like Israeli Jews who were members of the �bloc of the faithful� group that tried to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem: well paid, well educated, and of course deeply religious.

In Singapore a major terrorist organization is Jemaah Islamiyah. Singaporean psychologists studied 31 of its members and found them normal in most respects. All were male, had average to above-average intelligence, and held jobs ranging from taxi driver to engineer. As with al-Qaida and Hezbollah members, they did not come from unstable families, nor did they display any peculiar desire toward suicidal behavior. Though graduates of secular schools, they attached great importance to religion.

Poor Man's Hero

In Poor Man's Hero, Reason magazine interviews Johan Norberg, Swedish author of In Defense of Global Capitalism. Norberg makes a number of interesting points:

Look at Vietnam, which I visited recently. It had the benefit that when the Communists took power there, they actually implemented their ideas. They collectivized agriculture and they destroyed private property, which meant that in the mid-1980s people were starving there. The Communists' own ideas managed to do what the American bombs never did: destroy communism. In the wake of such failure, the government began to look for other examples, and they saw that Taiwan had succeeded by globalizing. The Communists in China were liberalizing trade and ownership laws and were seeing fast progress. The contrast is especially clear on the Korean peninsula. It's the same population, with the same culture, just having two very different political and economic systems. In 50 years, one of them went from hunger and poverty to Southern European living standards. The other one is still starving.

I particularly like this point:

Sweatshops are a natural stage of development. We had sweatshops in Sweden in the late 19th century. We complained about Japanese sweatshops 40 years ago. You had them here. In fact, you still do in some places. One mistake that Western critics of globalization make is that they compare their current working standards to those in the developing world: "Look, I'm sitting in a nice, air-conditioned office. Why should people in Vietnam really have to work in those terrible factories?" But you've got to compare things with the alternatives that people actually have in their own countries. The reason why their workplace standards and wages are generally lower is the lack of productivity, the lack of infrastructure, the lack of machinery, and so on. If workers were paid U.S. wages in Vietnam, employers wouldn't be able to hire them. The alternative for most workers would be to go back to agriculture, where they could work longer hours and get irregular and much lower wages.
[...]
When I was in Vietnam, I interviewed workers about their dreams and aspirations. The most common wish was that Nike, one of the major targets of the anti-globalization movement, would expand so that a worker's relatives could get a job with the company.

I've seen this point before:

Places without natural resources, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, have developed relatively broad-based economies, where countries rich in oil or minerals often have not. The broader an economy is, the more wealth and income are spread around. The best thing that could happen to the Arab world would be for them to run out of oil. Then they'd have to open up to trade, and a small number of people wouldn't be in control all of the wealth, as is the case in Saudi Arabia.

Returning to the idea of developing versus developed economies:

Many environmentalists care about green forests, clean air, clean water, and so on. What they don't appreciate is that attitude is itself a result of industrial development. In our countries, people didn't care about these things 100 years ago. Preferences shift when you can feed your children and give them an education. That's when you begin to care about these sorts of things.

Singapore Policeman Gets Two Years for Oral Sex

Singapore never ceases to amaze me. Singapore Policeman Gets Two Years for Oral Sex:

A Singaporean police sergeant has been jailed for two years for having oral sex in a country where prostitution is legal but oral sex is not, a newspaper reported Friday.

The Straits Times reported that the 27-year-old police coast guard sergeant landed in court after a 16-year-old reported to the police that she had performed oral sex on the man.

She was above the age of consent and agreed to perform the act, but oral sex is against the law in the city-state, the paper said.

'The act by itself is an offence. It is not a question of consent or no consent. Even between consenting people, it is an offence,' criminal lawyer Subhas Anandan told the paper.

The maximum punishment for the offence is life imprisonment.

Singapore Targets Late Wedding Guests

Singapore provides an endless stream of darkly comic government programs. From Singapore Targets Late Wedding Guests:

Singapore on Wednesday began its latest behavior modification campaign — a wedding "punctuality drive" — to encourage guests to turn up on time for couples' big day.

The government-backed Singapore Kindness Movement said it would provide 400,000 cards for couples to insert into their invitations as "gentle reminders."

Previously the group has led efforts to encourage the city-state's citizens to smile more, wave at fellow motorists and switch off mobile phones in cinemas.

"Wedding couples are held back from starting their wedding dinners when the majority of their guests turn up late," the Singapore Kindness Movement said in a statement.

