Keeping Up With the Lees

SINGAPORE IS NOT A MODEL FOR AMERICA.

- MIKE RIGGS

WHEN MODERN SINGAPORE’S founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, died in 2015, The Atlantic’s obituary claimed that Singapore’s transition in just half a century “from third world to first”—the title of Lee’s memoir—“leaves students and practitioners of government with a challenge.”

Singapore has combined classical liberal policies such as free trade, an open port, and low taxes with an authoritarian single-party government that centrally plans large swaths of the island’s economy and infrastructure, plays the role of censor in practically every media sector, canes petty criminals, and executes drug offenders. Because of, or despite, this seemingly incongruous combination, Singapore for most of the 21st century has reported higher annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth than the U.S., as well as lower infant mortality, greater trust in government, a comparable GDP per capita, and a longer life expectancy. The island city-state, as its proudest inhabitants love to mention, is also cleaner than the U.S. and has much less crime.

Perhaps American elites