Singapore Lifts Ban on Chewing Gum

I find Singapore endlessly amusing. According to Singapore Lifts Ban on Chewing Gum, they've finally lifted their ban on gum. Sort of:

The government of this island nation announced Thursday it will allow chewing gum, long-banned here, to be sold — although only from pharmacies.

The decision stems from a recently signed free trade agreement between the United States and Singapore, and follows lobbying from the U.S. Congress and American gum makers.

Squeaky-clean Singapore outlawed the import, manufacture and sale of chewing gum in 1992, complaining that spent wads were fouling the city-state's famously tidy pavements, buildings, buses and subway trains.
[...]
Singapore initially agreed to allow gum to be sold only with a doctor's prescription, but that didn't satisfy U.S. negotiators.

Pharmacies may sell dentist-recommended gum that aids "dental and oral hygiene" once the trade pact takes effect, expected to be by the end of the year, a government spokeswoman said.

I didn't realize the ban only went back to 1992.

Singapore Seeks to Change Boring Image

Singapore always makes me chuckle. Nervously. Now they want to mandate creativity and excitement. From Singapore Seeks to Change Boring Image:

Straight-laced Singapore is urging its young people to figure out what turns them on and help the government make the city-state less boring, a lawmaker said Tuesday.

"I do not believe it is possible to be creative if you do not know how to enjoy yourself," said Vivian Balakrishnan, Minister of State for National Development, as he urged youth to take part in a government-organized street festival.

"We need to reach deep inside ourselves to find out what turns us on," said Balakrishnan, chairman of the government-appointed "Remaking Singapore" committee — a panel tasked with getting public feedback on how to make Singaporeans more lively and artistic.

The specifics are what really make the story though:

Among the events scheduled for the June street festival are graffiti, street wear and inline-skating contests.

Singapore is widely known for its tight controls on media. Cosmopolitan magazine and HBO's television hit "Sex in the City" are banned, along with home satellite TV antennae and even some popular songs deemed too racy.

In recent years, officials have taken small steps to spice up the nightlife, such as allowing some explicit language in plays.

The government may soon allow bar-top dancing and let nightspots stay open 24 hours, instead of closing at 3:00 a.m. as currently required.

Singapore Diarist: Lion in a Jungle

Singapore Diarist: Lion in a Jungle, by Howard Husock, makes the point that Singapore is surrounded by Muslim-dominated nations (Malaysia and Indonesia), has its own Muslim minority, and presents quite a target for anti-Western, anti-capitalist terrorists. It also makes some lighter points:

If Singapore is multiethnic, it is decidedly not "multicultural." When the island became an independent nation in 1965, the ruling People's Action Party made English the national language, even though few Singaporeans spoke English at home. Today, when I ask an American expatriate to describe the difference between Singapore and his former home of Los Angeles, his deadpan reply speaks volumes: "More people speak English here."

Singapore Plays Matchmaker, Hoping to Boost Its Birth Rate

I always find Singapore's ambitious social-engineering projects darkly comical. Singapore Plays Matchmaker, Hoping to Boost Its Birth Rate describes a program that tops "caning" vandals or outlawing chewing gum:

This tiny, Type A city-state, worried by a steep decline in population growth, is trying to get its best and brightest to mate and breed with a new generation of government-sponsored dating games, some of which it has copied from American singles groups.

Government-sponsored dating games?

It's American-style Speed Dating, sponsored by the government's official matchmaking agency, the Social Development unit. The SDU assembles a group of men and women and pairs them off at tables. They chat for seven minutes until a bell rings, and then rotate on to a new mystery date. At the end of the session, participants write down who they'd like to meet again. If there are matches, they'll get a date.

The SDU also organizes Zodiac Dates, in which singles try to guess each other's astrological signs. Prizes for right answers include bath gels and restaurant vouchers.

Then there are Library Dates, in which eight men and eight women are paired off and given 45 minutes to look through bookshelves, choosing books that reflect their interests. Then they write down their impressions of each other based on the books they have chosen. Over drinks and cake, everyone gathers at a roundtable discussion to present the partner to the rest of the group.

I won't cast aspersions on the dating games themselves — they have a certain dorky charm — but there's something seriously creepy about a Zodiac Dates session set up by the government's Social Development unit. Seriously creepy.